The other face of Japan you don't wanna know
Japan, according to the Korean minds
Now you are about to set out on a journey into the Korean mind on their cousin and neighbor called Japan. Fasten your seat belt.
The longest kidnapping in the history of the United States is known to be that of Jaycee Dugard, who disappeared while walking to the school bus stop in June 1991 at the age of eleven and remained missing for 18 years until 2009 when Philip Garrido, a convicted sex offender under parole then already, was arrested after his visit to the campus of UC Berkeley, with his two biological daughters between him and Jaycee Dugard, which caught the attention of the parole officer. Philip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years of imprisonment while many felt the punishment was too light. That’s what happens in the real life in the civilized society of today.
Now imagine that Philip Garrido somehow was released on conditions and is heard running around the town, bragging about feeding and raising Jaycee Dugard into a beauty, grumbling about her ungratefulness for his sacrifice. What would you feel when you are her parent? It’s not done yet. Further imagine that you are hearing of some stoned oafs at the town bar nodding at his boasts with the “C’est la vie” philosopher’s face. How would you feel if you have to live with the Philip Garrido and his oaf-philosophers in the same town?
That is just the way Koreans feel about Japan where the extreme rightist views are rampant under the connivance and underhanded encouragement of the Japanese government operated by the politicians, who are unfailingly regular at the Yasukuni shrine 1) paying tribute for the dead souls responsible, when alive, for the unprovoked killing of hundred thousands of unarmed people in their neighbor countries and, who make sure Japanese youth learn the history in line with the revisionism and denialism they patronize and, who keep getting re-elected mysteriously by the Japanese people.
1) Yasukuni Shrine, or War Shrine, first started as the Shinto shrine to honor the souls of those from the Choshu, Satsuma and Tosa Domains, who died for the Japanese emperor in the course of civil war for Meiji Restoration. Later it became one for all the war dead for Japan. The souls of war criminals from the World War II are also serviced here. The first soul that this shrine serviced was Yoshida Shoin, who masterminded the early Japanese expansionism, setting Korea as their first target. Ito Hirobumi, who orchestrated the Japanese invasion into Korea and Manchuria, was one of his students. Both Yoshida Shoin and Ito Hirobumi of Choshu Domain were from the modern-day Yamaguchi Prefecture, where the former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s constituency is located. Abe once said Yoshida Shoin was the figure he respected the most.
The author Min Jin Lee starts her Pachinko with “History has failed us, but no matter.” I am not sure what she may have wanted to mean with the ‘History’ there, but as a dilettante historian I would like to interpret the ‘History’ there as ‘the record of past events as written and known to the people as truth’ rather than as ‘the series of actual events that happened in the past’. The colonial period of 36 years under Japanese rule is a subject of immense disgrace to Koreans they would like to avoid and forget. But the ‘History’ keeps bringing them back to the subject time and time again as they saw a Japanese political leader proclaim one day “no more apology to Korea for the past” in the Diet "because we have done enough" and no need for a separate apology for the ‘comfort women’ because there had been found no direct evidence for Japanese government’s involvement in their recruitment, instead of saying they were voluntary prostitutes, and the Japanese Government demanding its Korean counterpart to override the court’s order for Mitsubishi to pay the unpaid wage to the Korean workers mobilized during the colonial period because all the issues were solved by the money paid to the Korean government under the inter-governmental pact signed in 1960s. Perhaps Min Jin Lee would not have been able to come up with, and maintain, the amount of passion burned for the great story if the past had been taken as seriously and as truly as it should be and the "History" had been more of truth than of sheer lies.
Once in her lecture on her book at a university, she said that the purpose of her story was to make all readers ‘Korean’. Said half-jokingly, her remark carried a lot of the sentiments Koreans have about the ‘History’ that failed them. The Nobel prize novelist Pearl Buck was ‘Korean’ when she got “dumbstruck” 2) after a brief conversation with President John F. Kennedy, who said Korean issues would be better dealt with through Japanese at the Dinner in Camelot in April 1962.
2) According ‘Dinner in Camelot’ by the Joseph A. Esposito, JFK asked the Novel Prize Laureate, “What do you think we should do about Korea?” When she replied, “Why do you ask, Mr. President?”, he responded, “Because we can’t go on as we are. Japan must help us to rebuild.” Dumbfounded at the President’s ignorance on the history and relationship between the two countries, the pledge to send him the first copy of the novel she was writing on Korea and its people was all she could make to the young national leader. When the novel The Living Reed was published in 1963, she could not keep her promise.
