Published on August 28, 2019.
This article introduces an essay by Nishioka Tsutomu published in the monthly magazine Hanada, discussing the “theory of illegal rule” promoted by Haruki Wada and others and its influence on South Korea’s Supreme Court ruling on wartime laborers.
It strongly questions the comfort women reporting fabricated by the Asahi Shimbun, criticism of Japan in the international community, the reality of “conscientious Japanese” praised in South Korea, and their responsibility for worsening Japan-South Korea relations.

August 28, 2019.
As expected, Prime Minister Kan did repeat apologies, but he did not explicitly include in the statement the “theory of illegal rule,” which would overturn the very foundation of Japan-South Korea relations.
However, the activities of Mr. Wada and others were widely reported in South Korea.
The following is from an essay by Nishioka Tsutomu published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Hanada, in the all-out special feature titled “The Disease Called South Korea: Anti-Japanese Japanese Who Still Side with South Korea Even at This Stage.”
He is the scholar who perfectly examined and pointed out that the Asahi Shimbun’s reports on the so-called comfort women, which the newspaper fabricated and spread throughout the world, were false.
In other words, he is a truly great Japanese who has made the greatest contribution to Japan and the Japanese people.
He is worthy not only of the People’s Honor Award but also of the Nobel Prize.
People such as Alexis Dudden, who took advantage of the Asahi Shimbun’s fabrication and have demeaned Japan in the United States, the United Nations, and the rest of the international community.
They are agents of the Nazism states of China and the Korean Peninsula, which still exist in the twenty-first century, and yet they hold titles such as university professor or legislator; they are the most vicious people in this world.
The evil acts by which the Nazism states of China and the Korean Peninsula, together with their agents, have operated behind the scenes and kept Japan, the country where the Turntable of Civilization turns as the providence of God, in the position of a political prisoner in the international community, have created today’s unstable and extremely dangerous world.
The passages between ＊ and ＊ are mine.
The true nature of “conscientious Japanese.”
Haruki Wada and others, who bear great responsibility for the worsening of Japan-South Korea relations, are once again doing strange things that worsen the situation.
On July 25, Mr. Wada and others, together with more than seventy sympathizers, issued a statement condemning the current Abe administration’s policy toward South Korea.
In my latest book, The Fabricated Wartime Labor Issue from Soshisha, I devoted one chapter to criticizing the fact that the activities carried out since the 1980s by “anti-Japanese Japanese” such as Mr. Wada lie behind the unjust ruling by the South Korean Supreme Court last October.
To summarize that criticism,
● Mr. Wada stood on the “theory of illegal rule,” which denies the legal validity of the 1910 Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty, and since the 1980s he has continued a movement to make his group’s biased view the official view of the Japanese government.
＊Toru Hashimoto, appearing either on a special election-night program for the House of Councillors election or later on a BS-TBS program, spoke in an arrogant, self-important manner, as if he knew the truth because he was a lawyer, though he is no more than a lawyer, and made remarks that seemed to sympathize with these contemptible people.
In this respect, Toru Hashimoto was truly unforgivable, equivalent to a national traitor, and a human being lower than toilet paper.＊
● In 2010, aiming to have then Prime Minister Naoto Kan issue a prime ministerial statement that incorporated that idea, they issued what was called the Japan-Korea Joint Statement by Intellectuals.
As expected, Prime Minister Kan did repeat apologies, but he did not explicitly include in the statement the “theory of illegal rule,” which would overturn the very foundation of Japan-South Korea relations.
However, the activities of Mr. Wada and others were widely reported in South Korea.
● Two years later, in 2012, a small bench of the South Korean Supreme Court, in a lawsuit brought by former wartime laborers and others, adopted for the first time as the basis of its argument the “theory of illegal rule” proposed by Mr. Wada and others, and handed down a remand ruling overturning the lower-court judgment that had ruled in favor of the Japanese company.
● The final Supreme Court ruling last October used the same line of argument.
Here again, my long-held view is proved: since the 1980s, Japanese people have been the ones who ignited the historical-recognition issues.
That same Mr. Wada has now issued another statement condemning the Japanese government.
Although it was almost entirely ignored by the Japanese mass media, in South Korea it is still being praised as the activity of “conscientious Japanese.”
As a result, it obstructs a correct understanding in South Korea of why the great majority of Japanese people support the current Abe administration’s policy toward South Korea.
Mr. Wada received the Manhae Peace Prize this August, for reasons including his spreading of the “theory of illegal rule.”
At the award ceremony held in South Korea on August 12, Mr. Wada said, “For sixty-six years, I have appealed for the Japanese government and people to live with hearts that reflect on and apologize for colonial rule and the past.
I want to walk the same path until my final moment.”
This prize, said to be one of the most prestigious in South Korea, is awarded every year in memory of Han Yong-un, whose pen name was Manhae, a Buddhist monk, poet, and independence activist, to “a person who has contributed to world peace”; past recipients include the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Kim Dae-jung.
On the other hand, on July 28, Dr. Lee Woo-youn, a rising South Korean economic historian who empirically criticizes the conventional theories of forced mobilization and slave labor in the wartime laborer issue, criticized Mr. Wada and others on social media, saying, “Such movements by some people in Japan do not help Korea-Japan relations.
They encourage the South Korean government, which is heading in the wrong direction, and are therefore harmful.
Japan’s ‘conscientious intellectuals’ also bear great responsibility for the current grave situation.
In relation to wartime laborers, they stood by and assisted historical distortion, and in severe cases even participated in it.
The same is true of the comfort women issue.
Why did they do this?
It was ‘sympathism.’
Now they are once again trying to gloss over the facts.”
To begin with, for Mr. Wada, who bears responsibility for worsening Japan-South Korea relations to this extent, to question the Abe administration’s responsibility is precisely an unforgivable “match-pump” argument.
His guilt is great.
This article continues.