Published on September 11, 2019.
This article introduces an essay by Matsumoto Koji published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, examining the anti-Japanese historical view created under state leadership in postwar Korea and the problem of Korean historiography that treats history not as science but as faith.
Through the historical views of Park Sung-soo, the textbook issue, the forced labor issue, and the comfort women issue, it examines Korea’s historical consciousness formed beyond objectivity and documentary evidence.

September 11, 2019.
Such a story belongs entirely to the realm of fiction, but in postwar Korea the state took the lead in creating a history like virtual reality and earnestly taught it to the people.
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.
History Is Faith.
When they suddenly looked around, the world into which they had been thrown was a world over which America reigned.
A worldview had been completed in which Japan was an evil country and America, the country of justice, had punished it.
Korea had no path other than to adapt to this.
This was not a matter of good or bad; there was no other choice.
People who had largely assimilated into Japan and had taken part in the war as Japanese nationals loudly denounced Japan while slipping, with innocent faces, into the seats of victims.
There was no other way to make the country stand.
After that, all that remained was to say, in every possible form, how evil a country Japan was and how atrocious the Japanese people were, and to tell both themselves and others how fiercely they had fought against Japan.
Such a story belongs entirely to the realm of fiction, but in postwar Korea the state took the lead in creating a history like virtual reality and earnestly taught it to the people.
Koreans do not possess a glorious national history like the Vietnamese, who fought and drove out great enemies such as France and America.
Therefore, they have no choice but to carry out an abnormal education far removed from reality.
They must put facts aside and replace history with something completely different.
Park Sung-soo, professor at the Academy of Korean Studies and head of the Compilation Office of the National History Compilation Committee, was the person responsible in the first half of the 1980s for compiling Korea’s demands for corrections to Japanese history textbooks, and he is a scholar who has represented Korea’s national position.
He has repeatedly said that the truth of history cannot be grasped through objective textual criticism or empirical verification, and that true history must be something that awakens the patriotism of the people.
“Japanese imperialism accepted Ranke’s historical politics together with documentary positivism and used it as a weapon of imperialistic interpretation.
…In concealing the barbarity and criminal nature of Japanese imperial aggression, there was no tool more convenient than Rankean historiography, which placed value neutrality and historical objectivity at the forefront.”
“Reevaluation of National Resistance Historiography,” Park Sung-soo.
“I think history is originally not so much a science as a discipline through which one reflects and understands by means of history.
…It is difficult to turn history into a science.”
“In every nation, there is something called a historical faith that the nation has believed in for a long time.
This faith may perhaps be unscientific, but seen from the dimension of science, just as the art of shrinking distance is unscientific, faith too is unscientific.”
Critique of Korean History, Park Sung-soo.
“History must be narrated with true patriotism, and only history that can awaken patriotism is history in the true sense.”
“History education exists, above all, to cultivate the morale of the people.
History education must bring the spirit of young people to life.
It must become a source of courage and morale.”
“Reevaluation of National Resistance Historiography,” Park Sung-soo.
It is not that the barbarity and crimes of Japanese imperialism are exposed through value neutrality and historical objectivity.
It is the opposite.
He says that neutrality and objectivity, documents and textual criticism, conceal them.
This man says that history is not science but “faith.”
He believes that every nation has its own historical faith, that these faiths fiercely clash with one another, and that a “history war” over which faith will prevail is constantly being waged.
For example, he states that the interpretation of the Gwanggaeto Stele inscription, which supports ancient Japan’s advance onto the Korean Peninsula, is also an ongoing history war unfolding among three countries: Japan, Korea, and China.
Most Japanese people may think that he is saying something extremely radical, or that perhaps this man is a little strange.
However, he was also the editor responsible for the Encyclopedia of Korean National Culture, which was promoted as a national project, and he served as a member of the National History Education Deliberation Council of the Ministry of Education, in charge of modern and contemporary history.
He is a genuine mainstream scholar.
One cannot help feeling that he is less a scholar than a priest of the anti-Japanese religion, but I think he came to hold such ideas because the history this country needs is far removed from actual history.
Korea has no ethnic religion, no monarchy that could serve as a centripetal force, and only a vague national memory of having won independence or liberation by its own power.
Therefore, it has no choice but to seek the basis of national integration entirely in “history that awakens patriotism.”
To satisfy the enormous demands that the Korean state imposes on historical consciousness, mere embellishment is nowhere near enough.
It has no choice but to pursue a faith-based history completely free from documentary grounds and objectivity.
Having thought things through in its own way, it was probably forced to advance this far.
Japanese people are in a state of blessed ignorance, but the Korean scholars who once stood on the front lines of textbook disputes and denounced Japan’s historical consciousness possessed this kind of historical view.
He served as a Korean-side member of the Japan-Korea Joint History Textbook Research Association, established in 1991, but the Japanese scholars who had to “research” jointly with such a person must have had a terribly difficult time.
At the Japan-Korea History Education Seminar held in Korea that same year, Yoon Se-chul, a professor at Seoul National University, stated that in order to resolve the textbook issue one must not lean too far toward the scientific nature of history, and one must abandon the stubborn attitude of clinging to facts.
This is undoubtedly one kind of insight, but he was saying this about Japanese history textbooks.
If Japan respects the position of victim country Korea, abandons its stubborn attitude of clinging to facts, and rewrites its textbooks, the problem can be solved—scholars who appear before Japanese people as representatives of Korea are generally people with this sort of thinking.
Koreans who believe that science and objectivity are unnecessary in history are upholding their own “faith,” and therefore, whether on the “forced labor” issue or the comfort women issue, they are not moved in the slightest even if Japan refutes them by piling up objective evidence.
It seems that the Japanese people have belatedly begun to realize this.
This article continues.