As a reposting of a chapter originally published on December 5, 2018, this essay examines South Korea’s history education, the massacres and dictatorship of the Syngman Rhee era, anti-Japanese education after the Park Chung-hee administration, and the formation of “false memories” toward Japan.
It argues that South Korean history textbooks have portrayed Japan as absolute evil and instilled anti-Japanese sentiment in children, identifying this as the root problem in Japan-South Korea relations, and insists that Japan should demand the correction of South Korea’s history textbooks.

September 6, 2019.
The world has overlooked for 74 years after the war the fact that countries such as the Korean Peninsula and China, countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” have continued to carry out Nazism under the name of anti-Japanese education.
The following is a chapter I sent out on December 5, 2018.
Astonished and appalled by the words and actions of President Lee Myung-bak in his final days, I wondered what kind of country South Korea really was, and searched the Internet about South Korea and the Korean Peninsula…in one hour, I understood the reality of the Korean Peninsula.
As someone who had subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun and received postwar education, I learned for the first time the reality of South Korea, which I had not understood at all.
Even without searching about North Korea, anyone can understand that it is an unspeakably terrible country.
A little while ago, I discovered an article that is also the very essence of the Internet, the greatest library in human history.
What is happening in South Korea now should make sense only when one knows these facts.
In other words, unless one knows these facts, one cannot understand Koreans…and that is extremely dangerous for Japanese people.
Just as I personally encountered an evil that led me to a serious illness that nearly cost me my life, in fact Japan has been encountering this evil all along…has been continuously exposed to it.
Not only against Japan, but also using the United States and the United Nations as their main battlefields, they have continued to scatter their evil.
The truth revealed by this laborious work is the true nature of anti-Japanese propaganda.
As a matter of divine providence, toward Japan, a country where The Turntable of Civilization is turning and which, together with the United States, must lead the world, as a being like Judas in relation to Christ,
the world has overlooked for 74 years after the war the fact that countries such as the Korean Peninsula and China, countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” have continued to carry out Nazism under the name of anti-Japanese education.
The time has long since come to realize that God’s anger over this has kept the world unstable and made it a world where conflicts never cease.
The fact that I…with no choice…have appeared in this way, carrying The Turntable of Civilization, was, in fact, something very important for Japan and the world, to an extent that neither I nor, of course, the readers could have imagined.
The following is the article I found.
It was after reading South Korea’s history textbooks.
Japanese people were depicted as cold-blooded and merciless “devils.”
Modern Japan was made out to have done “nothing but slaughter and exploitation” against Korea.
◆Why Did South Korea Rewrite History? Considering Its Motives and Background, Part Two, Yamada Takaaki.
The Syngman Rhee era, which became the beginning of South Korea’s true misfortune.
Now, let us return to the main point.
With Japan’s defeat, the authority to govern Korea was transferred from the Government-General to the United States.
At first, various factions were in turmoil over the founding of the state, and the Soviet Union quickly set up a puppet.
Although the provisional government and the independence army themselves were not recognized, Syngman Rhee personally, who came from that government, had studied in the United States and had also engaged in lobbying there, and in the end he was elevated to the head of an anti-communist puppet regime.
However, the selfish demand that “Korea be added to the Allied Powers” was rejected.
That was because people who had neither fought nor shed blood were considered to have no right to push themselves forward.
Therefore, when Koreans call themselves “citizens of a victorious country” or “citizens of the Allied Powers,” it is simply contrary to fact.
Regarding the fact that this man seized dictatorial power as the first president, one cannot help feeling sympathy.
The period from Rhee’s return to Korea until his exile was a “dark age,” and it is abnormal that contemporary Koreans lack that memory.
In many senses, this Syngman Rhee was the root of all evil, and his era was precisely the same as the “Japanese Empire” depicted in South Korea’s history education.
The first evil act committed by Syngman Rhee was the “Jeju Island Incident,” in short, a massacre of communists and islanders suspected of being communists.
As a result, tens of thousands of citizens were killed, and tens of thousands of others fled to Japan and settled there.
The massacres continued afterward, and the island’s population sharply decreased.
