2024/03/05

The following is also from an article I found on the Internet today.
The emphasis within the text is mine.
“Ugly, but Don’t Look Away from Our Neighbor, South Korea,” by Hiroshi Furuta
(June 22, 2017)
Ugly, but Don’t Look Away from Our Neighbor, South Korea! (WAC BUNKO)
[My rating] ★★★★★ (93 points)
This is a 2014 book by Mr. Furuta, who has engaged in shouting matches with the South Korean side in joint research on Japanese-Korean history.
Why does South Korea continue to spread lies around the world that denigrate Japan?
It is because denigrating Japan is necessary for it to maintain its own legitimacy.
Mr. Furuta asserts that it is best to have nothing to do with Koreans, whose common sense is so different.
There is no point in teaching or helping them.
They show no gratitude whatsoever.
Instead, they make endless demands for ten or twenty times more.
It is best to have nothing more to do with Koreans (p. 75).
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The following are the passages in this book that resonated with me.
• In Korean, the act of going around informing on a person one dislikes to bosses and superiors in order to isolate that person is called “igandjil.”
Because igandjil has a certain effect within South Korea, Koreans assume that such behavior is accepted throughout the world as well (p. 56).
• It was Japan’s postwar left-wing scholars who taught false nationalism. They taught that Japan was a wicked country that exploited and plundered Korea, and that Koreans should therefore reclaim their independent history from Japan (p. 47).
• Those who did not fight the Japanese military have no memories of their own righteousness.
China seized upon a Japanese civic-minded newspaper that fabricated the Nanjing Incident, while South Korea became ensnared in the lie about the military comfort women.
In the end, Japan’s left-wing intellectuals and mass media encouraged their despicable behavior (p. 114).
• The only heroes South Korea takes pride in are terrorist bombers.
What I fear is the danger that young South Koreans will think, “I want to be a hero too,” and cross the sea carrying bombs (p. 64).
• The lie that associates the “comfort women” with coercion by the military and enshrines them in bronze statues is also based on the social convention in that country that “if a lie works, so much the better.”
The same applies to the abductions, the Senkaku Islands, and Takeshima.
It is believed that if a lie is maintained, it will become the truth (p. 109).
• On seeing a person, they immediately assess whether that person is above or below them and whether the person has greater legitimacy than they do.
If they judge the person to be beneath them, they readily break their promises. What is truly unsettling is how they suddenly seize the other person’s arm and appraise whether the wristwatch they are wearing is more or less expensive than their own (p. 74).
• Korea’s rulers always cast aside what they should be responsible for.
King Injo of the Joseon dynasty abandoned the people to the Manchu army.
In 1905, at the time of the Second Japan-Korea Agreement, Gojong handed the fate of Korea over entirely to his ministers.
South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, abandoned the people and fled, and during the 1997 financial crisis, Kim Young-sam handed the country over to the IMF (p. 96).
• Impoverished Korea had nothing to plunder in the first place.
We had to begin by teaching those who knew nothing of labor its value and significance (p. 122).
• NHK continues to broadcast phony Korean historical dramas about the royal dynasties.
Unlike the Japanese, who enjoy Mito Kōmon while knowing it is fiction, Koreans themselves believe these fabrications to be historical fact.
NHK bears a heavy responsibility for helping promote these fabrications overseas (p. 185).
• As with China, university professors specializing in South and North Korea rarely tell the truth.
This is because, if they did, more people would come to dislike those countries, the numbers of undergraduate and graduate students studying them would fall, and the professors would be undermining themselves.
Furthermore, if they incurred the dislike of intellectuals across the sea in those countries, opportunities for joint research would disappear and research funding would plummet.
If they also incurred the dislike of the ruling class, they might be denied entry into the country or access to materials in libraries (p. 5).