This essay examines why the false national history centered on anti-Japan ideology continued to be passed down in South Korea without correction, from the period after Syngman Rhee’s exile through the eras of Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, Roh Tae-woo, and even after democratization.
The author emphasizes that although South Korea escaped poverty twice through Japan’s massive financial assistance and technical cooperation, the Park Chung-hee government never revised the propaganda that portrayed Japan as absolute evil.
According to the essay, the reason was that military dictatorships needed an external “enemy of the people” to divert domestic resentment and hatred away from themselves.
It further argues that an inflated historical view of ethnic superiority — the idea that “our people have always been great” — was added to this framework, producing a peculiar history education that nurtured both a sense of superiority over Japan and a strong victim consciousness.
Even after democratization, forty years of internal propaganda had already turned these false memories into accepted fact, and ordinary citizens themselves had become guardians of the founding myth.
For that reason, the essay concludes, overturning this fabricated historical consciousness has become extraordinarily difficult.

2019-03-18
In other words, ordinary citizens have come to believe that “we fought bravely against the demonic Japanese Empire and won,” and because they have become the guardians of that myth, it is no longer easy to overturn.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Why was this false national history handed down?
After Syngman Rhee went into exile, South Korea was thrown for a time into confusion, but the man who ultimately seized power was Park Chung-hee.
As is well known, he came from the ranks of the former military officer corps, normalized relations between Japan and South Korea through the conclusion of the Treaty on Basic Relations, and obtained enormous funds from Japan.
Park fostered heavy industries such as steel and petrochemicals and expanded social infrastructure, thereby achieving the period of rapid economic growth known as the “Miracle on the Han River.”
Of course, when one has Japanese funds amounting to more than twice the size of one’s national budget, together with a neighboring country that, out of a sense of mission, teaches technology and know-how with the utmost care, …
Thus South Korea was able, not once but twice, to escape from poverty through Japan’s aid and cooperation.
Yet President Park Chung-hee also never corrected the propaganda that cast Japan as absolute evil.
Because he thoroughly suppressed anti-government demonstrations and movements, he became an object of bitterness and resentment for some citizens.
For a military dictatorship, which inevitably produces internal friction, it is indispensable to have some target toward which to divert the people’s hatred and dissatisfaction.
North Korea or communists alone were not sufficient for that role.
After all, many anti-government people were sympathetic to them.
What was needed was an “enemy of the people” unrelated to ideological divisions.
Perhaps from such political calculations, Park Chung-hee simply inherited the education that demonized Japan.
Moreover, since he appropriated all the fruits of Japan’s economic assistance as his own achievements, it is difficult to say that he was a particularly fair figure, whatever image of him may commonly be believed in Japan.
In fact, it seems he even added something extra to public education.
That was the cultivation of a pride along the lines of “our people have always been great.”
In other words, he appears to have strengthened an inflated view of national history.
(*However, I should note that on this point I do not have source materials at hand, and this is only based on hearsay.)
But viewed from the other side, this also meant degrading Japan as a “culturally backward nation.”
For the superiority of one’s own people becomes visible only through comparison with another, and naturally that comparison could not be with China, but with ancient and medieval Japan.
South Korean children are taught that “our ancestors taught the Japanese such-and-such,” or that “in the past we were more advanced than Japan.”
Among the advanced cultural elements said to have been conveyed by Korea are rice cultivation, weaving, architecture, Buddhism, paper, and writing in ancient times, pottery-making techniques at the time of Hideyoshi’s invasions, and medicine, Confucian learning, and calligraphy and painting through the Korean embassies in the Edo period.
Thus, through this comparison with Japan, they come to hold an ethnic sense of superiority, imagining that “until the Meiji Restoration, Korea was the more advanced civilization,” or that “our ancestors were the teachers who civilized the barbaric Japanese.”
And then, because Hideyoshi’s invasions and modern Japan’s invasions are emphasized on top of that, they naturally grow indignant that “our kindness was repaid with enmity.”
In this way, the foundations were completed for the strange kind of historical education that nurtures both a sense of superiority over Japan and a sense of victimhood toward Japan down to the present day.
The presidents who came afterward, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, were also from the same military lineage as Park, and they too carried on the anti-Japan education.
The reason was probably much the same as above.
Military regimes inevitably require some object that will absorb the people’s hatred.
And Chun Doo-hwan, moreover, was a man who from the very beginning carried out the suppression of civilians in an incident like Gwangju.
He also wanted to perform a miracle like Park’s and sought to extract enormous economic assistance from Japan.
If he chose as a means to that end to pick a quarrel over textbook issues, why would such a man ever revise anti-Japan education?
In 1988, South Korea finally moved into a democratic system.
At least in form, freedom of thought and speech was now largely guaranteed.
But through forty years of domestic propaganda, “false memories” had by then become completely established as accepted fact, and it was already too late.
South Koreans had become thoroughly and psychologically fused with the “father of the nation.”
Now the independence activists themselves had become the identity of the Korean people.
In other words, ordinary citizens have come to believe that “we fought bravely against the demonic Japanese Empire and won,” and because they have become the guardians of that myth, it is no longer easy to overturn.
To be continued.