Revisiting a major essay by Korean-peninsula specialist Abe Nangyū in the conservative monthly Seiron, the author contrasts its hard historical data with the narratives pushed by outlets like Asahi, Mainichi, TV Asahi, and TBS.
The piece traces how the slogan of “forced deportation” to Japan was constructed after the Kimu Hira (Kim Hi-ro) incident, how a population of about 600,000 postwar Koreans in Japan included an estimated 200,000 illegal entrants, and how this reality was buried under a victimhood narrative likening them to African slaves.
Against the background of current disputes over “wartime requisition” and World Heritage sites, the essay asks: why did the myth of “forced deportation” arise, and what past of the Zainichi community has it been used to hide?

February 23, 2017
Last night, I realized there were many articles in this month’s issue of Seiron that I had left unread.
Every one of them turned out to be an essay that should be considered required reading.
Among them was a truly outstanding piece by Abe Nangyū, titled “Governor Onaga’s Astonishing Pro-China Remarks to the Chinese Premier,” which taught us historical facts that the great majority of the Japanese people and virtually everyone in the world do not know.
Before introducing that article, I reread another of his major works that I myself had transmitted to the world on October 7, 2015.
In this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Seiron as well, the pages are packed with truths that people who subscribe to Asahi or Mainichi and live their lives watching only TV Asahi and TBS news programs could never possibly grasp.
And yet the price is 780 yen.
By contrast, Asahi fills roughly half of its already limited pages with advertisements on the level of a sports paper, and still charges roughly 5,000 yen per month.
What follows is drawn from pages 178 to 187 of a major work by Korean-issues researcher Abe Nangyū.
Mr. Abe Nangyū was born in 1939 (Shōwa 14) in Fukuoka Prefecture.
He graduated from Kogakuin University.
He served as a senior research officer at the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, Chemical Technology Research Institute.
After retiring in 2000, he worked until 2003 as director of the Tsukuba Office of the Chemical Technology Strategy Promotion Organization.
His specialty is technologies for dealing with mining and industrial pollution.
His authored works include An Outline of Tsukuba Science City; his co-authored works include The Militarization of North Korea’s Industry and A Study of Postwar Japan–North Korea Relations.
He is currently preparing to establish a “Museum of Materials on Trade with the Communist Bloc.”
Readers will surely notice that his major work also proves the correctness of my own arguments one hundred percent.
All emphases in black other than the title are mine.
World Heritage Sites Tainted by Anti-Japanese Agitation from China and South Korea
The Illusory “Forced Deportation” Theory and the Past of the Zainichi
How the Myth of “Forced Deportation” Was Born
Those Who Crossed the Genkai Sea After the War
As a historical issue between Japan and South Korea, “wartime conscription” has now surfaced following on from the dispute over Japanese military comfort women.
It was once called “forced deportation” and was remembered as an example of “Imperial Japan’s barbarity.”
As the actual circumstances have been clarified and that image of “barbarity” has been rejected, the term “forced deportation” has come to be used less often, and the expression “forced labor” is now frequently employed instead.
In any case, the reason wartime conscription has become a source of friction between Japan and South Korea is that the memory of this “forced deportation = barbarity” theory remains deeply rooted.
In 1968 (Shōwa 43), in a snack bar in Shizuoka Prefecture, second-generation Korean resident in Japan, Kimu Hira (Kim Hi-ro), shot and killed two debt-collecting gang members, and barricaded himself in a ryokan at the Sumata Gorge hot-spring resort in the same prefecture.
When Kim demanded, as a condition for releasing his hostages, an apology from a serving police officer who had made discriminatory remarks against Korean residents in Japan, the incident was taken up by the mass media in a big way, in connection with the issue of “discrimination against Korean residents in Japan.”
Within Japan, activist groups and people styling themselves “intellectuals” began to offer support to Kim Hi-ro.
And despite the fact that Kim killed two men with a rifle, he escaped the death penalty in court.
The incident had a major impact on the Korean-resident movement thereafter.
Its greatest effect was that the following myth was constructed: “Korean residents in Japan have been discriminated against all along. And at the root of that discrimination lay ‘forced deportation’ by Japan before the war.”
It was propaganda designed to implant an image that they had been brought to Japan in the same way that blacks had been brought from the African continent to America as slaves.
To be continued.