Published on November 2, 2019.
Based on an essay by South Korean attorney Kim Ki-soo, this article discusses anti-Japanese tribalism in South Korean society, Juche ideology, the demonstrations to defend Cho Kuk, false historical understanding in school education, and the true nature of “nationalist historiography.”
It argues that a society that injects a specific view of history into its people and permits neither alternative memories nor objections is precisely totalitarian, and introduces how Anti-Japanese Tribalism has become a catalyst for awakening South Koreans to the importance of freedom.

November 2, 2019.
What is called nationalist historiography is in fact something learned from, or uncritically imported from, Japan’s left-wing scholars who are called “conscientious Japanese,” with the wrapping paper of nationalist historiography placed over it.
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
The Spontaneous “Defend Cho Kuk” Demonstrations.
After reading Anti-Japanese Tribalism, edited by Lee Young-hoon, which has become a bestseller in South Korea, I thought that the anti-Japanese tribalism ruling South Korea may have something in common with Juche ideology.
Juche ideology emphasizes the nation, and especially bloodline.
Among these, there is the pure-blood ideology that the bloodline of Mount Paektu, the family of Kim Il-sung, is important.
I think that such a way of thinking and anti-Japanese tribalism are truly one and the same.
I am not an author of this book, so I have stated only my impressions as a reader after finishing it, but South Korea has begun from not allowing exceptions in historical views and has now reached the point where a specific view of history reigns above the law, even ignoring the law.
Such a state is precisely what a dictator would welcome, and that is totalitarianism.
People into whom memories have been injected attack people who have different memories in order to protect those memories.
Even if power itself does not attack people who have different memories, if the injection of memory succeeds, the people who have been injected will themselves attack people who have other ideas.
When it reaches that point, totalitarianism is complete.
For people into whom a specific memory has been injected, the existence of people with different memories appears to be the existence of people who deny their own existence, and so citizens begin to exclude fellow citizens who have different memories.
Mr. Cho Kuk resigned as justice minister on October 14, but until then, every Saturday, demonstrations saying “Defend Cho Kuk, the justice minister” and demonstrations saying “Arrest Cho Kuk” confronted each other in front of the prosecutors’ office.
South Korean conservatives say, “The demonstrations defending Cho Kuk were government-organized demonstrations, with people mobilized.”
However, I do not think so.
The people who insist “Defend Cho Kuk” are people who are trying to be faithful to the memory created by Cho Kuk, and they are people who voluntarily gathered with a sense of crisis that “if Cho Kuk is denied, the memory injected into us will be denied.”
In that sense, they are more dangerous.
Cho Kuk took the lead in shouting for the liquidation of pro-Japanese elements, and for those who say “Defend Cho Kuk,” compared with the magnitude of the fabricated memory that “pro-Japanese elements must be liquidated,” Cho Kuk’s wrongdoing looks like a small matter.
They are gathering with a voluntary sense of crisis that their belief in “the liquidation of pro-Japanese elements” will be destroyed together if Cho Kuk is brought down.
The demonstrations to defend Cho Kuk are demonstrations to protect their own memories.
Lies Are Also Rampant in School Education.
History requires diverse interpretations, but I think history education needs education that, while based on facts, nurtures patriotism, like the history of the founding of the nation, which is emphasized in the United States as well.
However, in South Korea today, fabricated falsehoods not based on facts, for example the claim that “requisitioned workers” were subjected to forced slave labor, are continuing to be taught without criticism being permitted, and I feel a strong sense of crisis about this.
When one looks at North Korean textbooks, one can clearly understand that history textbooks become a means for realizing totalitarianism.
The same thing is beginning to happen in South Korea.
After it was revealed through the research of Dr. Lee Woo-youn and others that the photographs of “requisitioned workers” circulating in South Korea were “fake,” those photographs were published in sixth-grade elementary school textbooks.
However, because we protested, South Korea’s Ministry of Education distributed correction stickers and had them pasted over the textbook photographs.
Putting fake photographs in textbooks is precisely an act of injecting false memories, and our action of having stickers pasted over them was resistance to the injection of memory.
When I was enrolled at Korea University, I was in the Faculty of Law, but there was a history lecture as a general education subject.
What I was taught there was that empirical historiography equals pro-Japanese historiography and is therefore bad, and that nationalist historiography alone is true historiography, and that was also written in the textbook.
However, what is called nationalist historiography is in fact something learned from, or uncritically imported from, Japan’s left-wing scholars who are called “conscientious Japanese,” with the wrapping paper of nationalist historiography placed over it.
Therefore, it can be said that the South Korean scholars who advocate nationalist historiography are precisely the ones who are pro-Japanese.
Those people say, “Punish the pro-Japanese faction,” but I cannot help thinking that they themselves, who learned their theories from Japan, are the pro-Japanese faction.
With the publication of the book Anti-Japanese Tribalism, I think it is necessary for truly conscientious Japanese intellectuals and scholars, and sensible South Korean scholars such as Professor Lee Young-hoon, to interact.
With Anti-Japanese Tribalism as a catalyst, South Koreans are beginning to notice the danger of totalitarianism and to awaken to the importance of freedom.
I hear that this book, which exceeded 100,000 copies in three months after its release and became an exceptional bestseller in South Korea for a conservative social science book, will be published in Japanese translation by Bungeishunju in November.
It is not my book, but everyone, please buy it.