Published on August 3, 2019.
This essay discusses the process through which anti-Japanese sentiment was formed in South Korean history education, examining the Syngman Rhee administration, the Jeju Island incident, the Korean War, the Park Chung-hee administration, the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, Japan’s economic cooperation, and changes in textbook education.
The author points out that the “false memories” implanted in South Korean children have distorted contemporary relations between Japan and South Korea.
August 3, 2019
For seventy years after the war, the world has overlooked the fact that countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” such as the Korean Peninsula and China, have continued to practice Nazism in the name of anti-Japanese education.
The lies and fabrications of the South Korean government are that merciless.
I immediately sensed that it was dangerous.
This was a chapter published on April 16, 2019 under that title.
The Japan–South Korea relationship depicted in South Korean history education is, so to speak, one of “a 100-percent aggressor and a 100-percent victim,” and of “absolute evil and absolute justice.”
I am republishing the chapter published on December 5, 2018 under that title.
Astonished and appalled by President Lee Myung-bak’s words and actions toward the end of his presidency, I wondered what kind of country South Korea actually was and searched online for information about South Korea and the Korean Peninsula…Within one hour, I understood the reality of the Korean Peninsula.
For the first time, I learned the reality of South Korea, something that I had been completely unable to understand as a person who had not only subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun for many years but had also received a postwar education.
Even without conducting a search, anyone would surely understand that North Korea is an appalling country beyond description.
A short while ago, I discovered another article that embodies the true essence of the Internet, the largest library in human history.
What is happening in South Korea today can be understood only after these facts are known.
In other words, without knowing these facts, one cannot understand the South Korean people…and that is extremely dangerous for the Japanese people.
Just as I personally encountered an evil so great that it caused me to suffer a serious illness that nearly cost me my life, Japan had in fact been continually encountering this evil…it had continually been exposed to it.
Not only against Japan, but also with the United States and the United Nations as their principal battlefields, they continue to exercise their evil.
The truth presented by this laborious work is the true nature of anti-Japanese propaganda.
Against Japan—a country where The Turntable of Civilization revolves as an expression of divine providence, and which must lead the world alongside the United States…
Countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” such as the Korean Peninsula and China…
For seventy years after the war, the world has overlooked the fact that they have continued to practice Nazism in the name of anti-Japanese education.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the true reason why the world remains unstable and unceasingly afflicted by conflict.
The fact that I…having no other choice…appeared in this way, bearing The Turntable of Civilization…was, in fact, extremely important—not only for me, of course, and for my readers…but also for Japan and the world.
The following is the article I discovered.
It was after I read South Korean history textbooks.
The Japanese were portrayed as coldhearted and merciless “devils.”
Modern Japan was said to have done “nothing but massacre and plunder” in Korea.
◆Why Did South Korea Rewrite History?—Examining Its Motives and Background (Second Half), Takaaki Yamada.
The Era of Syngman Rhee, Which Marked the Beginning of South Korea’s True Misfortune
Now, let us return to the main subject.
Following Japan’s defeat, governing authority over Korea was transferred from the Government-General to the United States.
At first, the various factions quarreled over the establishment of the state, while the Soviet Union swiftly installed a puppet.
Although neither the Provisional Government nor the Independence Army itself was recognized, Syngman Rhee, who came from that government, had studied in the United States and had also engaged in lobbying there. Consequently, he was ultimately installed as the head of an anti-communist puppet regime.
However, the self-serving demand that “South Korea be admitted to the Allied powers” was rejected.
This was because it was considered that people who had neither fought nor shed blood had no right to push themselves forward.
Therefore, when South Koreans call themselves “citizens of a victorious nation” or “members of the Allied nations,” it is simply contrary to fact.
It is impossible not to feel sympathy over the fact that this man seized dictatorial power as the first president.
The period from Rhee’s return to South Korea until his exile was a “dark age,” and the absence of this memory among contemporary South Koreans is abnormal.
In many senses, Syngman Rhee himself was the source of all evil, and his era was precisely the same as the “Japanese imperial rule” depicted in South Korean history education.
The first evil committed by Syngman Rhee was the “Jeju Island incident,” which, in short, was a wholesale massacre of communists and islanders suspected of being communists.
As a result, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, while tens of thousands of others fled to Japan and remained there.
