The court ruling in South Korea over the Tsushima Buddha statue theft case violated the fundamental principle of non-retroactivity, a cornerstone of modern legal systems.
This was not an isolated incident, but the third instance in which South Korea justified retroactive legislation—in 1996, 2006, and now again.
This article examines the deeper intellectual and civilizational reasons why South Korea has yet to fully internalize the principles of modern rationalism, legalism, and a unified concept of individual responsibility.

March 8, 2017

I have already written that I recently learned, for the first time, that Professor Hiroshi Furuta of Tsukuba University—one of the foremost experts on the Korean Peninsula—had, like the late Minoru Oda, married a resident Korean woman in Japan.
The two men, however, stand on completely opposite intellectual ground.
Until August three years ago, I held a certain degree of respect for Oda Minoru.
Today, I hold none at all; rather, it would be more accurate to say that I now view him with contempt.

What follows is taken from the latest installment of Professor Furuta’s regular column in the monthly magazine Seiron.
Omissions from the original text are indicated.
Emphasis within the text is my own.

The Japanese people have successfully accomplished all the major challenges of modernity—rationalism, scientism, rule of law, democracy, a unified sense of self, and human rights.
For a long time, Japan was engaged in an apprenticeship of Western modernity.
Without a unified concept of the self, even contracts signed while intoxicated would have to be deemed invalid.
No one today would tolerate such an idea.

In the recent theft of Buddhist statues from Tsushima, every Japanese citizen felt that the ruling of the Daejeon District Court in South Korea was utterly absurd.
A Korean theft ring stole a Buddha statue from a Japanese temple, yet following a lawsuit by the Korean Buseoksa Temple, the court retroactively declared the statue to have been looted by Japanese pirates in the past and ordered its transfer to the Korean government for return to the temple.
This ruling directly violates the principle of non-retroactivity, a foundational element of the rule of law, and serves as proof that South Korea has yet to internalize legalism.

It should be noted that this was the third time South Korea violated the principle of non-retroactivity.
The first instance occurred in 1996 under President Kim Young-sam, when the government enacted the “Special Act on the Gwangju Incident,” a retroactive law that nullified statutes of limitations and dragged former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo into court in shackles—only to later pardon them after sentencing.
The second instance occurred in 2006 under President Roh Moo-hyun, with the enforcement of the “Special Act on the Confiscation of Property of Pro-Japanese Collaborators,” which resulted in the seizure of approximately 16 billion yen worth of land from descendants by 2009.

South Korea is neither governed by the rule of law nor by emotional governance alone.
The question that must be asked is: what lies behind this fundamental absence of legal consciousness among Koreans?
Identifying this is precisely the task of modern scholarship since the Enlightenment.

This essay continues.