Published on September 9, 2019.
This article introduces an essay by Matsumoto Koji published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, discussing the view that Korean traditional culture, modern Korean, administrative systems, laws, and cultural studies were formed through Korea’s encounter with modern Japan.
Through Fukuzawa Yukichi, Inoue Kakugoro, Ogura Shinpei, Korean ceramics, Seokguram, and the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, it examines the contradiction between Korea’s anti-Japanese discourse and the deep influence it received from Japan.

September 9, 2019.
Fukuzawa Yukichi created the Korean language.
It was Fukuzawa Yukichi who played the decisive role in the formation of modern Korean, written in a mixture of Chinese characters and Hangul.
The following is from an essay by Matsumoto Koji, published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title: “Stand Up to Korea’s Lies: Why Does Korea Continue Its ‘Anti-Japanese’ Stance? Confront It with the Truth of History and Expose Korea’s Fiction.”
It is an essay that must be read not only by the Japanese people but also by people all over the world.
Unless one reads this essay, one cannot understand the postwar history of the Far East at all.
Alexis Dudden, who is an agent of Korea and a person of unbelievably poor and low intelligence, dominates the American historical association.
The same is true of the United Nations.
The time has long since come for the international community to recognize its own ignorance and low intelligence and feel ashamed.
Above all, Korea, a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, has done this for the 74 years since the war, and China began it under Jiang Zemin in order to divert the eyes of the people from the Tiananmen Square Incident, and continues it even now.
The fact that the international community has overlooked Nazism in the name of anti-Japanese education has created the extremely unstable and dangerous world of today.
China’s arrogance, Korea’s madness, or the madness of the Korean Peninsula, and Putin’s arrogance are all the result of the international community’s continuing to leave untouched the Nazism that China and the Korean Peninsula have continued to practice.
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
“Korean Tradition” Begins in the Modern Age.
I will say this deliberately: Korea is the country in the world that most resembles Japan.
Since modern times, it has continuously taken in Japan’s systems and culture, and Japanese influence extends into every corner of its society.
Japan fought the Sino-Japanese War and made Korea independent, but it can be said that the Korea born through this war not only acquired the status of an independent country, but also became a country completely different from the old Korea that had existed before.
The core issues that led to the birth of the Korean people, such as independence from China, the establishment of Korean as a cultural language, and Korean studies based on modern methodology, were largely accomplished by Japanese people.
I think many people may find this surprising, but most of what is now called “Korean traditional culture” in fact appeared after the modern period, or had its significance discovered after that time.
At that point, it was Japanese people who played the leading role.
Originally, the people of the Korean Peninsula had little interest in their own country’s indigenous traditional culture.
In the realm of consciousness, “things Korean” hardly existed at that time.
The frontispiece of Korean history textbooks contains a photograph of the Buddha statue at Seokguram in Gyeongju.
It is a magnificent Buddha statue made in the Silla period.
It was discovered in 1909.
This was before the Japan-Korea Annexation, but it was during the period when Korea was under the protection of the Japanese Residency-General.
A Japanese postal carrier who entered the cave to take shelter from the rain found the Buddha statue exposed to the elements, and this caused a great stir.
An investigation team was dispatched, and because it was found to be extremely precious, the Government-General undertook large-scale work and devoted itself to its preservation.
Some may think this was only natural, but one should recall that the Joseon dynasty was a rigid Confucian state hostile to Buddhism, and that many Buddhist statues were destroyed as soon as they were found, abandoned without even records being left behind.
In 1940, the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, which records the circumstances of the creation of Eonmun, or Hangul, written in the fifteenth century, was discovered.
It was found being used as scrap paper in a private house in North Gyeongsang Province.
It is now a national treasure, but if this had been during the Joseon dynasty, it would have been treated as no better than wastepaper.
It saw the light of day precisely because the age had come in which Hangul was valued as a precious cultural heritage.
It was also Japanese people who discovered the beauty of Korean ceramics.
In old Korea, there seems to have been little custom of treasuring old ceramics as valuable objects, and little awareness of trying to preserve tradition; the technique of celadon had died out long before, and no one could make it anymore.
It was the discerning businessman Tomita Gisaku who invested his private fortune and revived it over a period of ten years.
The celadon sold today in Korean department stores and souvenir shops is not made by an inherited traditional technique, but by the technique that Tomita restored, as is generally recognized.
It is an old yet new art, something that had once disappeared from the land of Korea and was revived from the soil by a Japanese person in the early twentieth century.
Ogura Shinpei is also a person who deserves special mention.
Originally, he was an assistant at the University of Tokyo, where he studied such things as the notation system of the Manyoshu, but he resolved to go to Korea and began studying the ancient Korean language, especially “hyangga.”
Hyangga means rustic songs, and they were songs composed in the Silla and Goryeo periods, but only twenty-five had been transmitted.
From the perspective of Confucian scholars in Korea, they were like worthless relics from the age of barbarians.
To begin with, documents in the ancient Korean language were virtually nonexistent, and no one knew how to read them.
While working at the Government-General as a lower-ranking official, Ogura began researching ancient words, and on his days off he rode a horse into the countryside and collected dialects.
