Ichigen koji (275)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

A certain media outlet asked me to review some book about the South Korean presidential election. When I asked them if I could choose the book to review, they told me to choose whichever book I liked from my perspective. When I asked them if they would accept a book with a slanted viewpoint, they said that would be fine. I accepted the job on those terms. But then they told me I couldn’t use the book I selected.

– Kimura Kan, Kobe University professor

Ichigen koji (274)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

South Korean historical scholar Cheong Jae-jeong’s statement that Takeshima is the same as Mt. Fuji for the South Korean people is absurd. The intellectuals and the mass media give their full support to the government’s propaganda that small islets which had no meaning for them 60 years ago are now the symbol of the race. Cheong is affiliated with the Korean Northeast Asian History Foundation, which is a propaganda organ. It would be pointless to conduct joint historical research with them.

– The Tweeter known as Aceface

All you have to do is look (149)

Kukuchi-jo, a (perhaps) Korean-style fortress, now a national historical structure in a national park in Yamaga, Kumamoto. It is not known when it was built, but the name first appears in written records in 698. Here’s the Japanese-language website.

Ichigen koji (272)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

Whenever the Emperor is brought up, the Japanese dispense with reason and lose their capacity for judgment. The Japan that existed before the Second World War again shows its face. It’s the same with the Japanese government and their attitude that they can’t let anyone say one word about the Emperor.

– A Choson Ilbo editorial

Ichigen koji (271)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

There has been a lot of discussion in South Korea recently that they’ve succumbed to the “Japanese Disease”. But the vast majority believes they can overcome it if they boost the growth rate. Whenever I ask South Koreans about the lack of manpower due to the aging of society, they say they can overcome their demographic problems by bringing in a large number of people from China and elsewhere. Most people answer, “All we have to do is utilize people from North Korea and China.”

– Suzuoki Takabumi of the Nikkei Shimbun

Ichigen koji (267)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

Those people opposed to participation in the TPP negotiations do so on the premise that Japan will absolutely lose. In that case, can we win with in a free trade agreement with China and South Korea, the EPA/EIA with the EU, or the RCEP with ASEAN? We won’t know unless we try. The key is what happens when the treaty provisions are written into national law at the end of the process. It would be pointless to sign a treaty without the attendant domestic law.

– Takahashi Yoichi, economic advisor to the Japan Restoration Party, Your Party, and others

Ichigen koji (266)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

I’m quickly putting together a paper on the Japanese population in South Korea. The more I conduct research, the more it appears that the presence of the Unification Church is the decisive factor. If what I’ve heard can be believed, there are roughly 7,000 Japanese women now living in South Korea. About 30% of that total, and 70% of all international marriages (with Japanese) are related to the Unification Church.

– Kimura Kan, Kobe University professor

Where it all started, and where it all starts

HERE are two related posts. The first is an excerpt of an article that appeared on the website of the Cheonji Ilbo, a South Korean religious daily that focuses on history, culture, and religion.

The Race that Knows History will be the Masters of the Future

“Hang Sang-won, professor of East Asian and Western linguistics, holds that the countries that do not know history are idiots and will be rendered extinct.

“It is not possible to understand the history of Asia without an understanding of Dangun-era Joseon in the ancient history of Northeast Asia. (N.B.: According to legend, Dangun founded Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom, in 2,333 BC).

“Dangun-era Joseon is that important for ancient history, but it is impossible to understand why South Korea does not recognize its importance.

“Though Japan and China make up history that didn’t exist, why do you Koreans believe that history which actually existed did not exist? This country is unbelievable.

“It all started with the scholars who taught the distorted historical falsehoods of the toadyism and colonialism concocted first by the Chinese and the Japanese. We must authenticate the resplendent civilization that was the start of human history by restoring the history that was shredded. Yet the scholars without common sense, neutered by the transmission of that which is erroneous, who destroy the true history by declaring it false, hold firm to the mendacity.

“The history and civilization of humankind began in the East and moved westward. Western historians past and present are well aware of the importance of the history of humankind. The historical philosophers of the West have insisted on meeting the “wise men of the East”. They have included Francis Bacon, Albert Einstein, and Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee once said that human civilization will move from Europe and the North American continent to Northeast Asia. He predicted the reality of today.

