Originally published on April 30, 2019, this chapter is based on a work by Masayuki Takayama, a journalist the author regards as without equal in the postwar world, and examines the historical relationship between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, as well as the true nature of the “burden” Japan was made to bear.
It argues that despite Japan’s enormous national investment in providing family registration, education, and the foundations of civilization, Korean society remained marked by falsehood, division, and fragility in preserving civilizational achievement, and that Japan’s efforts ultimately went unrewarded.
The piece further explores Theodore Roosevelt’s geopolitical judgment, the historical meaning of Japan’s rule over Korea, and whether modern Japan should finally consider taking real distance, making this an intensely provocative and fundamental argument.

2019-04-30
The Japanese would probably try in earnest to teach and guide even “the Korean people, incompetent and barbaric, who quarrel and split apart whenever they gather.”
That would become, in the literal sense, a “burden.”
He judged that it would sufficiently exhaust Japan’s national strength.
That judgment proved correct.

What follows is from the latest work by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.

The national character of South Korea, whose president lies without the slightest hesitation.

Koreans say, “Japan made the peninsula a colony as a foothold for conquering the continent.”
But I swear this.
Japan had long found this peninsula troublesome and, if possible, had wished to sever ties with it.

Professor Hiroshi Furuta of the University of Tsukuba explains the reason succinctly.
“One hundred years ago, that place was still in antiquity.”
That country had from long ago clung to Japan incessantly.

The Muromachi period.
In what they call the age of Sejong, envoys came three times.
In truth, many times that number tried, but because they had no ships worth speaking of, most became debris in the Tsushima Current.

The first envoy who finally arrived wanted to know how to do plating, how to make paper, and how to build waterwheels for irrigation.
The Japanese kindly taught them.

After some time, they came again, having gone through much hardship.
Asked what they wished to learn this time, they scratched their heads and said they wanted once more to be taught how to make the waterwheels and the like that had been taught to them before.
It was a national character that forgot quickly.
So they were taught again.
That was repeated until the Edo period.

When people went there in the Meiji era, there were neither waterwheels nor wooden tubs.
What spread before them was “antiquity,” where people cooked in earthenware vessels.

A people who regressed rather than advanced.
The Japanese found that deeply unpleasant, but the peninsula where they lived resembled a dagger pressed against Japan’s flank.
Because of that geopolitical reality, Japan ended up having to wage war with China and Russia.

The Japanese resolved in their hearts that with such troublesome and dangerous people of antiquity, only a complete severing of ties remained.
But the one who obstructed that was Theodore Roosevelt.

After the Russo-Japanese War, he closed all American legations in Korea and withdrew all diplomats.
It was far more than the temporary recall of an ambassador.

The Korean side was astonished.
They asked him to change his mind, but Theodore said, “You have no capacity for self-government.
Have Japan look after you.”

He further said, “For Japan to do so is Japan’s clear mission, to bear not the white man’s burden but the yellow man’s burden.”
J. Bradley, Did Teddy Cause the Japan-U.S. War.
That is what he said.

“The white man’s burden” is a phrase from a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
White men were to go to the lands of barbaric and childish savages and enlighten them.
That, it was said, was the noble mission borne by the civilized race, the white man.

And how was that enlightenment to be carried out.
At around the same time as this presidential statement, U.S. Congressman George Foss gave a speech in Manila.

“We must, as a duty imposed by God, teach incompetent Filipinos the splendor of freedom and independence.
We must carry out here once more the work of enlightenment that the great founding fathers carried out upon the natives in New England.”
Soki Watanabe, The Seeds of the U.S.-Japan Clash.

The founding father in New England refers to John Winthrop, who spoke of the famous “city upon a hill.”
What he did there was to kill the Indians, seize the hill, and fill the foot of the hill with their corpses.

In Manila as well, Americans in the same way killed Filipinos in great numbers when they resisted colonization.
White men’s “enlightenment” meant killing those who were in the way.

But Theodore did not believe that the Japanese would carry out enlightenment in the white way.
The Japanese would probably try in earnest to teach and guide even “the Korean people, incompetent and barbaric, who quarrel and split apart whenever they gather.”
That would become, in the literal sense, a “burden.”
He judged that it would sufficiently exhaust Japan’s national strength.
That judgment proved correct.

Japan poured in twenty percent of its national budget and gave them family registration, education, and civilization.
It even dug up and taught them Eonmun, which Sejong had created in imitation of kana.
It admonished them that kenchanayo, sloppiness, and lying were bad things and that they must stop.

But once Japanese imperial rule ended, they immediately quarreled and split apart just as Theodore had said.
Kenchanayo also quickly revived, the bridges they built over the Han River collapsed together with people and cars, and the department stores they built crumbled together with many customers inside.

Only the other day, a man called Yi Chil-ryong, supposedly a leading authority in the Korean craft world, began saying, “During the period of Japanese imperial rule, Korean craftsmen taught raden to the Japanese.”
But raden was something shown to them when they came to learn plating techniques, was it not.
It was useless even to have taught them that lying was wrong.

Japan should take the temporary recall of its ambassador as the occasion to consider, this time, the severance of ties it was unable to accomplish before.

(Issue dated February 2, 2017)