Japan’s ironmaking history exposes why China and the Korean Peninsula stagnated: not climate, but a mindset that never embraced reforestation or productive labor.

2016-02-20

The February 26 issue of Kaido o Yuku examines the history of Japanese ironmaking, but within it there was another passage that proved the correctness of my argument.

When former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak suddenly landed on Takeshima toward the end of his term and made deranged statements such as demanding that the Emperor visit Korea to apologize, I searched for the first time in my life to understand what kind of country Korea truly was.
I wrote that within one hour, I understood it.

In that process, I saw photographs of the Korean Peninsula from before the period of annexation—an annexation Korea desired and Japan accepted—and I immediately understood something.

Every mountain on the Korean Peninsula was barren.
I was the first person to convey this fact to the world.

In the opening article, there was a passage that proved my argument was one hundred percent correct and explained why.

Ancient ironmaking used iron sand, and this technology spread from the Chinese mainland through the Korean Peninsula.
It required enormous amounts of wood as fuel—so much that it stripped entire mountains bare.

The article states that Japan’s climate and geology allowed mountains to regenerate, whereas China and the Korean Peninsula did not, leading to civilizational stagnation.

However, I am convinced that the real cause was a national character that never embraced the idea of reforestation.

I am now even more convinced that my reasoning is correct.

China, a distorted bureaucratic state that evolved from the imperial examination system and rigid class discrimination, and the Korean Peninsula, its tributary state, were societies built on the absurd idea that despised labor itself.
I also wrote that this tradition led to the emergence of the yakuza, a structure still composed overwhelmingly of resident Koreans in postwar Japan.
It is common knowledge that ninety-nine percent of Japanese yakuza are composed of resident Koreans.
The behavior of the yangban class that I discovered through my research was identical to that of the yakuza.