Nothing much seems to have changed since. When the Park Keun-Hye’s government was at the brink from the domestic scandals, Japanese and U.S. Democrat Administration wasted no time to twist the arm of the weak-kneed lady into signing the ‘Comfort Women’ agreement at the very end of 2015 past the Christmas- they, the Japanese and the Democrats, worked so hard- that would clear Japan of any further responsibility on that issue for the meager amount of 10 million dollars, without even asking for the consent from the victims themselves. No words of apology to the ‘Comfort Women’ accompanied the money when the remittance was made in 2016. The amount was never an issue for Koreans, who had made their country No. 10 economy of the world, as they silently gritted the teeth at the news of Abe announcing the contribution of 50 million dollars at the 2017 World Assembly for Women in Tokyo to a project championed by Ivanka Trump, who opened the conference saying the harassment of women in the workplace shouldn’t be tolerated.
They feel the ‘History’ failed them when, reading the Western treatise on the historical significance of 1923 Tokyo earthquake about how the catastrophe helped generate Japanese economic crisis that eventually led to the Pacific War, they find no single line was given for the gratuitous killing of thousands of Koreans in Tokyo by Japanese in the aftermath of the very same natural disaster while the author was eager to find every little scrap of reason to explain the inevitability for the Japanese to wage the war against America, skipping over their unprovoked invasions to its neighbors and the series of massacre they committed, often just for fun, as if those things did not have anything to do with the war and deserve any serious discourse.
‘History’ keeps failing them when they see the putrid ghost of the “Made-In-China History” that had thrived on ignorance for so long in the past climbing out of its grave as they hear Donald Trump came out of the meeting with Xi Jinping wide-eyed and asked his staff whether it was true that Korea had been a part of China in the past.3)
3) China finished its 5 year governmental endeavor called ‘Northeast History Project’ in 2007, to make the ancient Korean State Koguryo, from which the name Korea came, Chinese. They have been using this latest historical fabrication as basis of their campaign of cultural larcenies, such as for Hanbok, Kimchi and what-not, the list growing every day. CCP has started the propagation of the historical forgery all around the world, in the university class, in diplomatic venues, academic gatherings and in the internet spaces such as Quora ,Reddit and Wikipedia, and even at the personal levels in dating conversation. The Korea erasing has been the unchanging theme of the Made-in-China history from the time of the Shiji written more than two millennia ago. In 1963 the great Chinese gentleman Zhou Enlai made an official apology to the visiting North Koreans for the history distortion the Shiji made regarding the ancient Korea. Throughout the history of China ancient Korean states were foreign to China, and never once been a part of China, even by the narrative of Shiji and by any written Chinese records before and after that, until the Baidu updates in line with CCP’s Northeast project. The history fabrication of the current CCP is the typical Chinese response to the rise of Korean soft power, this time made in bold nullification of the positions of the founding fathers of CCP, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai ,who supported scientific approaches in history study, regarding the Chinese historical relationship with Korea. The common denominator of the Shiji and the recent CCP History Project is that they both were the government projects and were about ancient Koreans and their cultural assets. The difference between the two “Made-in-China” stories two millennia apart in time space, is that while the earlier one endeavored in disparaging and erasing Korea, the latest one is venturing to make it Chinese.
Now you are beginning to be ‘Korean’ if you feel somehow able to fathom the depth of the indignation of Min Jin Lee when she said “History failed us,” and the firmness of the fortitude in the “but no matter.” that follows. Koreans are ready to take up their own share of the responsibility for the disgrace of being colonized and the unfortunate things that ensued in the modern time since "things do not happen, things are made to happen". But Koreans now have learned enough to know they could not afford any more to let the lies thrive on indifference and ignorance and fail them again. When we know about all these things, it was a lifetime-rare dramatic scene to witness that Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy and former U.S. ambassador to Japan, visited a book event for Pachinko and made an opening speech as a personal friend of Author Lee.
