This article is a call for a fundamental reexamination of modern historical perception, focusing on the period of Japan-Korea annexation, Japanese rule in Taiwan, postwar American occupation policy, and the discourse of Japan’s left-wing cultural elites and Korea specialists.
The quoted text discusses evaluations of Japanese rule in Taiwan and Korea, anti-Japan movements after Syngman Rhee, the historical narrative shaped under the GHQ occupation, and the response of Japan’s postwar intellectual class, while arguing that the time has come to return to the original sources.
It is an essay that raises questions concerning Taiwan under Japanese rule, Japan-Korea annexation, occupation policy, postwar left-wing thought, and historical memory.

2019-03-13
It was the result of America’s occupation policy and the culpable ignorance of Japan’s left-wing cultural elites.
Now is the time to return to the origin.
Ad fontes.

What follows is the continuation of the previous chapter.

“We should learn from Japan.”

During the period of Japan-Korea annexation, Korean riots and uprisings disappeared completely after the Manchurian Incident.
That was because Koreans had become equal to the Manchus of the Qing, who had formerly been the ruling people over Korea.
Not only the Manchus, but Han Chinese as well had long looked down on the Korean people, and Koreans had been subjected to constant humiliation.
But through Japan-Korea annexation, they were able to say, “We are Japanese.”
The movement for adopting Japanese-style names arose, and once they had Japanese names, they were able to stand proudly against the Manchus and Chinese who had kept them down for thousands of years.
After that, Korean rebellions disappeared altogether.
The idea of “common ancestry between Japan and Korea” became popular, and Korean middle schools even came to visit Ise Jingū on school excursions.
During the war, there were many volunteers, and there were also many Korean special attack pilots.

I believe the Meiji government had a strong resolve that it would not engage in colonization.
Taiwan was annexed by Japan in Meiji 28, or 1895, after the Sino-Japanese War, and about ten years later The London Times wrote, in substance, the following.

“In only ten years, the population of Taiwan increased by several hundred thousand.
Britain, France, and the Netherlands also could have made Taiwan into a colony if they had wished, but they deliberately did not do so because the land was full of miasma, endemic disease, and contagious illness.
Moreover, aside from the aborigines in the mountains, most of the inhabitants were bandits who had fled from China.
Li Hongzhang, the plenipotentiary ambassador to the Treaty of Shimonoseki that decided the cession of Taiwan, was inwardly gloating, thinking, ‘We have saddled Japan with a terrible burden.
Just watch.
They will suffer for it soon enough.’
Yet Japan made extraordinary efforts, overcame the endemic diseases, and dramatically increased the population.
The Western colonial empires should learn from Japan’s success.”

The Japanese rule praised by The London Times was carried out in the same way in Korea as well.

The annexation of Taiwan lasted fifty years, and Japan-Korea annexation lasted thirty-five years.
If there had been no anti-Japan movement by Syngman Rhee, who returned to Korea after the war and became its first president, and if the peninsula had not remained divided between north and south, and if for another fifteen years, as in Taiwan, union with Japan had continued for a full fifty years, then perhaps Japan might have been able to relate to Korea with feelings closer to those it has toward Taiwan.
This is no more than imagination, but that is how it seems to me.

Moreover, at that time America, in utter ignorance, indoctrinated the Japanese by saying, “Japan colonized Korea.”
Almost all of Japan’s Korea specialists were leftists, and they gladly went along with America’s falsehood.
The sound scholars and politicians who should have corrected that were purged from public office.

It is pitiable that Koreans came to think, “Our country was a colony of Japan.”
That was the result of America’s occupation policy and the culpable ignorance of Japan’s left-wing cultural elites.
Now is the time to return to the origin.
Ad fontes.