On a smaller scale, similar massacres were also carried out in other regions.
When one speaks of Syngman Rhee’s war crimes against Japan, the invasion and seizure of the Japanese territory of Takeshima and the massacre of Japanese fishermen are famous, but in fact, before that, he tried to invade Tsushima.
For that purpose, he had gathered troops at the southern tip of South Korea, but then North Korea’s lightning invasion occurred.
Since he could even massacre his own people without hesitation, it is not difficult to imagine that the South Korean army would have carried out a massacre in Tsushima.
When the Korean War broke out, Syngman Rhee accelerated his paranoia toward internal enemies and executed in large numbers the people who had registered with the National Guidance League, an organization for re-educating communists and their families.
The exact number of people massacred by the military and police is unknown, but it is said to have exceeded one million.
Not only was it obscured by the war, it continued to be concealed under the subsequent military regimes.
At first, the South Korean army was driven into the southern part of the peninsula, but with the participation of the U.S. military, it counterattacked, and four months later reached the Yalu River on the border between China and North Korea.
However, although the war should have ended with the fall of North Korea, the entry of the Chinese army pushed it back again to the 38th parallel, and in the end the war continued for three years.
As a result, millions of soldiers and civilians were sacrificed, and most of the Korean Peninsula was devastated.
Incidentally, South Korea has not once demanded that China, which prolonged the war and increased the number of victims, face up to and settle the past.
Even afterward, Syngman Rhee continued to cling to the position of dictator until mid-1960.
Rhee purged not only communists but also anyone who opposed him as political criminals, and thoroughly suppressed demonstrations and opposition movements.
Koreans who knew the Japanese period at the time were indignant, saying, “Where on earth is the ‘liberation’?
Isn’t this a society far worse than under Japanese imperial rule?”
Syngman Rhee cracked down on this movement through a reign of terror involving control of thought and speech, a system of informing, secret police, and so on.
In this way, he monitored and suppressed pro-Japanese thoughts and words, made the generation that knew the Japanese period through experience keep silent out of fear, divided the generations, and implanted “false memories” in children using the media and public education.
During the Pacific War, Korea was not bombed, there was virtually no conscription (*a small number were conscripted but the war ended before they were sent to the front), and only requisitioning of goods and compulsory labor were imposed, treatment that was exceptional for a “colony.”
As a result, at the end of the war, the home islands had suffered massive war dead and were reduced to ashes, while Korea was almost unharmed.
In other words, after the war, the economic and social conditions of Japan and Korea had completely reversed.
However, by the time Syngman Rhee left, South Korea had fallen into the ranks of the poorest countries, and the positions of the two had reversed again.
In the end, Syngman Rhee contributed nothing whatsoever to the development of South Korean society and economy; he merely wielded dictatorial power, imposed oppressive rule, massacred large numbers of his own people, and impoverished them.
Incidentally, the South Korean government still conceals this shameful part, and conversely fabricates nonexistent massacres by the Japanese military and teaches children false history, so is it not something like a half-accomplice?
Why was the false national history inherited?
After Syngman Rhee’s exile, South Korea was in turmoil for a while, but the one who ultimately seized power was Park Chung-hee.
As is well known, he came from the former military officer class, normalized relations between the two countries by concluding the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, and obtained an enormous amount of funds from Japan.
Park fostered heavy industries such as steel and petrochemicals, expanded social infrastructure, and achieved the rapid economic growth called the “Miracle on the Han River.”
However, if they had Japanese funds amounting to more than twice the national budget and a neighbor who, with a sense of mission, taught them technology and know-how step by step, I do not think it would have been so difficult for diligent Koreans to create a “miracle.”
Thus South Korea was able to escape poverty not once but twice through Japan’s assistance and cooperation.
But President Park Chung-hee, too, did not correct the propaganda that made Japan absolute evil.
Because he thoroughly suppressed anti-government demonstrations and movements, he became an object of resentment among some citizens.
For a military dictatorship that inevitably creates internal friction, an object toward which people’s hatred and dissatisfaction can be diverted is indispensable.
North Korea or communists were not enough for that role.
