When It Comes to the History of a Country That Falls Between the Gaps in Historical Scholarship, Even Someone at This Level Can Become the Leading Authority.
October 23, 2015
The following is from the preface to “Masayuki Takayama Takes on America, China, South Korea, and Asahi,” Themis, 1,000 yen, by Masayuki Takayama, a man of genuine integrity and backbone whom it would be no exaggeration to call the most sensible newspaper reporter in postwar Japan.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Others may call it nonsense, but there was a time when, at least in terms of my job title, I was a scholar.
So, speaking self-critically, what scholars write is generally self-indulgent and not interesting at all.
Such things could hardly be expected to sell, but this is where university professors have an advantage: they declare that their own “Introduction to International Politics” will be the textbook and force students to buy it.
With a guaranteed market, there is no particular need for it to be interesting.
Viewed through eyes accustomed to such academic books, the historian Hidehiro Okada’s “Collected Works of Hidehiro Okada” is interesting.
He demonstrates the falsehoods in accepted wisdom, and his prose is skillful as well; the book-band declaration that he “opened up previously unexplored horizons in world history” was by no means an exaggeration.
The reasons he continued to be purged from a historical establishment built on academic cliques and narrow-mindedness also become apparent, but in “What Is History?” in the first volume of his collected works, there is a passage stating that only three kinds of history can be properly studied in Japan: Western history centered on Britain, France, and Germany; national history, meaning Japanese history; and Eastern history centered on China.
As an academic discipline, history encompasses only Japan, China, and Europe.
The histories of countries and regions falling between them—for example, India and the Middle East, and even America—do not, he says, exist as systematic fields of historical study.
Put that way, several things come to mind.
In the early 1990s, when the Cold War structure collapsed, I traveled through Asian countries, reporting on what they intended to do from then on.
I also sought guidance from a professor at Meiji Gakuin University who specialized in Vietnam.
But as we talked, what he said somehow failed to match my preliminary research.
Astonishingly, this professor believed that Japan had occupied and ruled Vietnam when Japanese forces entered French Indochina before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
No, I explained, Vietnam had remained under French rule and administration, and the Japanese military had been a lodger; it was only with Operation Meigo in the spring of the war’s final year that the local French Indochinese government was driven out, so the period that could be called Japanese rule lasted five months at most, and I showed him various documents.
One example was the French Indochinese government’s much-publicized “opening” of a four-story Saigon prison to hold Vietnamese political prisoners in 1943, during the war.
The professor in question was left speechless, managing only a “Huh?”
When it comes to the history of a country that falls between the gaps in historical scholarship, even someone at this level can become the leading authority.
This article continues.
The following is from “Masayuki Takayama Takes on America, China, South Korea, and Asahi,” Themis, 1,000 yen, by Masayuki Takayama, a man of genuine integrity and backbone whom it would be no exaggeration to call the most sensible newspaper reporter in postwar Japan.
pp. 186–191
Let Us Teach South Korean President Park Geun-hye “Correct History”
Looking at the Path Taken by Her Father, Park Chung-hee, There Was Neither Invasion nor Enslaving Rule
Remember the Path Taken by Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee’s daughter, Geun-hye, visited Obama and said, “For peace in Asia, Japan must have a correct understanding of history.”
What is “correct history”?
According to her, Japan was a brutal aggressor state that colonized Korea, enslaved its people, and stole its resources, culture, and even names.
This is the first I have heard that that country had anything one could call culture, but let us leave that aside here.
She herself probably does not believe that any part of the “history” she asserts is correct.
If she still insists, “What nonsense. I am right,” she should be reminded of the path taken by her own father, Park Chung-hee.
He was born in 1917 into a poor family in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province.
At best, his life would have been confined to that of a commoner—a tenant farmer.
Commoners were worked mercilessly by the yangban, and if they displeased them, they might have had “a stick inserted between their bound legs and twisted, breaking their bones and leaving them disabled” (Park Tae-hyeok, “The Ugly Korean”).
Yet with the annexation of Korea by Japan, a school was established even in such a rural place, and he graduated at the top of his class.
The miracles continued.
A Japanese teacher, unwilling to let his talent go to waste, helped him enter Daegu Normal School with his tuition waived.
He was able to become an elementary school teacher.
In terms of his social standing, this was a tremendous advancement, but he dreamed of “becoming a Japanese military man, more important than the yangban.”
However, Korea had no military.
Park Geun-hye said, “Japan colonized Korea” and “exploited it.”
Western colonial powers did precisely what she described.
The French Indochinese government made Vietnamese people mine the finest Hong Gai coal and simply took it away.
Britain simply seized the oil of Yenangyaung and the rubies of Mogok in Burma.
The United States worked Filipinos mercilessly in copper mines.
This article continues.