Published on September 10, 2019.
This article introduces an essay by Matsumoto Koji published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, discussing the formation of “things Korean,” Korea’s break with antiquity, classical Chinese culture, the “Little China” consciousness, and Korea’s modern construction of its traditional identity.
It examines the rupture between old Korea, which regarded Chinese classics as its own classics, and modern Korea, which began anew through its encounter with Japan.

September 10, 2019.
A break with antiquity: it is only natural that people cannot feel as “their own classics” things that are difficult to read and far removed from modern aesthetic sensibilities and feelings of life.
The following is from an essay by Matsumoto Koji, published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title: “Stand Up to Korea’s Lies: Why Does Korea Continue Its ‘Anti-Japanese’ Stance? Confront It with the Truth of History and Expose Korea’s Fiction.”
It is an essay that must be read not only by the Japanese people but also by people all over the world.
Unless one reads this essay, one cannot understand the postwar history of the Far East at all.
Alexis Dudden, who is an agent of Korea and a person of unbelievably poor and low intelligence, dominates the American historical association.
The same is true of the United Nations.
The time has long since come for the international community to recognize its own ignorance and low intelligence and feel ashamed.
Above all, Korea, a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, has done this for the 74 years since the war, and China began it under Jiang Zemin in order to divert the eyes of the people from the Tiananmen Square Incident, and continues it even now.
The fact that the international community has overlooked Nazism in the name of anti-Japanese education has created the extremely unstable and dangerous world of today.
China’s arrogance, Korea’s madness, or the madness of the Korean Peninsula, and Putin’s arrogance are all the result of the international community’s continuing to leave untouched the Nazism that China and the Korean Peninsula have continued to practice.
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
A Break with Antiquity.
It is only natural that people cannot feel as “their own classics” things that are difficult to read and far removed from modern aesthetic sensibilities and feelings of life.
In an essay written in 1962 titled “What Is ‘Korean’?”, the scholar of English literature Yu Jong-ho argued that while in France the general rule that what is national is traditional holds true, in Korea this is nothing but a fiction; all the works now generally regarded as Korean appeared in the world after the birth of new literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, and are not traditional.
This caused controversy, but what he said strikes at the truth.
The gentlemen of old Korea thought that they possessed a rich classical culture.
However, those were Chinese books written in classical Chinese, and everything that the Korean envoys to Edo were conscious of as their own classics consisted of ancient Chinese texts.
The Analects were so.
The Records of the Grand Historian and the Tang Poetry Selection were so.
For Koreans who prided themselves on being “Little China,” the Chinese classics were also their own classics.
This is like people in Morocco or Algeria thinking of what was created in Baghdad, the center of Islamic civilization, as their own country’s culture, and there is nothing particularly strange about it.
However, Korea, which for more than a thousand years had been culturally integrated with China and had lived with pride in being “Little China,” was “forcibly” made independent by Japan and became a country of the Korean people.
The substance of its civilization changed completely, and a major rupture was born there.
Modern Koreans find it difficult to understand what kind of country the age of “Little China” was.
Rather, they seem not to want to know.
Korean history textbooks write that since Dangun ascended the throne in 2333 B.C., there has been a consistent history of the Korean people.
In ancient times there were the three kingdoms of Goguryeo, Silla, and Baekje, but all of them are treated as countries of the Korean people.
Those three kingdoms are said to have been unified by Silla, then followed by Goryeo and the Joseon dynasty, then the Korean Empire and the Republic of Korea, leading to the present day.
However, the actual Korea is a country that in modern times abandoned the tradition it had inherited until then and began anew.
What expresses this most clearly is classical Chinese.
Japanese people, for example, read Du Fu’s poem in Japanese as, “The country is broken, yet mountains and rivers remain; in spring the castle is deep with grass and trees.”
Many Japanese people vaguely think of kanbun as ancient Chinese writing, but in the world of Western Oriental studies, “KANBUN” is taught strictly as Japanese written language.
Shirakawa Shizuka, a master of classical Chinese literature and Chinese character studies, strongly emphasized that Chinese characters in Japan are national characters, that is, Japanese characters.
For example, if one shows the character “山” to Japanese people and asks, “What is this?”, every one out of a hundred would answer that it is the character for “yama.”
Of course, it is also read in its on-reading as “san,” but this character is, above all, “yama.”
That is why expressions such as “yama o haru,” “hitoyama ateru,” and “ashita no shiai ga yama da” are derived from it.
Whatever the original meaning in the Chinese classics may be, when new meanings and nuances are added to the Japanese word “yama,” the Chinese character “山” changes in connection with them.
Therefore, in substance, it is a Japanese character.
In Korea, however, “山” is read only as “san,” and its meaning is determined strictly by the accumulation of Chinese classical texts.
Besides the meaning of “a raised mass of land,” it can mean the emperor himself, as in “the mountain is there,” or refer to something like the pattern on the emperor’s clothing; there are meanings that Japanese people can scarcely imagine, and the scholar-officials of old Korea had to be aware of them at least in outline.
Chinese characters were strictly Chinese characters, and here they had no organic connection with the ethnic language.
For example, in Japan “過猶不及” is read as “sugitaru wa, nao oyobazaru ga gotoshi,” but in Korea, since it has no connection with the ethnic language, the four Chinese characters “過・猶・不・及” are read mechanically in that order, and at the end a word corresponding to the Japanese “nari” is attached.
Such sentences can hardly be called Korean, but they accepted Chinese classics as something of that nature.
This article continues.