Citing Shintaro Ishihara’s essay “Korea Must Not Be Forgiven” in Sound Argument, this chapter discusses South Korea’s stance toward Japan on issues such as radar lock-on, wartime labor, and the comfort women controversy through the lens of geopolitics and historical context.
It frames the peninsula’s fate as a “fringe” region shaped by surrounding great powers, recounts conditions leading to annexation, references education and infrastructure under Japanese rule, criticizes the narrative symbolized by comfort-women statues, and contrasts it with postwar Japan where returning youths confronted disorder even against U.S. military police.

2019-02-04
February 4, 2019
They even stood up to the U.S. Army’s MP and drove them out.
Violent organizations such as Shibuya’s Ando-gumi and Ginza’s so-called “Ginza Police” were symbols of that backbone.
What follows is from an essay by Shintaro Ishihara, published in the recently released monthly magazine Sound Argument under the headline “Korea Must Not Be Forgiven,” with the subtitle “The Folly of Denying History, and Urging Korea to Reflect.”
~ indicates my own remarks.
Looking at South Korea’s recent swaggering attitude toward Japan, I am so astonished that I am left speechless.
Whether it is the very recent radar-illumination incident—one step short of pulling the trigger—against Japan’s patrol aircraft, or the accusations over wartime labor and the demands for compensation from Japanese society that employed them, or the freezing and confiscation of Japanese assets in South Korea, or even the accusations regarding the comfort women issue, one must consider the historical structure of Japan’s rule over Korea that lay in the background.
I understand well the humiliation of being ruled by another people, yet to ignore the historical background of that humiliation, to condemn the moral responsibility of the historical fact itself at this late stage, to revive issues that should already have been politically settled, and in short to scheme to extract money once again, can only be described as base.
Behind the humiliating and painful historical event of annexation and rule—humiliating for them—there existed the fateful and geopolitically unfavorable condition of the Korean Peninsula, and this should be recognized by referencing world history.
There are several large peninsulas in the world similar to the Korean Peninsula, collectively called “fringes.”
The typical example is the Balkan Peninsula in Eastern Europe, where turmoil never ceased, and in Asia the Indochina Peninsula where Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have contended, and then the Korean Peninsula.
The historical axiom is that these large peninsulas have constantly been eroded and influenced by great powers enthroned at their base, and have continued to clash while fragmenting into multiple countries.
The Korean Peninsula was no exception.
When the Mongols, who once dominated most of the Eurasian continent, extended their hand even to the island nation of Japan and tried to invade, the countries on the Korean Peninsula, used as the passageway for that effort, had the trees of the entire land cut down and were stripped bare in order to build warships to cross to Japan.
Around the time Japan annexed Korea, the Asian situation was such that the Qing Empire, which had been Korea’s suzerain, was declining, and taking advantage of this, the northern great power Russia began to move south, and it was self-evident that once the Qing retreated, Russia would exploit the situation and sweep across the Korean Peninsula.
Under that sense of crisis, Korea’s government and parliament selected annexation with Japan as their own will through deliberation.
That is the clear historical fact.
It has also been proven that their choice was not mistaken.
As shown by a book written by the European foreigner Allen Ireland titled “THE NEW KOREA—The Era When Korea Became Dramatically Prosperous,” it was precisely Japanese rule that spread education across the peninsula and built and provided social infrastructure such as railways and dams for power generation.
This is what President Park Chung-hee, whom I came to know personally and who contributed to South Korea’s modernization, used to say: although he was born into a poor farming family and longed for learning, he was able to attend school, have his talent recognized, enter Japan’s military academy, and even graduate at the top of his class, and this was the result brought about by Japanese rule.
He himself said this with a shrug.
Even regarding the comfort women and wartime labor issues that they now criticize, I understand that humiliation under foreign rule serves as the trigger, but if they ignore the historical background that produced it and merely repeat emotional condemnations, neither side will gain anything.
The responsibility for the decision that produced the historical fact of rule and control by Japan lies with their ancestors’ judgment, and shifting the blame elsewhere while condemning Japan is nothing but a rough posture that ignores and distorts the fact called history.
Even the comfort women issue, and the young-girl bronze statues that have been scattered around the world, are fictitious, and I cannot believe that, at the time, even such innocent young girls were rounded up.
It is said in common accounts that two thousand women were mobilized, but if, in Korea whose population was said to be twenty million at the time, as many as two thousand women were forcibly turned into comfort women by the authorities, did the Korean men of that time simply look on and do nothing.
If so, is that not an utterly pathetic story.
By contrast, in Japan immediately after defeat, so-called third-country nationals who had been suppressed ran rampant and committed outrages against Japanese women and children, and yet young men returning from the war even stood up to the U.S. Army’s MP—then the absolute authority—and drove them out.
Violent organizations such as Shibuya’s Ando-gumi and Ginza’s so-called “Ginza Police” were symbols of that backbone.
To be continued.