March 4, 2018
The following is also from an article I found on the Internet today.
The emphasis within the text is mine.
“Ugly, but Don’t Look Away from Our Neighbor, South Korea,” by Hiroshi Furuta
(June 22, 2017)
Ugly, but Don’t Look Away from Our Neighbor, South Korea! (WAC BUNKO)
[My rating] ★★★★★ (93 points)
■ This is a 2014 book by Mr. Furuta, who has engaged in shouting matches with the South Korean side in joint research on Japanese-Korean history.
Why does South Korea continue to spread lies around the world that denigrate Japan?
It is because denigrating Japan is necessary for it to maintain its own legitimacy.
Mr. Furuta asserts that it is best to have nothing to do with Koreans, whose common sense is so different.
• There is no point in teaching or helping them. They show no gratitude whatsoever.
Instead, they make endless demands for ten or twenty times more. It is best to have nothing more to do with Koreans (p. 75).
■ Regarding President Park’s overtures toward China, he predicted that South Korea would eventually betray China, correctly anticipating the current THAAD missile issue.
He further points out that, because of extreme anti-Japanese education in South Korea, terrorists and bombers are treated as heroes, and warns of the danger that a South Korean will eventually carry out a bombing.
He predicts the 2015 bombing incident at Yasukuni Shrine.
His final prediction is that China will begin expanding its territory under a system of national mobilization, and this too, one could say, has proved correct.
• On February 26, 2010, China’s National Defense Mobilization Law passed the Standing Committee, the permanent body of the National People’s Congress. It was promulgated as Presidential Order No. 26 and took effect on July 1…
As one follows the provisions of the law, the intentions behind such events as the September 2010 Chinese fishing boat collision incident off the Senkaku Islands and restrictions on the export of rare earths become visible.
In other words, China is now under a “national mobilization system” that treats peacetime as a quasi-wartime state and mobilizes all people and resources (p. 136).
■ He maintains that criticisms such as “despicable” and “liars” are meaningless when directed at Chinese and Korean people.
This is because, since all of their people are despicable and dishonest, they have no awareness that such behavior is wrong.
Yet, despite saying this, the author is not criticizing Chinese and Korean people.
In other words, these people are acting according to the common sense of their own countries and therefore mean no harm.
Mr. Furuta, thank you for this good book.
On seeing a person, they immediately assess whether that person is above or below them and whether the person has greater legitimacy than they do. If they judge the person to be beneath them, they readily…
March 4, 2018
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
■ The following are the passages in this book that resonated with me.
• In Korean, the act of going around informing on a person one dislikes to bosses and superiors in order to isolate that person is called “igandjil”…
Because igandjil has a certain effect within South Korea, Koreans assume that such behavior is accepted throughout the world as well (p. 56).
• South Korea has anti-Japanese nationalism, but no patriotic nationalism… It was Japan’s postwar left-wing scholars who taught false nationalism… They taught that Japan was a wicked country that exploited and plundered Korea, and that Koreans should therefore reclaim their independent history from Japan (p. 47).
• Those who did not fight the Japanese military have no memories of their own righteousness.
China seized upon a Japanese civic-minded newspaper that fabricated the Nanjing Incident, while South Korea became ensnared in the lie about the military comfort women.
In the end, Japan’s left-wing intellectuals and mass media encouraged their despicable behavior (p. 114).
• The only heroes South Korea takes pride in are terrorist bombers…
What I fear is the danger that young South Koreans will think, “I want to be a hero too,” and cross the sea carrying bombs (p. 64).
• The lie that associates the “comfort women” with coercion by the military and enshrines them in bronze statues is also based on the social convention in that country that “if a lie works, so much the better.”
The same applies to the abductions, the Senkaku Islands, and Takeshima.
It is believed that if a lie is maintained, it will become the truth (p. 109).
• On seeing a person, they immediately assess whether that person is above or below them and whether the person has greater legitimacy than they do. If they judge the person to be beneath them, they readily break their promises. What is truly unsettling is how they suddenly seize the other person’s arm and appraise whether the wristwatch they are wearing is more or less expensive than their own (p. 74).
• Korea’s rulers always cast aside what they should be responsible for.
King Injo of the Joseon dynasty abandoned the people to the Manchu army.
In 1905, at the time of the Second Japan-Korea Agreement, Gojong handed the fate of Korea over entirely to his ministers.
South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, abandoned the people and fled, and during the 1997 financial crisis, Kim Young-sam handed the country over to the IMF (p. 96).
• Impoverished Korea had nothing to plunder in the first place…
We had to begin by teaching those who knew nothing of labor its value and significance… (p. 122).
• NHK continues to broadcast phony Korean historical dramas about the royal dynasties…
Unlike the Japanese, who enjoy Mito Kōmon while knowing it is fiction, Koreans themselves believe these fabrications to be historical fact.
NHK bears a heavy responsibility for helping promote these fabrications overseas (p. 185).
• As with China, university professors specializing in South and North Korea rarely tell the truth.
This is because, if they did, more people would come to dislike those countries, the numbers of undergraduate and graduate students studying them would fall, and the professors would be undermining themselves.
Furthermore, if they incurred the dislike of intellectuals across the sea in those countries, opportunities for joint research would disappear and research funding would plummet.
If they also incurred the dislike of the ruling class, they might be denied entry into the country or access to materials in libraries (p. 5).