Published on September 17, 2019.
This essay introduces the prologue of Furuta Hiroshi’s book A Unified Korea Would Be a Disaster for Japan, discussing the abstract rhetoric of postwar intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao, the realities of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and South Korea, and the importance of depicting the Korean Peninsula realistically.

September 17, 2019.
When I was a young university student, the great scholar Maruyama Masao was still alive and kept crying in print that “Japanese nationalism had lost its virginity.”
The following is a chapter published on September 16, 2018.
The following is from the prologue of A Unified Korea Would Be a Disaster for Japan, a true book written by Furuta Hiroshi, one of the finest intellects living in the twenty-first century, with all the power of his own scholarship, for Japan and the world, for the world and for people.
Introduction.
When I was a young university student, the great scholar Maruyama Masao was still alive and kept crying in print that “Japanese nationalism had lost its virginity.”
Having gone through defeat in war, perhaps he feared, or perhaps he hated, the possibility that that ghost would rise again.
In any case, he could not help but denigrate it.
I understand the feeling, but from these words I could not conjure up any visual image at all.
In fact, most scholars at that time were like that.
I read The Theory of the Roman Empire by Yuge Tōru, the leading authority on Roman Empire studies.
“What is ‘slave-based large-estate management’?”
“What is a ‘tenant-like slave’?” I muttered, and wanted to shout, “You don’t understand slaves at all!”
Explain it properly so that I can form a visual image.
As for the meaning of “abstract,” Shin Meikai Japanese Dictionary, 1995, Sanseidō, defines it as “extracting from individual separate things the elements common to all things in that range, and assembling them in one’s mind as ‘roughly speaking, things called … are such things.’”
This is truly realistic and correct.
One abstracts because one cannot help doing so.
However, the pompous scholars of old all struck at us from the beginning by throwing abstract nouns at us.
They did not know reality.
They did not know the world.
They did not know hardship.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I traveled through those countries at a time when China and Korea were simply poor, a time when one could still keep a suitable distance from Moon Jae-in’s South Korea, which has now fallen to the dark side, and from Xi Jinping’s China, which has become like Mordor, the dark land that appears in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Even so, in the end, I think it was unfortunate.
There are many better countries in the world.
And yet, as for me, I walked only through bad countries.
The Soviet Union.
“What do you mean, ‘the homeland of socialism’?”
The back streets were full of unemployed people.
One of the unemployed grabbed my arm and told me to sell him my Seiko watch.
I did not learn Russian for that.
The People’s Republic of China.
Why were the communal toilets in the provinces so outrageously filthy?
The toilets in the sleeping cars were also dreadful.
The filth of this country has a basis separate from poverty.
When one is poor, things are dirty, smelly, hungry, and painful, but this was a filth of a different kind.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The name of the country itself is a lie, and the place was truly a “living hell.”
All the drinking water was hard water, and as soon as one drank it, one developed diarrhea.
It was like the town of Jericho in the Old Testament.
2 Kings 2:19–22.
Pyongyang, a city like a papier-mâché façade, was truly papier-mâché, and behind it were dwellings where real people lived.
Low, dingy concrete buildings, broken glass windows, and the voices of children could be heard.
When I turned around, the large man who served as both guide and watcher was glaring at me.
The Republic of Korea.
That place is an “interesting purgatory.”
Everyone who returns from South Korea speaks more loudly.
Why?
Because no one listens to what others say.
“Listen to what I’m saying!”
That is why everyone’s voice grows louder.
The women have had plastic surgery, so when you get close, their skin is covered with tiny scars.
The men lean back arrogantly and do nothing but boast.
Even so, in the old days they were simple and honest, so somehow things worked.
Recently, however, everyone has become arrogant.
The starting salary at a first-rate company is twice that at a small or medium-sized company?
What kind of country is that?
My greatest misfortune may be that, unlike a scholar, I cannot toy with abstract nouns.
For that reason, in this book I have tried to write about South Korea as realistically as possible.
Where it becomes abstract and difficult, it is only because it could not be helped, so you may skip those parts without the slightest problem.
July 6, 2018.
Furuta Hiroshi.