“The people of the West now have nothing to brag about. They have no history or philosophy worth mentioning. That’s because the roots of the history and philosophy they are so proud of originated in the East. This fact is also well known by people in the West….

“…The Oxford English Dictionary, published from the early 1800s to the early 1900s, makes clear through linguistic proof that humanity originated with the Korean people.

“To cite a familiar example, there is the word “khan”, which means ruler. If we remove the silent K, it becomes Han. In other words, “Hanguk” (South Korea) means either the country ruled by the king, or the race with hereditary rule by kings.…

“…As a result of linguistic research in the East and the West, it was determined that the origin of humanity was the Korean people. They were the Dongyi people who created a flourishing civilization in the Pamir Mountains (of Central Asia) even earlier than the Sumerian civilization that so astounded the Westerners. We must know that the Dongyi are our ancestors, the Khan people who used Chinese characters, moved to Sumer, and created the foundation of contemporary Western civilization.”

The second is the introduction to a book by Takushoku University Prof. O Seon-hwa. She was born in Jeju in 1956 and first came to Japan in 1983.

“The arrogant attitude that the culture of one’s tribe is the standard, and that the culture of other tribes, such as the customs of their daily lives, their ways of thought, and the forms of their behavior, are disgraceful, irrational, mistaken, and inferior, is known as ethnocentrism.

“It can only be said that the Koreans’ belief that their culture’s value system is more proper and splendid than any other has exceeded normal bounds to a substantial degree.

“The damage of ethnocentrism is manifest in the self-serving fantasies and an unwillingness to look at reality. This problem is serious in South Korea because this way of thinking now extends into academia.”

Nishioka Tsutomu on the comfort women (Part 4 of 4)

NISHIOKA Tsutomu, a researcher associated with Tokyo Christian University, has been conducting research into the comfort women for more than 20 years.

Earlier this year he published an article on the subject in the biweekly Sapio magazine. He split it up into four parts on his website. Here is Part Four.

*****

In August 2011, the Constitutional Court of Korea handed down a surprising ruling that the failure of the South Korean government to demand compensation from Japan for the comfort women (in the 1965 treaty) was a violation of the country’s Constitution.

The backdrop to this decision was a statement prepared in 2006 by the leftist, North Korean-friendly administration of then-President Roh Moo-hyun. It referred to “the continued demand made to the Japanese government about inhumane and illegal acts, including the Japanese military comfort women, which were not dealt with in the Korean-Japanese agreement on the right of claim”. As I have already noted, the South Korean government made no claims about the comfort woman issue during the negotiations to normalize relations. The persistent efforts of anti-Japan Japanese, however, ignited this issue. That led to the South Korean government’s far-fetched view that the right to seek compensation remained because they didn’t exercise it during the original negotiations.

Using that as a basis, the former comfort women claimed it was unconstitutional for the South Korean government to have not sought compensation from Japan, in opposition to the government’s view. The court’s decision quoted from the report of the UN Commission on Human Rights and the US House of Representatives’ resolution to state as fact the idea that the comfort women were sex slaves. It asked the South Korean government to conduct negotiations with Japan based on that perspective. The placement of a comfort woman statue in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, the placement of similar statues in locations throughout the United States, and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s forceful claims on the issue during the summit meeting in December last year with Prime Minister Noda are all well known.

An organizational response is indispensable to defend Japan’s honor against this international plot. The Foreign Ministry will not deal with this issue. As with the issue of North Korean abductions, a special section directly under the prime minister and a ministerial portfolio should be created. An advisory panel with specialists should also be established. The government’s administrative investigation rights should be exercised to determine why the 1996 rebuttal to the UN report was withdrawn. A new declaration by the chief cabinet secretary about the comfort woman issue should be issued to replace the Kono Declaration. It is urgent that the idea equating comfort women with sex slaves be clearly repudiated.

Nishioka Tsutomu on the comfort women (Part 3 of 4)

NISHIOKA Tsutomu, a researcher associated with Tokyo Christian University, has been conducting research into the comfort women for more than 20 years.