To begin with, many of the anti-government people had sympathy with them.
What was needed was an “enemy of the people” unrelated to ideological classification.
Perhaps because of such political calculations, Park Chung-hee inherited the education that demonized Japan as it was.
Furthermore, since he made all the results of Japan’s economic assistance into his own achievements, unlike the image of him generally believed in Japan, it is hard to say he was a very fair person.
No, more than that, he apparently added something unnecessary to public education.
That was the cultivation of pride of the type “our people have been great since ancient times.”
In other words, he apparently strengthened a self-esteem view of history (*however, I should note that I do not have materials at hand on this point, and it is only hearsay).
However, reversing that also meant denigrating Japan as a “culturally backward country.”
This is because the superiority of one’s own people becomes visible through comparison with others, and the object of comparison could of course not be China, but ancient and medieval Japan.
South Korean children are taught things such as “our ancestors taught the Japanese such-and-such” and “in the past, we were more advanced than Japan.”
The advanced cultures said to have been transmitted by Korea include, in ancient times, rice cultivation, weaving, architecture, Buddhism, paper, and writing; during Hideyoshi’s invasion, ceramic production techniques; and in the Edo period, medicine, Confucianism, calligraphy, and painting through the Korean embassies to Japan.
In this way, through relativization against Japan, they come to have a sense of ethnic superiority, such as “until the Meiji Restoration, Korea was the more culturally advanced country” or “our ancestors were teachers who civilized the barbaric Japanese.”
Then Hideyoshi’s invasion and modern Japan’s invasion are taken up in a major way, so naturally they become indignant, saying that their kindness was repaid with evil.
Thus the foundation was completed for the “strange history education” that has continued to the present, nurturing both a sense of superiority over Japan and a victim consciousness.
Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, who later became presidents, were also from the same military academy line as Park, and they inherited anti-Japanese education.
The reason was probably much the same as above.
Military regimes inevitably need an object that will receive people’s hatred.
All the more so because Chun Doo-hwan was someone who suddenly carried out the suppression of citizens such as the Gwangju Incident.
He also wanted to perform a miracle like Park’s and tried to draw out a huge amount of economic aid from Japan.
As a means to that end, he began to pick a quarrel over the textbook issue—why would such a man correct anti-Japanese education?
In 1988, South Korea finally shifted to a democratic system.
In principle, freedom of thought and speech was also largely guaranteed.
However, through forty years of internal propaganda, the “false memories” had completely become established facts, and it was already too late.
Koreans had become completely spiritually integrated with the “founding father.”
Now the independence activists are the identity of the Korean people.
In other words, ordinary citizens believe that “we bravely fought and defeated the devil called the Japanese Empire,” and because they are the guardians of that myth, it has become difficult to overturn it.
The “Japan-Korea friendship” that did not exist from the beginning.
Now, it is not that I have never had personal relationships with Koreans.
My experience at that time was that “I could not think of them as strangers at all.”
Around me there are people who have done business with Koreans and been deceived, plagiarized, or had payments defaulted on, but fortunately I have never had an unpleasant experience even once.
Therefore, personally, I still think of the Koreans I know as if they were relatives.
Perhaps the reason Japanese people one hundred years ago devoted themselves to the modernization of Korean society with goodwill and a sense of mission that were somewhat beyond ordinary bounds was also this kind of feeling.
“I cannot think of them as strangers” or “it looked as if a long-lost brother was in miserable circumstances” may, unexpectedly, have been the truth.
However, in such personal relationships, I found it strange that even intelligent and gentle Koreans, when by some chance the topic turned to history, would change color.
It was as if people abused in childhood were suffering from flashbacks.
I learned the reason fifteen years ago, after reading translated South Korean history textbooks.
Japanese people were depicted as cold-blooded and merciless “devils.”
Modern Japan was made out to have done “nothing but slaughter and exploitation” against Korea.
The South Korean government’s lies and fabrications are that merciless.
I immediately sensed that it was dangerous.
Children, naturally, grow up believing that all of it is fact.
This is equivalent to “devilish Japan” propaganda, even beyond the “devilish Americans and British” propaganda that Japan spread during the war.
