In South Korea, anti-Japan education begins in elementary school, shaping a perception that Japan is inherently wrong. However, a Korean youth who befriended Japanese classmates abroad began to question this narrative. After the radar-lock incident, he started speaking out through YouTube, revealing the reality of education, historical narratives, and the true sentiments of younger generations in Korea.

March 31, 2019.
Many people who continue to live in South Korea have been raised under an “indoctrination education” that teaches their country is always right.
Anti-Japan education begins when children are in elementary school.
The following is from the May issue of the monthly magazine WiLL.
WWUK…Video creator.
At this rate, South Korea will be abandoned.
The radar-lock incident = the cry of a Korean young man who could no longer remain silent about the outrageous actions of his own country.
Why I started making videos.
Nice to meet you.
I am WWUK.
Currently, I have launched a YouTube channel called “WWUK TV,” and I upload videos every day, mainly about Korean political and diplomatic issues.
Why did I become interested in Japan-Korea issues and start distributing videos.
The reason was a Japanese friend I became close to when I was a child.
When I was in middle school, I lived in Australia, and at the school I attended I became friends with a Japanese student.
At that time, I could not speak Japanese, but as we played together I naturally learned it, and gradually I began to feel a sense of discomfort, thinking, “This is completely different from the image of Japanese people described in Korea.”
Many people who continue to live in South Korea have received an “indoctrination education” that teaches their country is always right.
Anti-Japan education begins when children are in elementary school.
Pure and innocent elementary school children are taught that “Dokdo (Takeshima) is Korean territory,” and when they become middle school students they are indoctrinated with the idea that “the comfort women were sex slaves.”
All of it is framed as stories of how Korea suffered terribly during the so-called “period of Japanese rule.”
Certainly, the anti-Japan education of elementary school influences people in many ways, openly and subtly.
However, when I was young, my grandmother, who had actually lived through the period of Japanese rule, told me many things about the reality of those days, so I never once thought that I hated Japan.
When I was in middle school, driven by curiosity about what information would appear if I searched in Japanese, I looked it up.
Then a large amount of information and materials appeared that could never be found in Korea.
For me as a middle school student, it was extremely vivid and shocking.
After graduating from middle school, I wanted to study Japanese more, so I entered a high school in Japan.
While I was in high school, partly because of my middle school experience, I began to research history more independently than ever before.
The more I researched, the more information I found that I had never heard before, such as how, during the period of Japanese rule, Japan developed infrastructure and established school systems on the Korean Peninsula.
Because such information kept overflowing, I began to feel that I wanted to share this truth with more people.
That is why I decided to make use of YouTube, where people such as KAZUYA were engaged in public discourse.
At first, I posted entertainment-type videos such as “product introductions” and “Korean language lessons not found in textbooks.”
I thought that extreme content such as “exposing the truth about Korea” would not be accepted from the beginning.
For the time being, I had decided not to touch on Japan-Korea issues.
However, the radar-lock incident went far beyond the limit.
Even though it was my own country, South Korea, there was no way to defend it.
Unable to endure it any longer, I made a video about Korean reactions to the radar-lock incident and posted it on December 30 of last year.
Honest young people.
For today’s Korean youth, the idea of “anti-Japan” is honestly something they “do not care about,” in a word.
Everyone loves Japanese subculture such as anime, and of course they are interested in Japanese food culture as well.
Many people go to places like Shibuya and Harajuku, and many also go to Osaka.
So I even feel that there are more pro-Japan people.
However, the voices of Korean youth do not draw attention, not only in Japan but even in Korea.
What gets covered are only the voices of certain left-wing forces in their forties to sixties.
And those voices are even reported in Japan as if they were the opinion of the entire Korean nation.
There is nothing more tragic than this.
In Korea, movements that occur almost always involve “money.”
Especially the current issue of wartime laborers.
In fact, it is said that the remains of about one thousand people claimed to be former laborers are buried in Munhyeon-dong in Busan, where there once was an underground torpedo base, and voices demanding excavation are growing, asking, “Why did Moon Jae-in hide this?”
Furthermore, in December last year, 1,100 former laborers sued the Korean government, claiming that based on the Japanese economic assistance under the Japan-Korea Claims Agreement of 1965, the Korean government should compensate them.
In Japan, it is often said that “the truth will finally be revealed,” and that may indeed be true.
However, since families and relatives are now demanding compensation on behalf of the individuals, they simply want compensation money.
I do not think there is even one person who truly wants to “reveal the truth.”
The comfort women issue is similar.
Certainly, there were women who became comfort women of their own will.
However, most were women who were deceived by their mothers and sold to Korean brokers.
Naturally, the women did not realize they had been sold because their mothers lied to them.
They happily followed along believing they could get a job somewhere, and at the end of that path there was a comfort station.
No matter how much they worked, the money went to their mothers, so they themselves received not a single coin.
In that case, since they did not know they had been deceived by their mothers or sold by their own people, they came to think that they had been forcibly turned into sex slaves by the Japanese military and demanded compensation.
In South Korea, more and more people in their twenties and thirties can be heard saying that if there is money to build comfort woman statues, then the comfort women should be compensated more.
Even regarding the radar-lock incident, many voices online say that it is simply too embarrassing.
At present, because the country is moving toward “red unification” with North Korea, it is not uncommon to hear rumors that President Moon Jae-in might be a spy for North Korea.
Such “cool” opinions toward the government also firmly exist in South Korea as the voices of young people.
While the Moon administration claims to pursue a “future-oriented” approach, it has no intention of stopping its favorite “anti-Japan pastime” of clinging to the past.
Young people are becoming disillusioned by these contradictions.
Online, there are even voices saying, “This country is finished,” and “We have never faced a crisis like this.”
Many people surely think, “If you have time for anti-Japan games, rebuild the Korean economy.”
To be continued.