This chapter exposes how the brutality of the Korean Peninsula’s yangban ruling class—and its highly stratified caste system—was replaced with the narrative of “Japanese cruelty” through postwar GHQ indoctrination and Korean anti-Japan propaganda.
It explains why fallen yangban elites such as Kim Gu and Syngman Rhee developed extreme hatred toward Japan after Japan abolished the caste system and modernized Korea following 1910.
The chapter further analyzes historical distortions found in modern Korean anti-Japan exhibitions and in cultural works like “Kamui Gaiden,” arguing that these depictions mirror the abuses Koreans historically inflicted on their own people.
It urges the global community to recognize these historical facts accurately and never forget them.

The brutality of the yangban rule on the Korean Peninsula was replaced with “Japanese brutality” through postwar propaganda created by GHQ-brainwashed Japanese.
As symbolized by manga such as “Kamui Gaiden,” which rewrote the cruelty of the yangban as if it were the cruelty of the Japanese, this distortion continues today.
Kim Gu was, if I recall correctly, a member of the yangban class.
In other words, Kim Gu’s abnormal hatred toward Japan and the Japanese stemmed from the fact that in 1910, when the Korean Empire faced national bankruptcy, it voted for annexation and requested Japan to assume control.
Japan accepted the request and poured more than 20 percent of its national budget annually into the Korean Peninsula for 36 years, rapidly modernizing what had been one of the poorest regions on earth.
Japan saw through the fact that the root cause of Korea’s misery lay in a caste system even more subdivided than India’s, the worst in human history, a system that had kept the peninsula in an ancient autocratic state.
Japan abolished the caste system at once.
As a result, the yangban—the discriminatory ruling class that had trampled the peninsula for centuries—was dismantled.
That resentment was the source 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 declared that he respected Kim Gu the most, is an even worse president—a historically disastrous leader.
The world must understand and never forget what is written in this chapter.
Syngman Rhee, who started postwar anti-Japanese education identical to Nazism for seventy years, was also of fallen yangban origin.
He, too, was a corrupt man from beginning to end.
Until 1910, women on the Korean Peninsula had no names—the women were property of the yangban.
The Korean Peninsula was a region where only the king and the yangban existed as privileged classes and spent nearly all of history trampling the country.
It was the world’s worst subdivided caste system, one in which even scholars belonged to the oppressed class.
Even prostitutes were divided into government slaves and civilian slaves.
The yangban prided themselves on not working and committed every kind of outrage against the oppressed people living in their domains.
After the war, Koreans who disobeyed GHQ orders and did not return to the Korean Peninsula, those who fled Korea during Syngman Rhee’s oppression and massacres—especially the Jeju Island massacre—and GHQ-brainwashed Japanese replaced the cruelty of the yangban with “Japanese cruelty,” as symbolized by manga such as “Kamui Gaiden.”
Furthermore, the modern Korean facilities where anti-Japan propaganda is presented to children and foreign tourists depict massacres and atrocities that are, in fact, the ways in which Koreans themselves historically abused their own people—the oppressed classes—throughout recorded history.
The entire world must recognize this truth and never forget it.
Le Clézio, the other “me” in this world, must never tarnish his twilight years and must immediately correct his misconceptions about Korea.
His view of Korea is no different from the commercialized tourism of Westerners he himself criticized—foolish and shallow.
If he believes that the extreme poverty created by wrongdoing and stupidity has some sort of meaning, then it is truly hopeless.