The massacres continued afterward, and the island’s population was drastically reduced.
Similar massacres, though on a smaller scale, were carried out in other regions as well.
As for Syngman Rhee’s war crimes against Japan, the invasion and seizure of the Japanese territory of Takeshima and the massacre of Japanese fishermen are well known, but he had actually attempted to invade Tsushima before that.
He had concentrated military forces at the southern extremity of South Korea for that purpose when North Korea launched its lightning invasion.
Since he was capable of massacring even his own citizens without hesitation, it is not difficult to imagine that the South Korean military would have carried out a massive massacre on Tsushima.
When the Korean War began, Syngman Rhee intensified his paranoia concerning internal enemies and executed large numbers of people registered with the National Guidance League, an organization intended to indoctrinate communists and their families.
The exact number of people massacred by the military and police is unknown, but it is said to have exceeded one million.
Not only was the matter obscured by the war, but it continued to be concealed under the subsequent military governments.
The South Korean military was initially driven into the southern part of the peninsula, but with the entry of the United States military into the war, it counterattacked and reached the Yalu River on the China–Korea border four months later.
However, although the war should have ended with the destruction of North Korea, China’s entry into the war pushed the forces back once again to the 38th parallel, and the war ultimately continued for three years.
As a result, millions of military personnel and civilians were sacrificed, and most of the Korean Peninsula was devastated.
Incidentally, South Korea has not once demanded that China, which prolonged the war and increased the number of victims, confront and settle its past.
Syngman Rhee continued to cling to his position as dictator until the middle of 1960.
Rhee purged as political criminals not only communists but anyone who opposed him, and thoroughly suppressed demonstrations and opposition movements.
South Koreans who had known the Japanese era were indignant at the time, saying, “In what possible sense is this ‘liberation’?
Is this not a society far worse than it was under Japanese imperial rule?”
Syngman Rhee suppressed this movement through a reign of terror involving control over thought and speech, a system of informants, the secret police, and other measures.
In this way, he monitored and suppressed pro-Japanese thoughts and speech, caused the generation that knew the Japanese era through personal experience to close its mouths out of fear, thereby dividing the generations, and used the media and public education to implant “false memories” in children.
During the Pacific War, South Korea was not bombed and had virtually no conscription (*the war ended before the small number of conscripts could be deployed to the front), and experienced only the requisitioning of materials and compulsory labor—exceptionally favorable treatment for a “colony.”
As a result, at the end of the war, the Japanese home islands had suffered enormous numbers of war deaths and had been reduced to ashes, whereas South Korea was almost completely unscathed.
In other words, immediately after the war, the economic and social conditions of Japan and South Korea had been completely reversed.
By the time Syngman Rhee departed, however, South Korea had fallen into the ranks of the world’s poorest countries, and the conditions of the two countries had been reversed once again.
In the end, Syngman Rhee contributed absolutely nothing to the development of South Korean society or its economy; he merely wielded dictatorial power, imposed tyranny, massacred vast numbers of his own people, and impoverished the country.
Incidentally, the South Korean government continues to conceal this shameful history while fabricating nonexistent massacres by the Japanese military and teaching children a false history. Does that not make it almost an accomplice?
Why Was the False National History Passed Down?
After Syngman Rhee went into exile, South Korea experienced a period of turmoil, but Park Chung-hee ultimately seized power.
As is well known, he was a former officer of the old military, normalized relations between the two countries by concluding the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, and obtained enormous funds from Japan.
Park fostered heavy industries such as steel and petrochemicals, expanded social infrastructure, and achieved the rapid economic growth known as the “Miracle on the Han River.”
However, if one has Japanese funding amounting to more than twice the national budget and a neighbor that, out of a sense of mission, painstakingly teaches technology and expertise step by step, it does not seem particularly difficult to create a (passage omitted) “miracle.”
South Korea was thus able to escape poverty, not merely once but twice, through Japanese assistance and cooperation.
President Park Chung-hee, however, likewise made no attempt to correct the propaganda that portrayed Japan as absolute evil.
Because he thoroughly suppressed anti-government demonstrations and movements, he became the object of resentment among some citizens.
For a military dictatorship that inevitably produces internal friction, an object toward which the people’s hatred and dissatisfaction can be redirected is indispensable.
