This text argues that historical realities regarding social hierarchy on the Korean Peninsula before annexation are deliberately ignored, while false narratives of forced abduction continue to be promoted.

This essay challenges narratives of forced abduction by presenting historical claims about social hierarchy and migration choices at the end of the war.
It emphasizes how selective silence and repetition of falsehoods shape contemporary propaganda.

2017-06-21
He may be deliberately pretending not to know, but before Japan’s annexation, the Korean Peninsula was a country with one of the world’s most severe systems of status discrimination.
Women in particular had no personal names and were treated as the private property of the yangban class.
It is recorded in writings by Koreans themselves that, in the Yi Dynasty period, it was a daily occurrence for the bodies of women—beaten and killed by wives who discovered that they had been used as sexual partners by yangban husbands—to be thrown into the Han River and caught on branches, exposed in a gruesome state.
Because Japan fully understood that this system of status discrimination had kept the Korean Peninsula in a primitive condition, it abolished discrimination at once and made Koreans equal imperial subjects at the time of annexation.
At the time of Japan’s defeat, more than two million people from the Korean Peninsula were living in Japan, and despite GHQ repatriation recommendations, approximately 600,000 remained.
They remained because it was far better to stay in Japan than to return to a land where they had no names and no property.
They refused to return to a hellish system of status discrimination, where most of them would have been placed at the very bottom.
Yet they remain silent about this truth and continue to tell outrageous lies, such as claims of forced abduction.
This is precisely an expression of the DNA of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
Like all those on the Korean Peninsula who promote anti-Japanese propaganda, he tells blatant falsehoods without hesitation.
In other words, he too is a person who carries the DNA of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
Hakoda Tetsuya, who fully believes such foolish lies, may also carry such DNA, but the time has long since come for all readers of the Asahi Shimbun to realize that such a person serves as one of its editorial writers.
Japanese citizens should feel ashamed that they have unknowingly subscribed until now.
They should know that there can be no greater regret.