Caroline Kennedy making the opening speech at a Pachinko book eventIn the speech, Caroline joked that she came to look for Koh Hansu, the charismatic character and key figure who ignites the story. In the fiction, he is depicted as one of those about one million Koreans who had immigrated to Japan before the nationwide war mobilization was proclaimed in 1938, which took another one million out of a population slightly over 20 million in the peninsula. When Japan finally took over Korea as colony in 1910, Japan itself was not a rich country, barely feeding its own people so they did not have much resources left to invest in the new colony. The colonization had not even started officially when they announced the new law for land registration in August 1910, which made the requirements for ownership claim complicated and exhaustive so that most of the lands which small farmers had lived on for generations under de-facto proprietorship and the lands customarily co-owned by the village or an extended family without an official document were declared the property of the Japanese government, taken over by Oriental Colonization Co., which had been readily established in 1908.
Many small farmers who tilled their land under de-facto ownership turned tenant farmer overnight as the total taxable area had doubled when the land registration campaign finished in 1918. In the next year the March 1st Movement took place. On the other hand, Japanese government actively encouraged Japanese to immigrate to Korea, handing out leaflets showcasing the money loan business for Japanese. Many Japanese ran usury business on the money loaned at low-interest from the Japanese banks who set up high threshold for Koreans. New immigrant Japanese to Korea with no capital were given land via the Oriental Colonization Co..
Life became harder to live for many Korean families, not just for the economic reasons. In 1922 a mob of drunken Japanese in the procession of their traditional Matsuri broke a show window of a roadside store by Jongro street in Seoul and assaulted some Korean women there because they looked “down” from the second floor of the store at the procession, which they claimed to be disrespectful for the God the procession carried. It was not their country any more. They had lost their land and then the country. That’s how the huge-scale immigration was made from Korea to Japan in the time.
One of the Koreans who had to immigrate to Japan in 1930s when his small rice field was expropriated for a new airfield for Japanese military was a man named Son, who had lived near Daegu. In Japan he and his wife had to make living on menial jobs until early1960s in one of those Korean shantytowns, taking care of their little grandsons who liked to play riding on the cart they used to carry the food wastes for the little home pigsty because the kids’ father and mother stayed out for work all day. Somehow the children’s father ended up successful in his business more than enough to be able to send his children for study abroad by the time his second son had grown up to be a young lad full of ingenuity and ambitions. Later in a lecture this guy confessed he had thought he was truly a genius because of his father’s habitual exclamation “You are genius!” at every little achievement he had made. This guy’s name is Masayoshi Son, who would become the richest man in Japan as founder of Softbank, the biggest IT conglomerate in Japan, which operates the mobile carrier service and once owned Sprint before the merger with T-Mobile. 4) He is the most successful ‘Solomon’ in the real world of Zainichi.
4) According to CEOWorld Magazine issued December 1st 2021, Son was ranked No.1 with net worth of 44.4 B USD followed by Tadashi Yanai of Uniclo of net 42B. He proved his genius when he preserved his Korean family name Son throughout the Naturalization process, navigating through the loopholes of Japanese Naturalization law that requires the naturalized to use only the Japanese family name.
The immigration in the early 20th century was only the latest of demographic moves made in the past 3 millennia since the bronze age. The waves and waves of the immigrants from the peninsula arrived in Japanese archipelago to build new communities and countries with the advanced agricultural skills and related technologies, starting from the first rice paddies and fenced communities that sprouted up in Southern Japan from around 4th century BC, in the process some scholars call "agricultural colonization". As the continent and peninsula became war-ridden with advent of the horse-riding warriors, the conquerors on the horseback began to show up in Japan leaving huge tomb mounds and relics identical to those of ancient Korean kingdoms from around 4th century AD. It was almost entirely immigrant Koreans who started the new state in 7th century in Nara 5) using for the first time the name Nippon as they call their country today.
Especially the royals and aristocrats from the fallen ancient Korean kingdoms of Baekje and Koguryo led the moves during this period creating many renowned family lines in Japan. Toyota is one of the descendant families down from a prince of Baekje kingdom who came over to Japan during this period.6) The latest influx of people in large scale from Korea before the modern time was made during the war of invasion from Japan at the end of the 16th century. People up to one hundred thousand by highest estimation, selected for their expertise in porcelains, cloth-making, cuisine, painting and calligraphic, paper-making and metallic-printing technology, were brought as war prisoner to Japan as if readily mobilized for the flowering of the Edo culture that followed the end of war. This drainage of human resources, followed by another one only a few decades later, by the Qing dynasty of China in emulation of the Japanese, was a huge loss of human resources to the Korean nation, which, combined with the fanatic obsession with the Neo-Confucianism by the ruling literati class, led to the long slumber of the nation under Joseon dynasty until the late 19th century when they were finally found by the Westerners, stuck between China and Japan, weak and lethargic depleted of all its glorious dignity of the past.
