Based on the preface to a work by Masayuki Takayama, this chapter discusses George Kennan’s recognition of Japan through the Korean War and the collapse of the postwar order surrounding the Korean Peninsula.
It sharply depicts the chaos the United States faced after Japan was driven out of Korea, the destruction of Manchukuo, the devastation of mainland China, and the historical significance of Japan regaining the freedom to sever its ties with Korea.

2019-04-23
“We had no choice but to recognize that the unfortunate situation into which we fell on the Korean Peninsula was an ironic punishment for the fact that we did not understand Japan at all and clung only to driving Japan out.”

The following is from the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is required reading not only for the people of Japan but for people all over the world.
Every Japanese citizen should head at once to the nearest bookstore to purchase it.

◎Introduction.

Even among Americans, there are occasionally people who can truly see things.
George Kennan was one of them.
When the United States became entangled in the Korean War and fell into a situation of being driven back by communist forces, he wrote as follows.
“The result of the United States driving Japan out of China, Manchuria, and the Korean Peninsula turned out exactly as wise men had warned.”
“Today, we have come to inherit the problems and responsibilities that Japan had borne in this region for almost half a century.”
The moment they inherited them, Koreans began killing one another.
The United States sent in five hundred thousand troops and, for three years, tried to suppress the conflict, but 2.2 million Koreans and 40,000 American soldiers died, and the order and prosperity that had undeniably existed under what they call ‘Japanese imperial rule’ were lost forever.
“We had no choice but to recognize that the unfortunate situation into which we fell on the Korean Peninsula was an ironic punishment for the fact that we did not understand Japan at all and clung only to driving Japan out.”
Kennan is saying that the U.S.-Japan War, brought about by white arrogance and racial prejudice, was a mistake.
And that the battle deaths and war wounds of more than forty thousand American soldiers in the Korean War were punishment for that mistake.

It was not only the Korean Peninsula.
Manchukuo, which had realized harmony among five races, was reduced to ruins through slaughter and plunder, and mainland China was devastated by the Communist Party’s two genocides, namely the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Japan lost many lives, but by doing so it swiftly delivered the death blow to white colonial imperialism and liberated Asia.
The wave of national self-determination reached as far as Africa, and more than one hundred independent states were born in the world.
Seen from the history of mankind, it was a great achievement incomparable to something like the Renaissance that occurred in a corner of Europe.

And there is one more thing.
There is also a modest happiness for Japan.
That it was able to sever its ties with Korea.
That country still clings in one way or another, but at least the entanglement of naisen ittai has now been dissolved.
Japan gained the freedom to stop associating with that country, and even the freedom to break diplomatic relations.
That country has the trait of making every nation that becomes involved with it unhappy.

Take, for example, the Battle of Baekgang.
It began when Baekje, attacked by Silla, came seeking help.
When Japan went out, it found waiting there not Silla but the forces of Tang.
Japan fought Tang and suffered a crushing defeat.
Koreans force even their own wars onto other countries.
The Korean War that Kennan lamented also began as a struggle between North and South.
The South, being beaten, clung to the United States, while the North relied on China.
By the time one realized it, it had become a U.S.-China war.
Having pushed the war onto other countries and become free, the South drew the Syngman Rhee Line, stole Takeshima, seized Japanese fishing boats, and killed as many as forty-four people.
Though sly, this country has no example of having won a war against another land.
It was always conquered.
But no country wanted to rule it.
Tang conquered it, yet could not maintain its protectorate and abandoned it and went home.
After the last war, the Soviet Union took the North, but unlike the Northern Territories, it quickly cast it aside.
Mao Zedong, who was left to take over, also withdrew early.
It looked as though he wanted to finish being entangled with it as soon as possible.

The exception was Japan.
Perhaps Theodore Roosevelt had seen through the nature of the Korean people, for he cut diplomatic relations and pushed it onto Japan, saying it was “a burden Japan should bear.”
Good-natured Japan tried to make that country decent, and through naisen ittai, that is, annexation, lit it with electricity, ran railways, and built schools.
It even built irrigation facilities, something they had been unable to do no matter how many times they had been taught since the Muromachi period, and probably gave them, for the first time in their history, thirty-six years of peace and prosperity.
Taking by the hand a people “dwelling in antiquity” (Professor Furuta Hiroshi of the University of Tsukuba), Japan led them into modernity.
However, the people of that country had as their characteristic a tendency to repay goodwill with malice, a kind of twisted resentment.
After the war, they claimed to be “a member of the Allied forces that fought Japan,” and demanded wartime reparations and apologies from Japan.
Even Sanzo Nosaka and Shigesaburo Suzuki, who were still reasonable then, became angry and rejected those demands.
After leaving them alone for ten years, Park Chung-hee revealed his true intent and said that they needed neither apology nor anything else, just money.
There was no reason to pay, but Japan gave them an amount equal to twice their national budget as though it were severance money.
But even after that, they kept clinging on and continuing their twisted resentment.
They say, for example, that Somei Yoshino, a cross between Oshima-zakura and Edo-higan, “originated on Jeju Island,” or that Japanese swords too were invented by Koreans.
Even now, the South Korean army uses forged Japanese swords as military swords.
At the prompting of the Asahi Shimbun, they also began saying that prostitutes were sex slaves, and delight in erecting statues of prostitutes on street corners.
There is no room for shame in a resentful heart.
Now even those who came to Japan before the war as migrant laborers claim lies worse than those of the prostitutes, saying that they were “forcibly taken and their wages went unpaid,” and with even the Supreme Court joining the cheering section, they are trying to extort money from Japanese companies.
Just writing various things about such a national character makes me feel as though my pen is being dirtied, and it leaves me with a raw and irritated feeling.
My Shukan Shincho series “Henken Jizai” has now thankfully exceeded eight hundred installments, but for such reasons I had long avoided writing about that country.
Even so, feeling that it was something that simply could not be avoided in order truly to understand that country, I found that I had written more than thirty columns on it.
If they can serve as material for thinking about how to deal with that country, or rather when to sever diplomatic relations with it, I would be most pleased, and it would mean that the pain with which I wrote them had some meaning.

February 2019
Masayuki Takayama