North Korea and the communists were inadequate for that role.
Generally speaking, many anti-government people sympathized with them.
A “people’s enemy” unrelated to ideological divisions was required.
Perhaps because of such political calculations, Park Chung-hee retained the education that demonized Japan without alteration.
Furthermore, because he claimed all the achievements resulting from Japanese economic assistance as his own accomplishments, it is difficult to describe him as a particularly fair-minded person, contrary to the image of him generally accepted in Japan.
Indeed, far from that, it appears that he added something unnecessary to public education.
That was the cultivation of pride based on the idea that “our people have been great since ancient times.”
In other words, it appears that he strengthened a self-glorifying view of history (*however, I must point out that I have no materials at hand concerning this and that it is based entirely on hearsay).
Viewed from the opposite side, however, this also meant disparaging Japan as a “culturally backward country.”
That is because the superiority of one’s own people is brought into relief through comparison with others, and the object of comparison naturally could not be China; it had to be ancient and medieval Japan.
South Korean children are taught that “our ancestors taught the Japanese such-and-such” and that “in the past, we were more advanced than Japan.”
The advanced culture said to have been transmitted by Korea includes rice cultivation, textiles, architecture, Buddhism, paper, and writing in ancient times; techniques for producing ceramics at the time of Hideyoshi’s invasion; and medicine, Confucianism, calligraphy, and painting conveyed by the Korean embassies during the Edo period.
In this way, by defining themselves in relation to Japan, they develop an ethnic sense of superiority based on claims such as “South Korea was the more culturally advanced country until the Meiji Restoration” and “our ancestors were the teachers who civilized the barbaric Japanese.”
When Hideyoshi’s invasion and the invasions of modern Japan are then given great emphasis, they naturally become indignant that “our kindness was repaid with hostility.”
In this manner, the foundations were completed for the “strange history education” that has continued into the present day and fosters both a sense of superiority over Japan and a sense of victimhood.
Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, who subsequently became presidents, belonged to the same military-academy lineage as Park and continued the anti-Japanese education.
The reasons were presumably the same as those described above.
A military government inevitably requires an object that will absorb the people’s hatred.
Moreover, Chun Doo-hwan was a man who began by suppressing citizens in an incident such as Gwangju.
He also wanted to accomplish a miracle like Park’s and attempted to extract enormous economic assistance from Japan.
As a means of doing so, he began making accusations over the textbook issue—why would such a man ever correct anti-Japanese education?
In 1988, South Korea finally made the transition to a democratic system.
In principle, freedom of thought and expression was also largely guaranteed.
However, forty years of domestic propaganda had caused the “false memories” to become completely established as fact, and it was already too late.
The South Korean people had become entirely integrated in spirit with the “father of the nation.”
Independence activists now constituted the identity of the Korean people.
In other words, ordinary citizens had convinced themselves that “we fought bravely against the devil of Japanese imperialism and achieved victory,” and because they had become the guardians of that myth, overturning it was no longer easy.
“Japan–South Korea Friendship,” Which Never Existed from the Beginning
Now, it is not as though I have had no personal relationships with South Koreans.
My experience at those times was that “I could not regard them as strangers.”
There are people around me who say that they were deceived while doing business with South Koreans, that their property was stolen, or that payments owed to them were never made, but fortunately I have never had an unpleasant experience.
Therefore, on a personal level, I still regard the South Koreans I know as though they were relatives.
Perhaps the Japanese people of one hundred years ago devoted themselves to modernizing South Korean society with a somewhat extraordinary degree of goodwill and a sense of mission because of this same feeling.
The truth may unexpectedly be that they “could not regard them as strangers” or “felt as though siblings from whom they had long been separated were living in miserable circumstances.”
However, within those personal relationships, I found it strange that even intelligent and mild-mannered South Koreans would suddenly change color whenever, by some chance, the subject turned to history.
It resembled the way in which a person abused during childhood is tormented by flashbacks.
I learned the reason fifteen years ago, after reading translated South Korean history textbooks.
The Japanese were portrayed as coldhearted and merciless “devils.”
Modern Japan was said to have done “nothing but massacre and plunder” in Korea.
The lies and fabrications of the South Korean government are that merciless.
I immediately sensed that it was dangerous.
Children naturally grow up believing that all of it is true.
This essay will continue.