5) In Korean Nara means country or capital of government. Nara-t-nim means King or the head of country and Uri-Nara means our country. In Japanese, it is written in Kanji 奈良 and is read Nara. Nara is one of the oldest Korean common nouns still being used witho its original meaning intact.
6) Ouchi 大內 was one of the most influential and richest Daimyo families based in the modern-day Yamaguchi, the port city which had monopolized the trade with Korea for hundreds of years, which happened to be the constituency of Abe. The Ouchi family was one of the most powerful Daimyo because of their monopoly on the trade with Korea, the port located closest to Korean peninsula in the Japanese main island Honshu. The first father of the Ouchi clan is recorded to have been the prince from Baekje, 'Imsung Taeja' 琳聖太子in Korean, who came over to Japan in the 7th century AD, according to the Genealogy Book of the Ouchi and Toyoda families and the local records. It was when the family lost their Daimyo position to Mori Motonari in 1557 around the end of the Warring State period that one of the sons of the primogeniture Ouchi spinned out to establish the Toyoda family. Toyoda is the Japanese pronunciation of 豊田. The character 豊 means "rich" and it was also used to indicate the ancient Korea, as in 豊國 とよ‐くに Toyo-Kuni,which meant Korea, bearing the sense of admiration that the ancient Japanese had about Korea. So, Toyoda 豊田 could mean "Korean rice field", with its literal meaning being "rich rice field". The founder of the Toyoda family, five hundred years ago, may have wanted his new family name to carry the connotation of the Korean lineage, as a spin-off of the Ouchi clan he was so proud of, but had to leave.
According to OECD, Korea, the southern half to be precise, surpassed Japan in per capita income in terms of purchasing power in 2018. 7) Reversal, if any, does not seem likely any time soon as we see South Korea ranked among the most innovative countries, way up in the list from Japan 8) and as Korean dramas, songs, food and fashions are sweeping the world, not missing out Japan. Now with Korea looming over their head, the rightist Japanese, fanfared by the pro-Abe TV talk show panelists with one or two hate-Korea bestsellers in their resume, began to talk about Japan’s contribution to modernization of Korea during the colonial period. They talk about the schools, railways and industrial facilities they built "for Koreans" during the period that spanned 1910 to 1945.
7) GDP per capita, USD, current prices and PPPs The OECD statistics is based on purchasing power, not in nominal USD. Japan is bigger economy yet because of its population size 2.3 times bigger than that of South Korea.
8) See Bloomberg Innovation Index 2021 which placed Korea at the top, ranking Japan in the 12th among many who placed among the top three. Bloomberg Innovation Index 2021.
Koreans see the following two pictures as showing the difference between man and child.
Child first.
Abe in 2013, The Nelson Report, an Asia-focused newsletter aimed at Washington politicians, compared Abe’s action to a German prime minster wearing a Nazi uniform “for fun.” Unit 731 was the covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Japanese Imperial Army that experimented on humans, including prisoners of war from China, Russia and Korea, between 1932 and 1945. The unit had the codename of “Maruta” or “log” in Japanese. He is the one , who proclaimed “no more apology to Koreans” to the effect of nullifying all the apologies made by prime ministers and Tenno, before his tenancy. He also executed the export regulation of the key items in an attempt to stall the Korean semi-conductor industry while he was alive. His grandfather on mother’s side was head of the 731 unit and war-criminal . Somehow, the war criminal became Japanese prime minister and made the model politician for Abe. Abe met Obama in Tokyo in a sushi bar in the next year this picture was taken. He acted like a minor who knew he was legally free from punishment. Who was the sponsor of this child?
Willy Brandt, German Chancellor in 1970, voluntarily kneeled down before the monument and paid one-minute silence tribute for the victims of WWII at the flower-giving ceremony on his visit to Warsaw, Poland. No such level of apology was made by Japan to Korea, China and other countries which fell victim to the Japanese atrocities and if there were some things done in the vicinity of what the German did, they were all nullified by Abe.
