While procrastinating because I'm stuck on last chapter of writing, I found this article on my daily feed. You all know I love nationalism issue, and especially Japanese one. It's very different from all other nationalisms (even such fierce and blind as Korean one). Article I quote below is not for any japanofile, so if you're one of them - don't read, because of course - Japan is a land of manga and bishonens, not genocide. The same goes for Korea - it's a nonsensical country of insane paradoxes, not minams and high-heels.
Though the East Asia Gazette has already published
an article about the arrogant and frighteningly ignorant Tsujimoto
Kiichi and his fellow ultra-nationalists before, we feel compelled to do
so once again since the implications of his blog being one of the most
popular in Japan is truly unbecoming for the land of the rising sun.
The 70 year-old businessman Tsujimoto was born in Osaka in 1942. He graduated from Konan University (which ranks
188th in Japan, and almost 4,000th worldwide), located in Kobe, with a
law degree. He then became representative director of MYO Corporation.
After gaining experience by working in China, Korea, Europe and
elsewhere, he started a blog in 2006 that is read about 55,400 times a
week, and almost 291,000 times a month. The blog is called “The man who
knew too much about China and Korea.”
Throughout his blog entries, Tsujimoto punctually vents his spleen on
Chinese, Koreans and their respective countries. Statements such as “I
can only hope that in the 21st century, Japan will no longer fraternize
with barbarous China” are common as muck, and would be easily ignorable
if it weren’t for the fact that his readership is impressive.
One of his latest entries
is entitled “Troublesome Koreans - A journey in modern and contemporary
history.” He begins by pointing out, “I am not a historian. However,
history textbooks ignore that epoch’s status quo and single out Japan’s
actions, fabricating Japan’s history and viewing it in a bad light.” He
claims he cannot forgive this reasoning, which he says is a result of
Japan’s left-wing historians who have a “poisoned” perspective that has
brainwashed current generations of Japanese children.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Japan’s history textbook controversies
involve conservative historians who try to brainwash its youth by
downplaying Japan’s crimes, remolding Japanese history in a way that
seems immaculate, devoid of reprehension and thoroughly commendable.
According to R. J. Rummel,
a political science professor at the University of Hawaii, Japan’s
savage military murdered more people from 1937 to 1945 than the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing in Poland and Tito’s
slaughterhouse in Yugoslavia combined. This is a sickening reality that
is silenced and decorticated from common knowledge about Japan, to the
point that very few Westerners are aware this happened.
It is not only Japanese middle and high-school textbooks that
downplay these incidents, but also bestselling books such as “Japanese
History clearly understood” (Yomu dakede sukkiri wakaru Nihonshi)
and countless others. The willingness to ignore these events ever took
place is evident: our previous article on Tsujimoto and Japanese history
was posted on Reddit and swiftly disliked by a Japanese readership. It
had to be transferred to another section of the website in order to be
read by eyes unclouded. This testifies to the attitude for writings of
this nature to be censored, ignored and silenced as unspeakable heresy.
When posted in a different section on Reddit, one netizen commented,
“If you ask Japanese children about WWII (I am a teacher in Japan and I
have done this), they will tell you all about the atomic bombs dropped
on Japan, the fire bombing of Tokyo, and the arduous rebuilding process
that made Japan the wealthy country it is today. But when it comes to
genocide, imperialism, and medical experiments done to Asian and
American prisoners, Japanese people in general seem to have a sort of
cultural amnesia. Indeed Japanese people hate talking about anything
negative when it comes to their home, but their knowledge of one of the
worst genocides in human history borders on willful ignorance.”
Willful ignorance aptly captures Tsujimoto’s spirit. The
ultraconservative 70 year-old claims, “if Korea had been conquered by
Russia and not become a Japanese protectorate, Korea wouldn’t have been
able to gain the independence it enjoys today, nor would it have
attained its present level of enlightenment.” For him, Korea betrays
with composure and does not know how to be grateful for the benevolence
done unto it by Japan.
Tsujimoto is oblivious to the fact that, if this line of reasoning is
followed, Japan should be indebted to Korea for its entire
civilization: several years ago, Emperor Akihito publicly declared
Korean ancestry. His Majesty tells of an ancient Japanese chronicle
regarding his imperial ancestor, Kanmu, who was from a Korean kingdom.