Earlier this year he published an article on the subject in the biweekly Sapio magazine. He split it up into four parts on his website. Here is Part Three.

*****
The second great uproar began when Japanese left-wing academics, encouraged by the Kono doctrine, wrote about the coercion of comfort women in junior high school textbooks. Other scholars, intellectuals, and many citizens formed the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. In addition, the late Nakagawa Shoichi, Abe Shinzo, and other conservative politicians with a conscience joined the ranks of those who argued there was no coercion.

At the start of a live, late-night television program on the comfort women broadcast in 1997, I asked Prof. Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Chuo University if it had been proven that comfort women were forcibly seized under government authority on the Korean Peninsula. He answered that it had not. At this point, even the leftwing scholars could no longer quote the testimony of Yoshida or Kim Hak-sun.

In 2006, however, soon after the Abe Shinzo Cabinet was inaugurated, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution calling on the Japanese government to give a formal apology to the comfort women and compensate them for sexual slavery. During a debate in the Diet, Prime Minister Abe explained there was no coercion of the comfort woman, based on the results of the domestic debate. He was harshly criticized by the American media, and bilateral relations began to grow strained. The backdrop to these developments was that an anti-Japan Japanese took the comfort woman as sex slave theory to the UN and spread the lie internationally.

It was Japanese lawyer Totsuka Etsuro who conceived of the international scheme to equate comfort women with sex slaves. He wrote rather self-importantly about his idea in War and Sex, Vol. 25, May 2006.

As a representative of the IED NGO, I first brought up the military comfort woman issue of the forced recruitment of North and South Koreans during the war at the UN Commission on Human Rights in February 1992. We demanded that the Japanese government take responsibility, and asked the UN to respond…

…Until then, there had never been a consideration of the military comfort woman issue on the basis of international law. A new investigation was necessary to determine how to evaluate the issue. As a result, I defined (the women) as sex slaves of Japan’s Imperial Army.

Totsuka’s definition was the start of the anti-Japan plot in the international community. A Japanese went to the UN and continued to slander his nation in contravention of the facts, so it was relatively easy for the diplomats of many countries to get caught up in the plot. The activities of his UN lobby included 18 trips overseas during the four-year period from 1992 to 1995. Of these, 14 were made to Europe, two to the U.S., and one each to South Korea and China. As a result of this relentless, abnormal activity, Totsuka’s sex slave theory was adopted in an official UN document in 1996.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, a special rapporteur on violence against women, submitted a report to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1996 titled, “Report on the mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the issue of the military sexual slavery in wartime”. She wrote:

The Special Rapporteur would like to clarify at the outset of this report that she considers the case of women forced to render sexual services in wartime by and/or for the use of armed forces a practice of military sexual slavery.

This document is based on the testimony of Yoshida Seiji and the idea that comfort women were forcibly recruited as part of the volunteer corps. This recognition of the facts is in error. Before this report was adopted, the Foreign Ministry submitted a 40-page report in rebuttal to the Human Rights Commission. This rebuttal was suddenly withdrawn, however, and replaced with a document stating that Japan had already apologized. It made no reference to the facts of the matter. The prime minister of Japan at the time was Murayama Tomi’ichi of the Socialist Party. Since then, the Foreign Ministry has issued no rebuttal with a discussion of the facts. This was the spark for the resolution in U.S. House of Representatives.

Afterwords:

The Yoshida book had already been discredited both in Japan and South Korea by the time it was cited in the Coomaraswamy report.

Nishioka Tsutomu on the comfort women (Part 2 of 4)

NISHIOKA Tsutomu, a researcher associated with Tokyo Christian University, has been conducting research into the comfort women for more than 20 years.

Earlier this year he published an article on the subject in the biweekly Sapio magazine. He split it up into four parts on his website. Part One was published yesterday. Here is Part Two.

*****
Eight years after Yoshida’s testimony, on 11 August 1991, the first great uproar over the comfort women began when the Asahi Shimbun published a newspaper article filled with falsehoods. The article was accompanied by a large headline that read, A Korean Comfort Woman Reluctantly Speaks a Half-Century after the War. The lede read:

Korean comfort women were taken to the battlefield during the Japan-China War and the Second World War as the “volunteer corps” and forced to prostitute themselves to Japanese soldiers. We discovered one of them still living in Seoul. The Council for Dealing with the Problem of the South Korean Volunteer Corps began the work of interviewing her.

