This chapter examines how Korea’s historical ruling class, the yangban, who oppressed and brutalized lower classes for centuries, later shifted the blame onto Japan through postwar propaganda, assisted by GHQ-influenced Japanese leftists. It argues that figures like Kim Gu and Syngman Rhee, both descended from the yangban class, projected their resentment against Japan after the abolition of Korea’s rigid caste system during annexation. Contemporary anti-Japanese propaganda in South Korea, including tourist exhibits and works like Kamui Gaiden, is portrayed as a distortion that masks Korea’s own history of internal violence. The chapter calls for global recognition of these historical facts.

As symbolized by works such as Kamui Gaiden, a manga created by Japanese who had been brainwashed by the GHQ and who replaced the brutality of the Korean Peninsula’s yangban with that of the Japanese people,

I believe that Kim Gu belonged to the yangban class.
In other words, Kim Gu’s abnormal hatred toward Japan and the Japanese people stemmed from the fact that, in 1910, when the Korean Empire was on the verge of national bankruptcy, it voted for annexation and requested Japan to accept it.
Japan accepted the request and, for the following 36 years, invested more than 20 percent of its national budget annually into the Korean Peninsula, rapidly modernizing what had been one of the poorest regions in the world.
Japan discerned that the root of all evil on the Korean Peninsula—left in the condition of an ancient autocratic state—lay in a caste system more subdivided and oppressive than India’s, arguably the worst class-discrimination system in human history.
Japan then abolished Korea’s caste system in one stroke.
As a result, the yangban—the discriminatory class that had trampled the peninsula for centuries—was dismantled.
That destruction of their privileges is likely the true cause of Kim Gu’s abnormal hatred toward Japan.
In any case, he was a corrupt man from beginning to end.
Moon Jae-in, who openly declares Kim Gu to be the person he respects most, is an even worse president—perhaps the worst in history.
The world must recognize this through this chapter and never forget it.

Syngman Rhee, who initiated seventy years of anti-Japanese education modeled after Nazism, was also a descendant of the fallen yangban.
Thus he, too, was a corrupt man from beginning to end.

Until 1910, women on the Korean Peninsula had no names—because women were property owned by the yangban.
The Korean Peninsula was a region where the king and the yangban, as the sole privileged classes, spent almost all of history trampling the entire nation.

It had the world’s worst, hyper-subdivided caste system, and even scholars belonged to the discriminated classes.
Even prostitutes were divided into official slaves and civilian slaves.
The yangban prided themselves on not working and continually committed all manner of outrages against the discriminated classes living on their land.

After the war, following the command of the GHQ, Koreans who remained in Japan instead of returning to the Korean Peninsula, along with those who fled to Japan during the numerous oppressions and massacres carried out by Syngman Rhee—such as the Jeju Island massacre, which was in fact a great massacre—and Japanese who had been brainwashed by the GHQ, created works such as Kamui Gaiden, in which the brutality of the yangban was replaced with brutality committed by the Japanese.

Likewise, the depictions of massacres in the facilities currently set up in South Korea as anti-Japanese propaganda aimed at children and foreign tourists represent nothing other than the violence that Koreans themselves, from time immemorial, inflicted at will upon their own people—upon the discriminated classes.

The entire world must recognize this through this chapter and never forget it.

My other self in this world, Le Clézio, must never stain his later years.
He must immediately discard any mistaken assumptions he holds about Korea.
His assumptions about the Korean Peninsula are no different from the commercialism he criticized among Western tourists—ignorant and shallow.
If he thinks that poverty, the result of wrongdoing and foolishness, has any particular meaning, then it is truly hopeless.