Now, remember the imagery Philip Garrido mumbling over the ungratefulness of Jaycee Dugard? Let’s throw away the ethics or humanity things of the civilized human society and enter the realm of the ‘C’est la vie’ philosophers, that might be more fit in dealing with the jungle of today’s international politics.
For the imaginary Garrido to earn the bragging right for feeding and raising Jaycee to a beauty, he needs to prove that her parents would not have been able to support her as good as he did. Would Koreans have not been able to grow into a modern nation by themselves, as those Japanese suggest, not to say of becoming one of the leaders of the industrialized world and the most democratic country in the East Asia?
They say history repeats itself. If one agrees to the saying, one should be able to say what is happening today could have happened in the past if given the same circumstances. In 1895 when the Queen of Joseon was slayed to death by a mob of Japanese villains who sneaked into the palace at night under the secret order of the Japanese government, Joseon had diplomatic relationships in place with the most of major powers of the time, including USA, Russia, Britain, Germany and France and, having already opened the modern telegraph and post office back in 1887, was on the way to build their first railway and the tram line in Seoul, both in collaboration with different US partners. 9) The tram line opened in 1899 in Seoul, becoming the first one in Asia since the first electric street car in the world ran in Berlin, Germany in 1881. As you might be able to guess from the way Koreans do things these days, Koreans were gritty and determined by then in taking the challenge of the new wave of technologies and social changes after a decade or two of dazed and wobbly time.
9) American businessmen named H. Collbran and H.R. Bostwick, who established the first electric power company in Korea, were the partners for the first electric tram in Seoul. Another American businessman James R. Morse got the license for the Seoul-Inchon railway in 1896 and started the work, but the management changed to Japanese as result of the Japan’s determined efforts to oust the non-Japanese from the most important utility of the country.
Japanese had been successful in painting Koreans as uncivilized and devoid of ability to stand by themselves to the Western powers. Japanese felt pressured to stop Koreans as quickly as they could since they were the ones who knew better than anyone about the potentials of the Koreans and who were the most afraid of the Korean resurgence for many special reasons of their own. That explains why they had to be so ruthless and cruel as to commit the assassination of the Korean queen at night, which made the people aghast again recently when the evidence surfaced that Japanese government had directly organized the assassination with the at-site participation of the Japanese government officers. 10)
10) Despite Japanese government’s denial, a lot of testimonies were made by witnesses of various nationality including Japanese that the terror was planned and carried out by Japanese government. A letter written by a Japanese deputy consul in Seoul, Horiguchi Kumaichi 堀口九万, to his friend in Japan on the next day of the assassination surfaced in Japan as recently as November 2021, which said he was at the site of the slaying with other Japanese officers and villains. All the Japanese involved in the slaying were later rewarded by Japanese King.
11) https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/29/what-a-difference-25-years-makes.htm
12) Hankyung Daily, 05/08/2021
In 1980s, Japan dominated the world electronics market with such nostalgic names as Hitachi, Panasonic, Sony, Sharp and Sanyo. In 1989, more than half of the 20 most valuable companies of the world were from Japan, while there was none by 2014. 11) For three consecutive years since 2018 Samsung made the more profit than all the Japanese big five electronic names combined 12) as Sony has to depend on the OLED panels supplied by LG to maintain their TV business, while Sharp has become Taiwanese.
In 2019 Japan’s Abe administration announced the export control of three key electronic parts from Japan to Korea, targeting Samsung allegedly, without which they believed the Korean semiconductor and cell phone lines would stall. It did not happen. Instead, the measure plucked up the domestic replacement of the items in Korea, that had been held back for reasons of technical risks, understandably in the industry of ultra technical precision and extreme market competition. They were successful. The Japanese parts and material suppliers involved not only saw their sales and profit shrink, but had to witness new Korean names emerging in the global market in their traditional territory. History repeats itself.
The export control measure by Abe administration was nothing compared to the queen’s assassination at the end of 19th century in ruthlessness, not because Japanese are any less anxious and reckless than they were 120 years ago, but because the situation of Korea not being so defenseless and the more transparent international environment did not leave Japanese much to do in their hand this time. But, still there is an existence lurking behind the scenes all along, who Japanese think they can manage to their advantage in the way it has worked all the time so far. Nine years after some Japanese villains climbed over the wall of the palace in Seoul, the Japan-Russia war broke out.
Thank you.
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Click the picture to enlarge.
- This essay is written by Syjo. Any questions and comments welcome via this tentative blog.
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