Published on August 22, 2019. This article introduces a column by Masayuki Takayama published in Shukan Shincho, discussing Lee Young-hoon and others’ Anti-Japanese Tribalism, the comfort women issue, the wartime laborer issue, South Korea’s historical perception, and the lack of understanding of Japan seen in the Japan Times and the New York Times, while criticizing articles by Shaun O’Dwyer and Ian Buruma.

August 22, 2019.
In prewar Korea, prostitution was a major industry, and there was no need to abduct anyone.
They were simply prostitutes, and at a time when soldiers received a monthly salary of ten yen, they earned one thousand yen a month.
The following is from the famous column by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, published in Shukan Shincho, which went on sale yesterday.
Those who have taken seriously articles about Japan written by second-rate or worse foreigners writing in the Japan Times, and those who have subscribed to the New York Times thinking that articles about Japan written by people with anti-Japanese ideas such as Ian Buruma were true, must be ashamed of their ignorance.
At the very least, I feel intense contempt for such people, and I feel unforgivable anger.
To those of you who continue your evil deeds thinking that you will not be condemned in this life, I, in place of King Enma of hell, will tell you only this: you are people who can go nowhere but hell, and King Enma is waiting with the greatest torments prepared for you.
You may think that, as befitting a mass of pseudo-moralists, you can go to heaven, but the place you can go is hell; and I feel regret that the only way I can relieve my anger is by knowing that you, who continue to commit the worst crimes in human history, will suffer the greatest torments in hell.
However, you should at least know that one stroke of the pen by me and Masayuki Takayama is making your evil known to the ends of the world.
Unforgivable lies.
The so-called military comfort women story, in which Korean women were abducted and made into sex slaves, was created in Japan and imported into South Korea.
In prewar Korea, prostitution was a major industry, and there was no need to abduct anyone.
They were simply prostitutes, and at a time when soldiers received a monthly salary of ten yen, they earned one thousand yen a month.
There is no fact that Koreans suffered from wage discrimination.
Wartime laborers, too, were properly paid wages without discrimination.
The thirty-six years of Japanese imperial rule are depicted as a nightmare, but that is a mistaken perception.
North Korea is the same as it was in the era of the Yi dynasty, a state serfdom with no human rights, and if the North and South are to be unified, first the leader system in the North must be dismantled.
The above is a translated excerpt of an essay that is very clear and, to use the Asahi Shimbun’s style of expression, faces reality and looks it squarely in the eye, but it was not Watanabe Shoichi who issued it.
It was a full-fledged Korean, Lee Young-hoon, professor emeritus of economics at Seoul National University, aged sixty-eight.
The essay quoted above is from Anti-Japanese Tribalism, written by Lee and five other scholars, and it is said to be currently a bestseller in Seoul.
It is 180 degrees different from Moon Jae-in’s view of Japan.
Eventually, they will probably be branded pro-Japanese, banned, and arrested.
I had thought that all Koreans were either Moon Jae-in or Wakamiya Yoshibumi, so I am greatly surprised that there were as many as six decent people.
Turning back, how do the Japan experts in America, to whom Japan has constantly “sought understanding,” evaluate Japan’s removal of South Korea from the white list and South Korea’s response of lighting candles and driving five-inch nails into it?
The other day in the Japan Times, Shaun O’Dwyer, said to be an associate professor at Meiji University, wrote in a column discussing immigration issues that “Korean immigrants had a major influence on the development of the Yamato court,” that “Korean blood entered the imperial family,” and finally that “Koreans also brought the techniques of refined temple architecture such as Horyu-ji.”
Does he mean to say that the central pillar, which does not exist in Korea, and its refinement were also their invention?
Shaun does not know that Japanese people once ruled Baekje.
It is true that a descendant of someone with Baekje blood became a concubine of the Emperor, but he also does not know that there is a theory that it was a Japanese family that went back and forth there, like Susanoo-no-Mikoto.
This man also has the face of being a hanger-on of Ric O’Barry, who criticizes Taiji’s dolphin fishing as barbaric.
He sees Japan only as an object of criticism.
This piece, too, looks as if it deliberately elevates Korea in order to insult Japan.
In the New York Times, a column on the Japan-Korea issue by Ian Buruma appeared.
This too is astonishing.
Right at the beginning, he introduces the issue by saying, “Japan and South Korea have almost the same language and culture. Normally, there would be nothing strange about their being close friends.”
But currently, he says, they are in a serious state of conflict because “over the issue of compensation for wartime laborers whom Japan forced to work during the last war, the South Korean Supreme Court seized the assets of Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel,” while Japan responds coldly that it “gave them 500 million dollars before, and the matter is over.”
He then continues, “This conflict has a prelude: Japan has not apologized despite thirty-six years of brutal colonial rule, and conservative governments have long denied the fact that, during the war, Korean women were systematically taken away and made sex slaves of the Imperial Army, which has further complicated the situation.”
The author Buruma is a Dutch-American and was the editor in charge of the paper’s book review section.
For that, his ignorance is excessive.
“Brutal colonial rule” first appeared at the Cairo Conference, and it was a phrase used to slander Japan.
He also does not know that there is a world of difference between that and the colonial rule carried out by his homeland in Indonesia, which did not shrink from murder.
He also has no knowledge of the friction between Japan and South Korea.
He mostly gets by with quotations from the Asahi.
And with that, he looks down on Japan.
It is a low-level article written with the hidden motive that his homeland lost its colony in the last war.
In American journalism, there is actually no soil from which arguments speaking sound opinion like Lee Young-hoon’s can emerge.
That is because, as a matter of white pride, they do not want to admit that Japanese people are more decent than they are.
It may be useless to enlighten the American media at this late date, but I would like at least one lie corrected immediately: the lie that Japan and South Korea have the same language and culture.