Published on August 11, 2019.
This article introduces WWUK’s essay from the monthly magazine WiLL, discussing anti-Japanese education in South Korea, the comfort women issue, the wartime labor issue, information control under the Moon Jae-in administration, and the real voices of young Koreans.
It presents a view of Korea different from what is often reported in Japan, examining how anti-Japanese sentiment is politically exploited and expressing concern over South Korea’s future amid fears of red reunification.

August 11, 2019.
Pure and innocent elementary school children are taught that “Dokdo (Takeshima) is Korean territory,” and when they become junior high school students, they are indoctrinated with the idea that “the comfort women were sex slaves.”
The following is from the May issue of the monthly magazine WiLL.
WWUK—video creator.
At this rate, South Korea will be abandoned.
The radar lock-on incident: the cry of a young Korean man who could no longer remain silent about the outrage committed by his motherland.
What led me to start making videos.
Nice to meet you.
I am WWUK.
At present, I have launched a channel on YouTube called “WWUK TV,” and I post videos every day, mainly on South Korea’s political and diplomatic problems.
Why did I become interested in Japan-Korea issues and begin broadcasting videos?
The trigger was a Japanese friend I became close to when I was a child.
When I was a junior high school student living in Australia, I became close to Japanese people at the school I attended.
At the time, I could not speak Japanese, but as we played together, I naturally learned it, and gradually began to feel that “Japanese people are completely different from the image of Japanese people described in Korea.”
Many people who have continued to live in Korea have received a “brainwashing education” that teaches them that their motherland is always right.
Anti-Japanese education begins in elementary school.
Pure and innocent elementary school children are taught that “Dokdo (Takeshima) is Korean territory,” and when they become junior high school students, they are indoctrinated with the idea that “the comfort women were sex slaves.”
All of it says, in one way or another, that Korea suffered terribly during the so-called “period of Japanese rule.”
Certainly, the anti-Japanese education of elementary school days influences people both openly and subtly.
However, in my childhood, I had heard many accounts of the actual situation at the time from my grandmother, who had experienced the period of Japanese rule, so I never once thought, “I hate Japan.”
When I was a junior high school student, driven by curiosity about “what kind of information would appear if I searched in Japanese,” I looked it up.
Then, a huge amount of information and materials that could never be known in Korea appeared.
For me as a junior high school student, it was extremely vivid and shocking.
After graduating from junior high school, I wanted to study Japanese more, so I entered a high school in Japan.
During high school, partly because of my experience in junior high school, I began to investigate history on my own more than ever before.
The more I researched, the more I found information I had never heard before, such as the fact that during the period of Japanese rule, Japan developed infrastructure and the school system on the Korean Peninsula, and I began to feel, “I want to share this truth with more people.”
That is why I thought I would make use of YouTube, where people such as KAZUYA were engaged in speech activities.
At first, I posted entertainment-style videos, such as “product introductions” and “Korean language lessons not found in textbooks.”
That was because I thought that extreme content such as “exposing the truth about Korea” would not be accepted from the beginning.
For the time being, I had decided not to touch on Japan-Korea issues.
However, the radar lock-on incident went far beyond the limit.
Even though South Korea is my motherland, there was no way to defend it.
I finally could not endure it any longer, so I made a video about Koreans’ reactions to the radar lock-on incident and posted it on December 30 of last year.
Decent young people.
For young Koreans today, the idea of “anti-Japanese sentiment” is, frankly, something they “do not care about.”
Everyone loves Japanese anime and other subcultures, and of course they are also interested in Japanese food culture.
Many go to Shibuya and Harajuku, and many also go to Osaka.
Therefore, I even feel that there are rather more pro-Japanese people.
However, the voices of young Koreans attract attention neither in Japan nor even in Korea.
What gets taken up are only the voices of some left-wing forces in their forties to sixties.
Moreover, their voices are reported even in Japan as though they represented the opinions of the entire Korean people.
There is nothing more sorrowful than this.
In movements that take place in Korea, “money” is almost always involved.
In particular, the current wartime labor issue.
In fact, at present in Korea, it is said that the remains of about one thousand former wartime laborers are buried in Munhyeon-dong in Busan, where there used to be an underground torpedo base, and voices demanding excavation surveys have grown louder, saying, “Why did Moon Jae-in hide this?”
Furthermore, last December, 1,100 former wartime laborers sued the Korean government, saying that, based on Japan’s economic assistance under the Japan-Korea Claims Agreement of 1965, “the Korean government should compensate us.”
In Japan, it is often said that “the truth will finally come to light,” and perhaps that is certainly so.
However, since families and bereaved relatives are now demanding compensation on behalf of the persons concerned, they merely want compensation money.
I do not think there is a single person who thinks, “I want to reveal the truth.”
The comfort women issue is the same.
Certainly, there were women who became comfort women of their own will.
However, the majority were women deceived by their mothers and sold to Korean brokers.
Naturally, because the women were lied to by their mothers, they did not realize that they had been sold.
They happily followed, thinking, “I can get a job somewhere,” and at the destination there was a comfort station.
No matter how much they worked, the money went to their mothers, so the women themselves did not receive even a single coin.
In that case, since they did not know that they had been deceived by their mothers or sold by their own compatriots, they believe that “the Japanese military forcibly made us sex slaves” and demand compensation.
In Korea, sound arguments such as “if there is money to build comfort women statues, then the comfort women themselves should be compensated more” are also increasingly heard from people in their twenties and thirties.
Regarding the radar lock-on incident as well, many voices on the internet said, “This is really too embarrassing.”