According to the New York Times,
this lack of knowledge is easily excusable: “Japan is said to produce
the largest number of archaeologists per capita of any country, and one
of their most popular pursuits is showing that the foundations of
Japan's culture predate contact with Korea and China.”
The New York Times also quotes Professor Ronald Toby, a
historian at Tokyo University and the University of Illinois, who said,
“in a way, what is surprising about Akihito's statement isn't that he
said it, but that people were surprised. … It is quite clear that in the
seventh and eighth centuries, the emperor’s family was descended from
Koreans from the Paekche Kingdom.”
According to Junya Tanaka, curator of Tsushima’s artifacts,
“excavations of sites here show that Koreans taught Japanese how to
build some of our first castles, and we think that a prince who fled
from the peninsula played an important role in Yamato.” (Yamato is the province where the ancient capital of Nara is located. The term was then semantically extended to mean “Japan”.)
Clearly in denial about the falsehood of his credences,Tsujimoto
takes his attacks to a new level by arguing that Korea, not Japan, has
fabricated its past: “in Korea, plastic surgery is so commonplace to the
point that even former president Roh Mu-hyeon admittedly had it done;
perhaps their insensitivity to this topic is what caused them to give
surgery to their own history.”
Tsujimoto quotes Isabella Bird, a nineteenth century English explorer
and writer who traveled to China and Korea in 1897. Out of the sixteen
books she wrote, one book, Korea and Her Neighbors, was almost
entirely dedicated to the peninsula. The quote reads, “both in cities
and in the capital, the crudeness is truly hard to verbalize. Roughly
250,000 inhabitants live in mazes of dirty roads. These filthy narrow
streets are wide enough for carts and men to brush past each other. Upon
exiting the homes that run along these paths lie solid and liquid
refuse in ditches. Many dogs and blear-eyed children, half or wholly
naked, and scaly with dirt, roll in the deep dust or slime, or pant and
blink in the sun, apparently unaffected by the stenches which abound.”
Tsujimoto claims these aspects of Korean history are negated in their
textbooks.
Alas, there is no need for Korea to negate this history. Koreans are
well aware of the poverty they came from, and their prosperity is
largely a result of these painful memories. An article in The Economist
points out that “in 1960, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the
exhausted south was one of the poorest countries in the world, with an
income per head on a par with the poorest parts of Africa.” Regarding
the Cheonggyecheon river that runs through downtown Seoul, the author
writes, “its waters, dirty and hidden, were trapped beneath a roaring
highway; its surroundings were a slum of sweatshops, metal bashing and
poverty.”
Though this description seems comparable to Isabella Bird’s half a
century earlier, Korea’s strength lies in the aftermath: “The
reclamation of the Cheonggyecheon, one of the great urban-regeneration
projects of the world, has about it the air of a dream achieved. … By
the end of 2011 [Korea] will be richer than the European Union average,
with a gross domestic product per person of $31,750, calculated on a
basis of purchasing-power parity (PPP), compared with $31,550 for the
EU. South Korea is the only country that has so far managed to go from
being the recipient of a lot of development aid to being rich within a
working life. For most poor countries, South Korea is a model of growth,
a better exemplar than China, which is too vast to copy, and better,
too, than Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong."
Rich within a working life. That is the key, the reason why there’s
no need for Korea to negate its history: it experienced poverty
first-hand, and came out of it egregiously
Korea is currently constructing a $40 billion city
called Songdo which aims to build a place that provides “everything one
could possibly want, need and dream of in a world-class city.”
According to The Economist, Songdo will feature the world’s
best-equipped school with a 650-seat theater and its own TV studio,
electric water taxis, a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course and huge
swathes devoted to staying green, including a 40-hectare park in the
center of town. What’s more, South Korea’s Hanwha conglomerate recently
signed an $8 billion contract to build an entire Iraqi city of 100,000
homes, JoongAng Daily recently reported.
Tsujimoto’s insight is myopic; his vitriolic words, an endless stream
of patriotic nonsense. What’s frightening is his large audience and
their “willful ignorance” to believe chauvinist falsehoods over
documented truths. Japan is a land rich in cultural treasures, but those
in denial must remember that all that glitters is not gold. More than
anything, they must bear in mind actress Yuki Kudo’s sensible words: “We
need the confidence with which to see the good qualities hidden in our
history and tell the world about them. We need a flexible mind with
which we can learn about mistakes in our history and turn them into
positive lessons.”
Article and pictures found on East Asia Gazette.
Author: Daniele
