Drawing on the book Final Ultimatum to Anti-Japan by a former South Korean Army colonel, this essay introduces Western eyewitness accounts of late Joseon Korea, especially those of Lillias Underwood and Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg. They describe barren hills, mushroom-like mud houses, superstition-driven rejection of wells and basic medicine, and women exhausted by hardship—contrasted with a ruling yangban class that lives in luxury by exploiting the poor. Hesse-Wartegg argues that Korean poverty, ignorance, and laziness stem from a greedy, unprincipled government and a slave-based feudal order, while Japan fostered ideals of loyalty and self-sacrifice. The author links these historical observations to today’s anti-Japanese propaganda, the behavior of media such as the Asahi Shimbun and German outlets, and the hypocrisy of Western academics and social media platforms that suppress dissenting truths online.

The Korean populace is poor, ignorant, lazy, and superstitious, but these traits are the unfortunate result of an unprincipled and greedy government.
June 6, 2024.

From the writings of Mrs. Horace Grant Underwood — the low hills were barren, with not a single tree growing on them.
January 23, 2021.

A close friend of mine, an avid reader, often says that “nothing is cheaper than books.”
When I saw that the following chapter was included, I felt, “Indeed, that is true.”
Disgusted by the behavior of Lee Myung-bak toward the end of his presidency, I searched the Internet for the first time, asking myself, “What kind of country is South Korea?” and “What on earth are Koreans?”
As I have already written, I understood everything about the Korean Peninsula in one hour.
However, at that time there were only a very few Westerners on the Internet, such as Isabella Bird, who had written about the truths of the Korean Peninsula that I was discovering for the first time.
The author of this book, a former colonel in the South Korean Army who has survived countless attacks and abuses, discloses truths that Koreans themselves had concealed from the Internet.
This chapter alone was worth far more than the 1,800 yen I paid for the book.
China and South Korea are lands of bottomless evil and plausible lies (this is especially true of South Koreans).
In Japan, that spirit is embodied by the Asahi Shimbun and those who sympathize with it.
In the United States, it is the Democratic Party supporters, who are a mass of pseudo-moralism.
People like these cannot tolerate the existence of anyone who disagrees with them.
They immediately try to erase such people from the Internet.
Recent actions by Twitter and Facebook against Trump are a clear example.
What is absurd about these social networks is that, while they leave alone fanatics like those described above and countless evil people who infest the Internet, they have the nerve to suspend the account of the President of the United States.
This is hypocrisy of the highest order.
The other night, the female anchor of “Nikkei News 10” (I feel she is under the influence of Chinese operations) invited Akira Ikegami as a guest and said the following.
She does not even know that the division of American society—its extreme widening of inequality—was created by globalism.
She is unaware that a tiny handful of people, such as the founders and executives of GAFA, have come to possess wealth greater than the national budgets of many countries.
She does not know that it was the Obama administration that not only allowed China to become overbearing, but also maximized income disparity.
Nor does she realize that the only thing barely holding the United States together is that the “American Dream” is still alive.
What did she say?
She said, “So the division in American society produced a man like Trump,” and sought Ikegami’s agreement.
To borrow the words of Tatsuru Uchida, she is intellectually on exactly the same level as the Asahi Shimbun, which he describes as “below kindergarten level.”
Such a female anchor, with that level of intellect, presumes to look down on the President of the United States.
TV Tokyo is also a baffling station.
Recently, they have produced a few distinctive programs that I have come to like.
But if you leave the TV on after watching “WBS” and turn it on at noon the next day, they are frequently broadcasting, without the slightest hesitation, “Korean dramas made of lies and plagiarism.”
Considering that female anchor and that sort of programming, I cannot help but question the mentality of TV Tokyo.

The following is from “The Final Ultimatum to Anti-Japan” by a former colonel of the South Korean Army.
This book is a must-read not only for all Japanese citizens but for people all over the world.
Especially for those who earn their living at the Asahi Shimbun, a newspaper unlike any in the advanced world, whose staff derive pleasure from degrading their own country to the world and will fabricate anything to do so, as well as for those who subscribe to it.
And in particular, for the so-called scholars who have been saying, “We must learn from Germany.”
For those who earn their living at Süddeutsche Zeitung, a paper that has repeatedly written anti-Japanese articles using the Asahi’s anti-Japanese reporting.
For those who subscribe to such papers and for the people who make their living at television stations that, every year at the end of the year, dutifully air John Rabe’s fabricated Nanjing Massacre tale as an annual ritual.
As a result of all this, about half of the German public is said to hold anti-Japanese sentiments.
And for American “scholars” such as Alexis Bray Dudden, who serves as a proxy for South Korea.
For them, this book is essential reading.

Chapter 2: Korea as Seen by Foreigners and Koreans Themselves.
As we have seen so far, Japan and Korea were different in their capabilities from the outset.
Was Korea really the “cultured” country that communists like to romanticize?
Below I will summarize what foreign intellectuals who observed Korea on the ground for many years, and the enlightened Korean thinkers of the same era, witnessed and wrote.
The image of Korea seen by twenty-one foreigners and six Koreans themselves can be summed up in a single phrase: a hellish, uncivilized land.

From the writings of Mrs. Horace Grant Underwood.
Lillias Horton Underwood (1851–1921) was born in Britain and was the wife of Horace Grant Underwood, the founder of Yonsei University in Korea.

The first thing I saw when I arrived in Seoul was the small, earthen houses crowded together like a giant patch of mushrooms.
Each house consisted of a single room and a single kitchen.
The low hills were bald, with not a single tree growing on them.
Koreans, when they go to a banquet, eat an unbelievable amount of food.
It is said that they leave their stomachs completely empty in advance for the sake of the feast.
By contrast, the Japanese serve several palm-sized bowls and elegant plates to their guests, but the food provided is only a small amount.
Perhaps here lies the reason that Koreans grow ever poorer while the Japanese build their wealth.
Koreans are deeply superstitious.
There is not a single well in Pyongyang.
There is a superstition that “if you dig a well, you will fall into it and sink.”
So everyone fetched their water from the Taedong River.
Even during the Russo–Japanese War, when countless corpses were floating in the river, they still drank that water.
When a small boil appeared, I intended to remove it with a simple surgical procedure, but everyone objected, saying that allowing a scalpel or scissors to touch the body went against the teachings of Confucianism.
Even the king opposed it in the same way.
As for Korean women, one cannot generally say that they are beautiful.
Because of sorrow and despair, harsh labor, illness, lack of affection, ignorance, and modesty, their eyes lose their sparkle and their faces become gaunt and scarred.
This tendency is especially pronounced in women over twenty-five.
Even the women of the royal court are no different.
Furthermore, I was surprised to see that they all smoked tobacco.
(See “Fifteen Years Among the Top-Knots; or Life in Korea.”)

From the writings of Hesse-Wartegg.
Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg (1851–1918) was a German traveler.

The common people suffer in poverty, while the officials indulge in every possible form of debauchery, using the wealth they have extorted from the people.
The Korean populace is poor, ignorant, lazy, and superstitious, but these traits are the unfortunate result of an unprincipled and greedy government.
For hundreds of years, the Korean government has not only failed to encourage within the populace the desire to improve society, but has actively suppressed such impulses.
This is because the yangban ruling class of Korea has sought to maintain a system of slavery under a feudal order, in which they can use and sell, at will, the people they have inherited as their own property.
What Japan has, but Korea does not, is a class of scholars and a cultural elite who hold high ideals of loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice.
(See “Korea: Eine Sommerreise nach dem Lande der Morgenruhe, 1894,” 1895.)

To be continued.