Written on 2019-05-28.
This passage argues that postwar Japan was profoundly distorted by defeat profiteers, including the rise of Zainichi Koreans, the spread of black markets, illegal occupation of land, unequal tax enforcement, and the weakness of the Japanese state.
It is a sharp indictment of the warped postwar order and its long-lasting consequences.

2019-05-28

One reason such things were possible was that, at the time, Japan had no legal punishment for people who stole real estate.
That was because, ordinarily, stealing real estate was something unheard of.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.

Zainichi Koreans Who Called Themselves a Victorious People

Thus, those who continue to make Japan’s politics difficult even now are the profiteers of defeat.
Another group among those profiteers of defeat was the rise of Zainichi Koreans.
Among ordinary Koreans who came to Japan before the war, there was not a single wealthy person.
Yet after the war, every one of them became rich.
Some later fell into poverty, but such people lie and say they were forcibly brought to Japan.
They settled in the burnt-out ruins after the war, claimed that the land was theirs, and became rich.
That is why pachinko parlors and yakiniku restaurants stand in convenient locations near stations.
There is no way those lands originally belonged to them.
In many cases, they simply squatted on places that had burned down in the war, where the owners had died or gone missing.
One reason such things were possible was that, at the time, Japan had no legal punishment for people who stole real estate.
That was because, ordinarily, stealing real estate was something unheard of.
In the burnt wasteland that Japan had become, the first things to appear near stations were black markets, and in those places, the groups the police could not control had an overwhelming advantage.
These were the so-called “third-country nationals.”
The term “third-country nationals” was not a slur.
It simply referred to people from countries that were not direct belligerents against Japan.
In Kobe, there was even a time when the police themselves were occupied by third-country nationals.
And because it was the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza group that helped save the situation, it was said that for a long time the police could not stand up to the Yamaguchi-gumi.
After the war, Zainichi Koreans pushed through their claims as though they were justice itself.
Moreover, they called themselves citizens of a victorious nation.
In particular, tax authorities never entered pro-North Korean organizations for a very long time.
Only after the Bush administration in the United States designated North Korea as a terrorist state, and the Koizumi administration responded by imposing economic sanctions linked to the abduction issue, were tax inspections finally conducted on them just as they were on ordinary Japanese people.
The difference in profits between those who were not properly taxed for sixty years after the war and those who were strictly taxed was enormous.
You can see this, for example, by walking through Akasaka, where one traditional high-class Japanese restaurant after another collapsed, and Korean-owned establishments appeared in their place.
One gets the impression that after Japanese high-class restaurants were crushed by properly imposed inheritance taxes, those whom even the tax office could not touch moved in.
A philosopher named Kida Gen had been evacuated to my hometown.
He was a student at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy when Japan was defeated, and he saw the atomic bomb with his own eyes from offshore Kure.
And until his father returned from military service, he worked as a carrier of black-market goods in order to feed his mother and sisters.
Speaking of those experiences, he said the following.
Immediately after the defeat, trains were unbelievably crowded.
And yet the cars occupied by Koreans were empty, because they would not allow Japanese people to enter.
When Mr. Kida tried to get into one of those cars, he was beaten.
Even so, he said he fought his way in.
Japan had no power to deal with such a situation.
We must never forget that vicious Koreans were allowed to run rampant as they pleased.
What angers me most is that Koreans called themselves a victorious people.
Japan had not fought a war against Korea, and yet they began saying such things.
More than that, among them were even people who had volunteered to join the Japanese military’s tokko units, and when the Japanese military was doing well, there were so many volunteers that the competition rate rose to dozens of times over.