Drawing on Professor Hiroshi Furuta’s essay, this piece examines the essential truth that history contains neither “progress” nor “inevitability,” while sharply exposing the deception embedded in the historical visions of Hegel and Marx.
It also reveals how Asahi Shimbun, by excluding genuine scholars and serious arguments, helped instill a deeply distorted understanding in the minds of the Japanese people.

2019-04-06
Because the other side was a nation of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” it is an unmistakable fact that Japan and the Japanese people have suffered enormous losses even down to the present day.

This is a chapter I posted on 2018-09-04 under the title: “It was only after August four years ago that I first came to know of the existence of this truly extraordinary scholar and one of the world’s foremost experts on Korea.”
The following is from an article titled “There Is Neither ‘Progress’ Nor ‘Inevitability’ in History,” written by Hiroshi Furuta, professor at the Graduate School of the University of Tsukuba, published on page 13 of this morning’s Sankei Shimbun.
It is an essay that not only the Japanese people but people all over the world ought to read.
It was only after August four years ago that I first came to know of the existence of this truly extraordinary scholar and one of the world’s foremost experts on Korea.
Until then, because I had long subscribed to and carefully read Asahi Shimbun, I knew absolutely nothing about him.
This shows how far the biased reporting of Asahi Shimbun had gone, deliberately excluding a scholar of such extraordinary gifts and erudition.
Without telling its readers anything at all about genuine scholars and journalists such as him and Masayuki Takayama….
Asahi, like a stick of Kintarō-ame….
Kept publishing only the arguments of scholars and so-called men of culture who spoke, in the language of pseudo-moralism and political correctness, of a masochistic view of history and the anti-Japanese ideology arising from it, an ideology that looks down on Japan from above and despises it….
And subscribers were made to keep reading it.
As one result of that….
All readers of Asahi Shimbun….
Were, for example, made to internalize, even at the unconscious level….
The utterly nonsensical notion, with no basis whatsoever….
That one must not speak ill of South Korea.
Because the other side was a nation of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” it is an unmistakable fact that Japan and the Japanese people have suffered enormous losses even down to the present day.
It is also an unmistakable fact that Asahi Shimbun, even now, has never carried out a correction to the world acknowledging that its reports were false.
All emphases in the text other than the headline are mine.

In the 1970s, the French began making a fuss that the “grand narrative” had ended, that modernity had come to an end.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the British coolly said that modernity had ended.
In the 1990s, the Germans insisted confidently that what had ended was only a small modernity, and that true modernity was only now beginning, that they would do it once again under the name of “reflexive modernization,” but in time that too faded into vagueness.
Americans are exceptional: because they have neither antiquity nor the Middle Ages, they have no interest in the periodization called modernity.
For them, it is always the present age.

Deceived by German Philosophy

As for the Japanese, because of the long-standing educational system shaped by German philosophy, they were deeply soaked in “modernity.”
They believed that “history progresses.”
But if one thinks calmly, such a thing cannot be true.
Did not the Inca, which appeared as an ancient empire in the 15th century, get destroyed in the 16th century by Pizarro, who came from medieval Spain?
Antiquity and the Middle Ages coexisted at the same time, and one side ended as antiquity.
Someone who thought, “What? I’ve been deceived,” then began to say that “history is jagged.”
Yes, they had been deceived, by Hegel and Marx.
The philosopher Wataru Hiromatsu said, “Hegel himself seems to have thought that history unfolded as the age of God the Father, the age of God the Son, and then the age of God the Holy Spirit, and in his own thinking, perhaps he saw himself as a prophet of the age of the Holy Spirit.”
From Hiroyuki Itsuki and Wataru Hiromatsu, Can Philosophy Do Anything?
In Marx’s case, it was even more ingenious: history advances step by step, and in the end socialism and communism will arrive, so revolutionaries should take heart and press on.
As a result, revolutions occurred in several countries, socialist systems were established, and many people were made unhappy by despotic rule and status hierarchy.
To begin with, are not despotic rule and status hierarchy characteristics of antiquity?
And then came the “collectivization of agriculture,” in which the state directly exploited the peasants, and that made matters disastrous.
Was this not precisely a return to an ancient economy?
To be continued.