The mistaken report took up the malevolent claims of Yoshida’s testimony by saying that the women were taken to the front under the name of the “volunteer corps”. Kim Hak-sun, the comfort woman who spoke out, did not say that she was taken to the battlefield as part of the “volunteer corps”. Her mother sold her as a gisaeng for 40 yen because the family was poor. The Asahi Shimbun has yet to correct its mistake to this day.

The article was written by Uemura Takashi, who was married to the daughter of an executive in the group known as the (South Korean) Association for Bereaved Families of the Pacific War victims. They brought suit against the Japanese government seeking compensation. It is difficult to forgive someone who used the pages of the Asahi to write a lie, giving his mother-in-law’s suit more credibility.

When then-Prime Minister Miyazawa Ki’ichi visited South Korea in January 1992, he apologized to President Roh Tae-woo eight times. That year in February, I asked a senior member of the Northeast Asia section of the Foreign Ministry whether the prime minister had apologized because he recognized that the women had been taken forcibly under government authority, or whether he apologized for the damage down by prostitution caused by poverty. I was surprised by the answer I received: We’re going to start investigating that now.

I wrote an article with the above content for the April issue of the Bungei Shunju that year. Right after that article appeared, Prof. Jin Uk-eon, whose field of specialty is modern history, went to Jeju to conduct a survey about Yoshida’s testimony. He discovered the previously mentioned article in the Jeju newspaper and revealed that Yoshida had lied.

An Byeong-jik, a professor emeritus at Seoul University, conducted an academic study of the testimony of the comfort women who had come forward other than Kim Hak-sun. He concluded that it was not possible to verify the claim that they had been forcibly taken under government authority. Starting in January 1992, the Japanese government thoroughly examined official documents. They found that the volunteer corps system and the comfort women were completely separate, and there were no official documents that indicated the women had been forcibly taken under government authority. Thus, the first dispute ended with the determination of the actual facts.

The Japanese government, however, did not present a rebuttal based on the facts. They conducted the cowardly diplomacy of continuing to apologize while putting off the resolution of the problem. This shouldn’t have been an issue to begin with, but it became a serious issue in Japan-Korean relations.

In confidential discussions, the South Korean government asked the Japanese government to recognize coercion. If Japan did so, they suggested, it would end the problem in bilateral relations. Pandering to the South Koreans, the Foreign Ministry bureaucrats and Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono turned their backs on Japan. The bureaucrats employed the sophistry that there was coercion because the women didn’t want to become comfort women. The government issued the Kono Declaration in August 1993 as a representation of the government’s apology.

Nishioka Tsutomu on the comfort women (Part 1 of 4)

NISHIOKA Tsutomu, a researcher associated with Tokyo Christian University, has been conducting research into the comfort women for more than 20 years.

Earlier this year he published an article on the subject in the biweekly Sapio magazine. He split it up into four parts on his website. Here is Part One.

*****

THE furor over the comfort women erupted again last year. This is the fourth time. The first started in 1991, when the Asahi Shimbun printed the error-filled report that a Korean woman who sold her body as a gisaeng was compelled to join the volunteer corps. It ended in 1994 with the issuance of the Kono Declaration. The second occurred during the turmoil in 1996 in Japan, when intellectuals and Diet members raised the issue. They claimed information included in junior high school textbooks whose screening was complete contained erroneous documentation about the forcible recruitment of comfort women. The adoption in 2007 by the U.S. House of Representatives of a resolution censuring Japan for forcing women to become sex slaves was the third. I have been involved in this debate since 1991, more than 20 years.

Initially, I took the stand that while the comfort women existed, there was no comfort woman problem. First, I did not recognize that comfort women were captured through the exercise of public power, and that they were victims of the sex trade due to poverty. Second, I held that the 1965 treaty between Japan and South Korea had completely and finally resolved the issue of postwar reparations to South Korea. Therefore, my claim was that nothing remained to be resolved.

