This essay discusses the class structure, the status of women, and the realities of yangban rule on the Korean Peninsula before Japanese rule, while criticizing the anti-Japan propaganda framework that spread the comfort women issue globally as one of “sexual slavery.”
Drawing also on the case of Yasuke, who served Oda Nobunaga, it emphasizes that Japanese society was a rare civilization that did not fundamentally conceive of treating others as slaves, and highlights the historical contrast between Japan and the Korean Peninsula.

2019-04-08
In this chapter, all Japanese people and people throughout the world must know the real truth.
Until Japan annexed Korea in the twentieth century, women on the Korean Peninsula had no names.
This is a chapter I posted on 2018-07-10 under the title, Are they not people who carry the DNA of the Korean Peninsula, which it would be no exaggeration to call an outrageous slave-system state?
“Until the twentieth century, when Japan went into Korea, women over there had no names.”
That opening passage appeared in my introduction to the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
As I have already written, when I witnessed the behavior of President Lee Myung-bak in his final stage in office, suddenly landing on Takeshima and demanding that His Majesty the Emperor come to Korea and apologize, I began to ask myself what kind of country South Korea really is, and what kind of people Koreans really are.
As I have already noted, by searching the internet, which I have repeatedly described as the greatest library in human history, I understood the history and reality of Korea, that is, the Korean Peninsula, in only one hour.
I take pride in thinking that I was the first to state clearly to the world that what defines the Korean Peninsula is the yangban class.
The moment I learned the actual nature of the yangban, I immediately realized that it was the prototype of the bizarre Japanese yakuza custom of protection money.
That is because almost all Japanese yakuza are Koreans resident in Japan.
It is a tradition that still survives uninterrupted not only among gangsters, but among politicians on the Korean Peninsula, and in essence also among the astonishing number of naturalized Korean opposition politicians in Japan’s opposition parties who resemble them.
They do not work themselves, but extort others and live by sponging off them.
A recent example makes this clear.
One need only look at Kim Jong-un’s entourage at the U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore.
They claimed not to have even an airplane that could safely take them to Singapore, nor money for accommodation, and yet they unashamedly stayed in the highest-class hotels.
They not only oppress their people, but continue nuclear development while pushing them to the brink of starvation.
If one merely voices dissatisfaction with the government in casual conversation, one is taken to a correctional camp, tortured, and finally killed.
A few years ago, when the United Nations adopted a report and recommendation on North Korea’s grave human rights abuses, I was astonished when I saw the torture instruments that were disclosed.
That is because they were exactly the same as the instruments of confinement and torture used by the yangban, whose reality I had learned within one hour, when the people could not provide the money or food they demanded.
Today, now, in this chapter, all Japanese people and people throughout the world must know the real truth.
Until Japan annexed Korea in the twentieth century, women on the Korean Peninsula had no names.
On the Korean Peninsula, the king and the yangban ruled, and all the rest of the people belonged to despised classes.
Even scholars were no exception.
Women were the private property, that is, the slaves, of the yangban.
That is why women had no names.
The yangban, so to speak, treated women as objects.
Not only were they made sexual playthings of their masters, but if the master’s wife became jealous, they were tortured, such as by having sticks thrust into their genitals, toyed with until they died, and thrown into the Han River, while the yangban suffered no punishment whatsoever.
Their corpses would be caught in branches along the riverbanks whenever the river flooded.
That was the daily reality of the Korean Peninsula until Japan annexed it.
In other words, the Korean Peninsula was a country in which the majority of the people were slaves.
And what about Japan?
Japan was, and it is no exaggeration to call it unique in the world, a people that possessed no slaves and detested the very concept of owning slaves.
This is obvious at a glance if one searches Wikipedia for Yasuke, but I will quote the opening.
Yasuke, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, was a black man who came to Japan during the Warring States period.
He had been owned as a slave by missionaries and was presented to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, but Nobunaga took a liking to him and retained him as one of his vassals.
Omitted in the middle.
On the twenty-third day of the second month of Tensho 9, that is March 27, 1581, Valignano brought him along as a slave when he had an audience with Nobunaga.
The Shinchō Kōki describes him as “a black monk who came from the Christian lands,” and portrays him as about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, possessed of the strength of ten men, and having a body black as an ox.
When Nobunaga became convinced that his skin truly was black, he showed great interest in this man, negotiated with Valignano to receive him, gave him the name Yasuke, elevated him formally to the status of a samurai, and kept him close by.
According to the Jesuit annual report from Japan, Nobunaga became fond of Yasuke and intended eventually to make him a lord of a castle.
Furthermore, according to Hiroshi Kaneko, a manuscript believed to be a copy of the autograph text preserved by the Kaga Ota family, descendants of Ota Gyuichi, author of the Shinchō Kōki, and now held by the Sonkeikaku Bunko, records that this black man Yasuke was given a residence and a short sword, and at times served as a bearer of tools.
To a degree almost incomprehensible outside Japan, it is no exaggeration to say that from ancient times Japan was a true democratic state.
The Japanese were a rare people who did not possess the sensibility of treating others as slaves.
A lawyer who had held an important post in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and had graduated from Rikkyo University went repeatedly to the United Nations and, concerning the comfort women issue, which the Asahi Shimbun had spread worldwide by riding on Seiji Yoshida’s lies, which lawyers such as Mizuho Fukushima had seized upon as ideal material for attacking the Japanese government and extorting money from it, and into which South Korean and North Korean spies then latched, declared, “They were not comfort women, they were sexual slaves.”
And in an interview in the Sekai Nippo, he boasted that it was he who had established the term “sexual slaves.”
Was that lawyer in fact not a person carrying the DNA of the Korean Peninsula, which until Japan annexed it was, without exaggeration, an outrageous slave-system state?
Because, needless to say, no genuine Japanese person would conceive of something like “sexual slavery.”
Even now in South Korea, this pattern of turning others into slaves remains.
Katsumi Murotani, one of the commentators who knows the true realities of South Korea best, has splendidly made this clear in his serialized column “The Shape of the Neighboring Country” in this month’s issue of HANADA.
His essay too is required reading for the Japanese people and for people all over the world.
When those who have been called intellectuals learn just how much evil lies behind the anti-Japan propaganda that the country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” continues to spread throughout the world, and how foolishly they accepted it as truth, they will come to understand their own folly so profoundly that, before even going to hell, they would wish the earth would open up and swallow them.
I will introduce that in the following chapters.