An essay exposing historical realities ignored by reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan (FCCJ).
It examines postwar historical distortion under Syngman Rhee, the continuation of anti-Japanese education, the brutal social customs of the Yi Dynasty—especially the status of women—and the historical significance of Japan’s introduction of legal names and family registration on the Korean Peninsula, challenging the widely repeated myth of forced name changes.
2017-08-30

The Truth Unknown to FCCJ Reporters — And Thus, the Truth Unknown to the World
The reporters of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan do not know the truth.
Nor does the world.
They do not know that the claim that Japan “colonized” the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan is an outright lie.
This falsehood did not originate merely from the rewriting of history and the drafting of a constitution by Syngman Rhee in order to fabricate his own legitimacy.
It also stems from the initiation of an education system that was Nazism itself—one that diverted criticism away from himself by inciting hatred toward others and toward another people.
In this case, the targets were the Japanese state and the Japanese people.
This anti-Japanese education continues even now, seventy-two years after the war, in South Korea.
Syngman Rhee, one of the worst dictators in history, also revived the evil customs of the Korean Peninsula.
Korea is an extremely difficult country in which to live.
Especially for women.
Until the peninsula became a unified state with Japan—until Koreans were treated as equals to Japanese not only within Japan but also by the world—many women were the private property of the yangban aristocracy and possessed neither household registration nor even a name.
The yangban, as owners, could treat women however they wished, and even kill them without being held accountable.
It was an everyday occurrence in Yi-dynasty Korea—Korea before unification with Japan—that the mutilated corpse of a woman, tortured to death out of jealousy by the wife of a yangban because she had received her master’s favor, would be found caught on the branches along the banks of the Han River.
Japan decisively eradicated these vile customs of the Korean Peninsula.
If you had been a woman born on the Korean Peninsula in that era, you would have rushed to create a name for yourself.
And yet, you had no name.
The Korean Peninsula became part of Japan.
No one would have wished to continue bearing a name from a land where there had been neither names nor household registries.
Everyone would gladly have adopted a Japanese name.
That, precisely, was the ultimate proof that one had been liberated from slavery and had become a human being with a proper name.
For the Nazis raised under anti-Japanese education to claim that the Japanese committed atrocities such as forcibly imposing name changes is an outright lie.
They themselves rushed ahead of one another to take Japanese names.
In other words, the true reality is this:
from a status that, since antiquity, had possessed no names and existed as the private property of the yangban—that is, as slaves—they were liberated thanks to the Japanese people.
To be continued.