My thinking changed with the fourth eruption last year, however. As a result of the activities of some professional anti-Japan Japanese and anti-Japanese South Korean activists whose aim was to destroy Japan-Korean relations, the falsehood that the Japanese army made South Korean and other women sex slaves began to spread overseas. Many foreigners, including young South Koreans, believed this to be a fact, and this problem should be resolved. I began to rigorously think of the comfort woman problem as an issue of how to clear away the falsehood of the sex slave theory.

Therefore, I wanted to confirm the identity of the first person to expound the sex slave theory. That was Yoshida Seiji, a professional anti-Japanese Japanese. The idea did not come from South Korea.

The first president after the Korean nation was established in 1948 was independence activist Yi Seung-man. The Yi administration conducted negotiations with Japan for the normalization of relations. At that time, the Koreans demanded money from Japan for a variety of reasons to extract the maximum amount of postwar reparations. The 1951 list included eight different categories. One of them was compensation to the people impressed into service because of the war. The comfort women were not part of this category. At that time, most South Koreans knew of the circumstances of the colonial period. Though the Yi Seung-man administration pursued anti-Japanese policies, they did not ask for money for the comfort women in the diplomatic negotiations.

The sex slave theory was not brought up during the 1965 negotiations, either. That arose with the publication of Yoshida Seiji’s 1983 book, My War Crimes. Yoshida said the army ordered him in 1943 to mobilize Korean women for the volunteer corps. He also said he led a group of Japanese soldiers on Jeju to round up young, unmarried women and mothers with infants, take them away in trucks, and rape them.

Yoshida’s book was published in Japanese in 1989. A female reporter with the local newspaper on Jeju covered the story, and all the residents told her nothing like that had happened. An article was published in that newspaper on 14 August 1989 that said Yoshida lied. That newspaper article attracted little attention, however. The sex slave theory began to spread from among Japanese and Korean scholars and anti-Japanese activists.

That is the preliminary history.

Normalization

Foreigners are making a big commotion about how Japan is moving to the right, but that’s all those people have been saying for the past 60 years. We’re not on some clock, and even if we are moving rightward, militarism is not going to return. So, just how far to the right is Japan moving then?

– The Tweeter known as Aceface

JAPAN will go to the polls on Sunday to select 480 members of the lower house of the Diet, and, as a consequence, a new government. This will be an important election for several reasons. One is that it will be the first election after the Democratic Party of Japan betrayed the public’s trust in the same way the Liberal-Democratic Party did post-Koizumi, while demonstrating unspeakable incompetence in the bargain. Thus, the politicians are facing an electorate who does not want to get fooled again.

Another is that it will be the expression of the political will of a younger generation of Japanese for whom debate of events several decades ago in a world long dead and gone has no meaning. Why should they? Their parents were born after the war. It is as of little interest to them as America’s victory in that war is for the Millennials in the United States, many of whom don’t know the difference between Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt.

Regardless of who wins — and it looks now as if a negotiated coalition could result — there will be more people in the Diet representing ideas that make some people outside the country uncomfortable. There is growing interest in amending the Japanese Constitution to remove the indignity of Article 9, the peace clause. Everyone has the right to defend themselves, including the Japanese. Americans once thought, and many still do, that self-defense is a natural and inalienable right. Events over the years have shown the Japanese are no more likely to become involved in malevolent adventures abroad than any other country. Events in recent years have shown they are a lot less likely to become involved in those adventures than some of their neighbors.

Osaka Mayor Hashimoto Toru isn’t running for the Diet, but he —- and Chinese behavior — has made constitutional reform a legitimate issue for public discussion. Some detractors label him a dictator and use the word Hashism as a code word for his movement. That reaction to what he represents shares much in common with those in America who tar with the racist brush those who criticize Barack Obama for spending too much time on the golf course or employing the poison ball brand of Chicago politics he was schooled in.

Dictatorial? Mr. Hashimoto wants a national referendum on the question. What could be more democratic?

The Osaka mayor also said:

We must create the defensive capabilities and policies for Japan to defend its sovereignty and land by itself.