Old words from the past remain in regions far from the center.
That is what he noticed.
In a field in which Korean people, the Government-General, and even the Japanese linguistic world showed little interest, he continued his lonely research amid the indifference around him.
It was entirely thanks to his devoted efforts that the Korean language obtained a scientific foundation for study.
In other words, the attempt to discover the value of “things Korean,” which the gentlemen of old Korea had not even looked at, and to rediscover and revive that tradition, was made by Japanese people after Japan came to govern Korea.
It is no exaggeration to say that the nation of the Korean people was born through its “encounter” with modern Japan.
“The leading actors of colonial Korea in the first half of the 1940s continued to play leading roles on the stage of the new country even after the declaration of independence in the latter half.
Formally, it began as an independent country, and so there should have been a great change, but in fact those who had accommodated themselves to Japanese imperial rule participated in the U.S. military government and played a role in building the new state.
In terms of human composition, no substantial change can be seen, and one must conclude that the new country was built as it was on the historical line of the first half of the 1940s.”
Contemporary Korean History under Japanese Imperial Rule.
Song Geon-ho.
Fukuzawa Yukichi Created the Korean Language.
It was Fukuzawa Yukichi who played the decisive role in the formation of modern Korean, written in a mixture of Chinese characters and Hangul.
He had long wished to create companions of civilization among Japan’s neighbors, but since China had nothing like kana-mixed writing, he had half given up, saying that educating the masses would be difficult.
However, when he learned one day that Korea had a script like kana called Eonmun, he conceived the idea of publishing a newspaper in Korea for the spread of new knowledge, placed a special order with the Tsukiji Type Foundry, made Eonmun type at his own expense, and sent Inoue Kakugoro to Korea with it.
Inoue was a student resident in the Fukuzawa household and was a young man of twenty-three at the time.
Thanks also to the prestige of Fukuzawa, who was regarded as Japan’s guide to civilization, Inoue was immediately appointed government adviser, and three years after crossing to Korea, in 1885, he succeeded in launching the national-language newspaper Hanseong Jubo, written in a mixture of Eonmun and Chinese characters.
Traditional Korean lacked the vocabulary with which to describe international politics and economics, or modern scholarship, so there was no choice but to take Japanese as the model.
Sentences mixing characters of different natures, sentence structure and usage, style, punctuation marks, and quotation marks were also transcriptions of Japanese.
The new Korean language was created at a stroke in the shape of Japanese in order to meet the immediate purpose of newspaper publication.
The consciousness of wanting to possess a new national language did not arise internally.
The present Korean language was born as the realization of the ideal of a Japanese Enlightenment thinker who tried to bring Korea into the circle of civilization.
Japan created the foundation of nation formation.
In a sense, one can say that Korea itself began from Japan.
“Modern Korean was formed by using Japanese as a ‘mirror facing itself.’
Beginning with the structure of genbun itchi, the unification of spoken and written language, many aspects of expression and prose level, vocabulary, and forms of expression were borrowed from Japanese.
This may be somewhat misleading, but the Korean language used by Koreans today differs greatly from the Korean language of the Joseon dynasty period.
If anything, it may be closer to Japanese.
It was newly remade on the model of modern Japanese, through adaptation and translation, and through genbun itchi modeled on Japanese prose.”
The Colonialism of Literature: The Landscape and Memory of Modern Korea.
Nam Bu-jin.
No matter how one tilts one’s head in puzzlement, it is impossible to derive modern written language from the classical Chinese of the Joseon dynasty period.
Even if one says there are Hangul novels such as The Tale of Chunhyang, they are far too small in scale to be called a tradition, and no matter how much one reads those texts, which line up the sounds of Sino-Korean words and Chinese set phrases, it is difficult to find anything that leads to modern Korean.
The first work of Kim Dong-in, one of the representative writers of modern Korea, was a work in Japanese, and he originally created in Japanese.
One day, when he resolved to write in Korean and sat down at his desk, no words came out at all.
It was only natural, since at that time there were no ready-made literary terms, but he later wrote that his mind went completely blank at that moment.
Having no other choice, he first composed the sentences in Japanese, then converted them into Korean and made them into a work.
At first, the prose, filled abundantly with words borrowed directly from Japanese, felt extremely strange and unnatural, but before anyone knew it, it had taken root and become the Korean language of today.
It is commonly said as though Korean and Japanese were in opposition, but this simply brings over the framework of the language struggles that blazed in nineteenth-century Europe, and there was no such reality in that place.
The Korean language that existed at the threshold of the modern age was still at a stage where it could almost be called a vernacular, and it was in no way something that could compete with Japanese.
Only by encountering Japanese did it begin to walk the path of development as a cultural language, and for Korean, Japanese was like a foster parent.
This sort of thing occurred across culture as a whole.
Because a change like a redesign of civilization took place, it seems difficult for Koreans today to understand the culture of the old era sensuously or to feel its virtues.
Intellectuals in the past must have read classical Chinese and had feelings that regarded it as beautiful, but people today cannot re-experience that.
Therefore, from a cultural point of view, a different country was born at the end of the nineteenth century.
In other words, one may say that Korea’s inner history began around this time.
This article continues.