The Japan-Korea relationship depicted by South Korean history education is, so to speak, that of “100 percent perpetrator and 100 percent victim,” and “absolute evil and absolute justice.”
It has become a cheap story of rewarding good and punishing evil, exactly the sort of thing a fake hero would think up.
Because Syngman Rhee, as the first president, obtained dictatorial power, this fiction truly became a founding myth, and because that brainwashing has continued until today, even ordinary Koreans have become spiritually integrated with this fake.
South Korea is an abnormal country that, as a state, has continued for 65 years a brainwashing education that implants hatred and prejudice against a specific people.
Moreover, it calls a counterfeit contrary to fact “correct historical recognition” and is trying to force it even on Japanese people.
Since the entire country believes things that are scientifically and objectively not factual, this is already in the realm of “faith.”
In other words, on this earth, besides Christian countries, Islamic countries, and Buddhist countries, it is better to think that there exists a fourth kind of country, an “Anti-Japanese Truth Sect country.”
South Korea is a single cult organization.
Therefore, Japanese people who say with a straight face that South Korea is a friendly country or a partner sharing the same values must be either extremely ignorant, foolishly good-natured to the point of stupidity, or agents.
The fact is that it is the most unfriendly country, one with different values.
Those pro-Korean people, or perhaps subservient-to-Korea people, are now flustered by South Korea’s “sudden” anti-Japanese behavior, saying things like “Japan and South Korea should have been getting along until now” or “They are only clashing at the level of politicians and governments, and after a while we should be able to return to the original friendly relationship.”
This is exactly what is meant by “there is no medicine for stupidity.”
South Korea was originally such a country, and the fact that it has now begun picking quarrels with everything simply means that, due to changes in the situation, it no longer needs to hide its true nature.
In the first place, there is a great gap between the Japan-Korea friendship imagined by Japanese people and that imagined by Koreans.
Japanese people literally imagine an “equal friendship.”
However, among Koreans, the relationship of “100 percent perpetrator and 100 percent victim” is assumed, and therefore when they speak of “friendship” or “cooperation,” it contains the meaning that “Japanese people should properly understand their position as perpetrators.”
In other words, it means “serve the victims.”
Therefore, whether Japan and South Korea need to reconcile is a question on another level, but believing that it can be done is too naive.
Personal exchange and dialogue between Japanese and Koreans should certainly be promoted, but one must not expect too much from their effects.
That is exactly like leaving alone the mother body that keeps laying alien eggs one after another in the rear, while only defeating the individual creatures attacking on the front line.
For such efforts truly to be effective, the mother body, namely anti-Japanese brainwashing education of children, must first be defeated.
However, even if it is extremely mistaken, the education of that country is ultimately a domestic matter.
If reform is possible, only Koreans can do it.
I cannot say anything definite about that possibility.
However, after all, it is unscientific occultism that regards a counterfeit as “legitimate.”
If the light of truth is shone upon it, falsehood will gradually dissolve.
But in a certain sense, that is equivalent to the “collapse of the national polity” of the Republic of Korea.
Therefore, the government fears the truth of history, in practice controls freedom of thought and speech, and even silences people.
Viewed differently, that can also be understood as “desperate resistance.”
On the other hand, is the attitude Japan should take not clear?
First, it should demand that South Korea “rewrite its history textbooks in accordance with the facts.”
Now that things have come to this point, talk of domestic affairs or anything of the sort is meaningless.
South Korea has, until now, implanted hatred and prejudice against Japan in its children, while at the political level pretending to be a friend and partner.
It can be said that in this way, through a kind of double-personality diplomacy, it deceived Japan and used it skillfully.
Probably, in its heart, it was sticking out its tongue, thinking, “It is easy to fool the Japanese.”
But from now on, a deceptive attitude toward Japan will no longer work, in which on the surface South Korea says things like “Japan and South Korea should cooperate with each other” or “we do not really dislike Japan,” while behind the scenes, in public education, it propagates Japan as a devil.
We will no longer swallow that trick.
Koreans who do not face the truth of history have no future.
First, the root must be corrected.
The discussion begins after that.