Since the country is now moving toward “red reunification” with North Korea, rumors are often heard that “President Moon Jae-in may be a North Korean spy.”
Such “cool-headed opinions” toward the government also firmly exist as voices of young people in Korea.
While the Moon administration sings of a “future-oriented” approach, it has no intention of stopping the Korean government’s specialty, the “anti-Japanese game” of clinging to the past.
Young people are disgusted by such contradictions.
On the internet, voices even say, “This country is finished” and “This is the first crisis of this magnitude.”
Many people must surely be thinking, “If you have time to play the anti-Japanese game, rebuild the Korean economy.”
Information control under the Moon administration.
Now, the Moon administration is trying to deceive even the Korean people.
To achieve red reunification, the government does not want to release information unfavorable to itself.
Until now, Koreans looked at China and thought, “How pitiful that they are subjected to internet regulation, information control, and even suppression of speech,” yet ironically, now they themselves are facing the same thing.
The Moon administration is rapidly advancing information control.
On February 11, it became a topic of discussion that Korean authorities had commissioned a private company to introduce software that blocks websites.
This was said to have been “introduced for the purpose of blocking illegal overseas sites,” but on March 3, Park Gwang-on, a supreme council member of the Special Committee on Countermeasures against False and Manipulated Information, also known for proposing the “Act Prohibiting Historical Distortion,” demanded that Google Korea delete nine videos, including videos describing comfort women as “prostitutes who received high pay,” and apologize.
Even when something is factual, Korea’s usual tactic is to say, “criticism of Korea is hate speech, while criticism of Japan is freedom of expression.”
＊It goes without saying that it is no mere coincidence that this usual Korean tactic and the behavior of Asahi Shimbun and others, as well as the so-called cultural figures who go along with them, are exactly alike＊.
Among videos I know of, about five videos related to comfort women had also been deleted.
Moreover, it was not the videos uploaded by the people who made them, but videos re-uploaded by users who liked those videos that were deleted.
What on earth does this mean?
On YouTube, the more subscribers a channel has, the more attention it receives.
Therefore, small channels that basically do not make videos and only watch and comment are, for better or worse, outside the view of YouTube’s management.
However, the current Korean government is carefully searching specifically for content about “comfort women” and content that affirms the “period of Japanese rule.”
Thus, videos are being deleted regardless of the number of subscribers.
As with the Historical Distortion Prohibition Act, the regulation of YouTube videos this time has hardly been reported publicly in Korea.
It has appeared as online news, but only in places that cannot be seen unless one advances about five pages, and it is almost completely inconspicuous.
Present-day Korea is openly imposing press restrictions.
Supreme Council Member Park has low name recognition in Korea, and before this uproar, he was a person whose name hardly came up at all.
On his own YouTube channel, he has also posted a video saying, “Google! Respect the history of the Republic of Korea.”
His scheme to raise his own position by using anti-Japanese sentiment is perfectly obvious.
By standing out here, he may be aiming to become the next president.
Turning one’s eyes abroad.
At present, PM2.5, which became a topic of discussion in Japan as well, has become a problem in Korea, and air pollution has become so serious that Seoul is said to rank first in pollution by city.
The causes are said to be aging coal-fired power plants, manufacturing factories, and exhaust gas emitted by poorly maintained automobiles, mainly diesel vehicles.
Including this, the Moon administration is all the more desperate to turn the eyes of the people toward Japan.
Therefore, the series of “anti-Japanese games” that began with this radar lock-on incident has become such a major issue as a result of Korea pushing various problems onto Japan.
At this rate, Korea will be abandoned not only by Japan but by the world as well.
At present, South Korea has an alliance relationship with the United States.
However, if red reunification, or a federal state, is realized, the United States will certainly count South Korea as a dangerous state.
Last December, the tenth meeting toward the conclusion of the Special Measures Agreement on Korea-U.S. defense cost-sharing, to be applied from 2019, was held at the Korean presidential office.
At that meeting, the conditions insisted upon by Harry Harris, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea, were “one billion dollars in cost-sharing and an agreement validity period of one year.”
He proposed reducing the validity period, which had previously been five years, to one year.
I believe this was a statement by the United States, looking ahead, that “eventually we will part ways with Korea.”
Furthermore, last November, he even stated, “The U.S.-Korea alliance must not be taken for granted.”
Korea wants to push the United States away, but the United States may soon abandon Korea first.
In this way, Korea is full of problems.
Therefore, in order to continue conveying the truth, I would like to continue posting videos from now on as well.
Also, there is one more thing.
Viewers often ask me, “Aren’t you going to naturalize?”
I had been thinking about naturalization since I was a high school student.
It is not something I started thinking about especially because of this incident.
I simply love Japan, and I get along well with Japanese people.
I have long thought that I want to live in Japan and end my life in Japan.
Now I am preparing the documents.
There is also the fact that if I am in Korea, I may be in danger.
One Korean YouTuber denounced me with phrases such as “discovered a traitorous YouTuber residing in Japan” and “video of traitorous YouTuber finally released,” and in the video there were even statements close to threats, such as “I am always watching you.”
After that, when I posted on Twitter that I had been denounced and threatened, Mr. Tsukasa Jonen gave me words of encouragement, saying, “Please keep doing your best. I support you!” and even helped spread the tweet.
Of course, Korea is my motherland and the homeland I love.
However, as for Korea’s future, I am completely pessimistic.
Rather than playing the anti-Japanese game, Korea has mountains of domestic issues that it should resolve first.
I want the Korean government to face these problems properly and solve them.
If it continues to repeat the anti-Japanese game, Korea will have no bright future.