Published on January 23, 2020. This article introduces a column by Masayuki Takayama from Shukan Shincho and sharply criticizes South Korean claims that equate Japan’s rule over the Korean Peninsula with Nazi Germany’s persecution of Poles and Jews. Through the Japan–South Korea Basic Treaty, the wartime labor issue, and National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang’s compromise proposal, it argues that there is no “future” for Japan–South Korea relations.

January 23, 2020
Mr. Moon says that Japan did the same thing as the criminal state of Germany, which killed and subjected millions to forced labor, and speaks as though Korea had suffered damage on the level of Poland.
There is no insolence greater than this.
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column, which closes the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
People all over the world would also be astonished by it.
Masayuki Takayama
There Is No Future for Japan and South Korea
There are black, yellow, and white races.
Which one has evolved the most and become the most beautiful?
Just like laundry, it must be white.
That was the sort of thing said by the eugenicist Francis Galton, and the one who agreed with it was Hitler.
Moreover, in Mein Kampf, it is written that among the white races, the Germanic race, which had mixed least with other races, was the whitest of the white.
Then, claiming that the purity of those wonderful Germanic people was being threatened by Jews, he began the persecution of Jews in November 1938, when a German diplomat was killed by a Jewish boy.
This is what is known as “Kristallnacht,” the Night of Broken Glass.
The name derives from the fact that, on that night of retaliation, thousands of Jewish shops were attacked, and broken glass lay scattered across the streets, shining like crystal.
However, according to historical records, when the boy asked the diplomat to bring back his family, who had been expelled abroad, “his body was demanded, he was toyed with, and then the promise was broken, so he stabbed him.”
History is quite raw.
From that night onward, pogroms, or destruction, became open, and the sending of Jews to concentration camps began.
However, these were still temporary detentions until they were to be sent to Siberia after the defeat of the Soviet Union, and they were not yet death camps.
During that period, those who suffered even more terribly than the Jews were the neighboring Poles.
In September 1939, the invading German army rounded up and killed tens of thousands of people, including doctors, clergymen, and journalists.
Education was deemed sufficient if people could count to 500 and write their own names, and higher education was abolished.
Teenage boys and girls who had been attending school were sent to factories in Germany itself and forced to work long hours.
By the end of the war, their number had reached 1.5 million.
Concentration camps such as Auschwitz were built in the occupied territories.
They are often described as if they were final processing sites for Jews, but nearly 30 percent of the inmates were Poles, and at least 200,000 were killed.
Why were they persecuted even more than the Jews?
Hitler intended to make all of Eastern Europe, including Poland, into living space for the superior Germanic people, and therefore Slavic Poles were marked for extermination from the very beginning.
The Soviet Union also carried out the same kind of killing from the other side, and so Poland lost 20 percent of its population, six million people.
This is nearly twice the number of Japanese war dead in the last war.
Poland, having suffered so much damage, was incorporated into the Eastern Bloc after the war, and its wartime compensation claims against Germany were therefore carried over until after the Cold War.
And the amount of compensation that unified Germany paid Poland was only 500 million marks, or 40 billion yen.
That was far less than the 500 million dollars Japan gave in 1965 to South Korea, with which it had not even been at war, an amount equal to 200 billion yen in today’s money.
Poland was angry.
Following the example of the Jews, it negotiated with the United States as intermediary, and in the end, the German government and twelve companies, including Krupp, which had imposed forced labor, contributed a total of 10 billion marks, or 500 billion yen, to create the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation.
The beneficiaries were 1.6 million people, including Jews and Poles, and each received about 300,000 yen.
South Korea received 500 million dollars under the Japan–South Korea Basic Treaty.
But it wants more, and the South Korean Supreme Court ordered Japanese companies to pay 10 million yen per former wartime laborer.
The total number of recognized wartime laborers is 150,000.
Eventually, they intend to collect 1.5 trillion yen.
However, it is clearly stated that the 500 million dollars included unpaid wages for wartime laborers.
On top of that, most of the plaintiffs who call themselves wartime laborers are people who simply drifted into Japan on their own and found jobs.
To Japan, which says, “Don’t be ridiculous,” National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang offered a so-called compromise.
He proposed that Japanese companies and citizens contribute money to create a “Memory, Reconciliation, and Future” Foundation.
The model is clearly Germany’s “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation.
Mr. Moon says that Japan did the same thing as the criminal state of Germany, which killed and subjected millions to forced labor, and speaks as though Korea had suffered damage on the level of Poland.
There is no insolence greater than this.
There is not even a sense of gratitude for having lived by sponging off Japan, from infrastructure to living expenses, both before and after the war.
There would still have been some saving grace if Moon had honestly called it the “Extortion, Sponging, and Coercion” Foundation.
In any case, what is certain is that there is no “future” for Japan and South Korea.