He and many like him would draw the line with China which needs to be drawn and continue cooperation with the United States. He’s written:

China has become a great power with responsibility, so it also has to behave responsibly. Demonstrations are one thing, but they have to stop the violence. It would also be a good idea to end the childish threats to cut off all relations whenever disputes occur. The international community jeers at them behind their back….

…Japan should be proud of the path it has taken in the postwar period. It should be proud of the more than JPY 3 trillion in ODA they’ve given to China. It should say what needs to be said to China. But we should also be aware that it won’t be so easy to wash away our past behavior.

As for other territorial disputes:

We cannot change South Korea’s effective control of Takeshima with military force.

He therefore proposed joint management of the islets while taking the case to the International Court of Justice. (Prime Minister Noda’s government is backing off their threat to do so. They’re waiting to see who wins the South Korean presidential election and thought sub-ministerial discussions with the Koreans have gone well lately. All of that is pointless considering the hard-wired Korean intransigence.)

He’s also in favor of downsizing government, rethinking the government’s social welfare responsibilities, decentralizing government authority, and controlling the out-of-control public sector unions.

Another result of the election is that Abe Shinzo, who also wants to amend the Constitution, and who passed the legislation enabling national referendums during his term as prime minister, might be serving a second term.

That the Chinese, the South Koreans, and some in the United States throw up their hands as if they were maidens threatened with violation and exclaim “extreme right wing!” or “nationalism!” says more about them than it does about the Japanese. Ending the renunciation of warfare and enforced pacifism is not right-wing, nationalistic, hawkish, or abnormal. The abnormality lies with those who object because they might lose their favorite diplomatic weapon. Are Japanese born with some geopolitical original sin that afflicts no one else?

The real complaint is that Japan is moving to end the postwar regime. That would inconvenience too many people not only in China and South Korea, but also the United States. Who knows? If they keep going down this road, Japan might actually start to tell the Americans no. Can’t have that, can we?

William Choong in the Straits Times of Singapore understands. He discusses both Mr. Hashimoto and Mr. Abe in this article, and says:

(I)t is important to see things in perspective. Japan’s rightward shift does not mean that it will go all the way right and revert to its odious World War II-era aggression. Instead, Japan is moving right to the centre.

In the long run, Japan will become a “normal” country – it will retain the right to wage war, assemble a standing army (as opposed to self-defence forces), and contribute substantially to the provision of regional and global security.

(Forgive him the “all the way to the right” line. Pre-war Japan had fascist political tendencies, and those are always statist — and therefore of the left.)

Mr. Choong also quotes University of Macau Prof. Wang Jianwei on China’s proper response:

Japan should sign a formal statement of apology for its wartime crimes, ban visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by its prime ministers, relinquish its bid to control the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands and resolve the dispute through negotiation.

If Japan were to agree to such conditions, China could, writes Prof Wang, recognize Japan’s “normal” country status and even support Tokyo’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.

Why the Chinese need another apology from the Japanese government after having received more than 20 already, JPY 3 trillion in ODA as de facto reparations, and signed a treaty normalizing relations that pledged to let bygones be bygones is not explained. In any event, China would be no more likely to keep its promise about supporting a Security Council seat than the South Koreans have kept their promises in bilateral negotiations over the years.

In a larger sense that few people outside the country can understand, Sunday’s election is not about government. Japan has all the government it needs, and like everyone else, needs a lot less of what it has.

Rather, the vote on Sunday will be another step in Japan’s reclamation of its nationhood. When that reclamation is complete, then it will be normal again.

*****
It’s been a long and winding road.

Ichigen koji (257)

一言居士
– A person who has something to say about everything

(Joong-an Ilbo headline: South Korea-China summit — Territorial disputes are due to Japan’s rightward shift)

Even if Japan were shifting to the right, the general public of those countries would not have been provoked to shouting discriminatory slogans and engaging in violent behavior by government agitation, unless the leader of one of those countries had not landed on an island under dispute. Otherwise, there would be no reason for concern in neighboring countries. In other words, there are no modern states built on the rule of law among our neighbors.

– The Tweeter known as Aceface

All you have to do is read

THE following are excerpts from The Economic History of Korea, by Myung Soo Cha of Yeungnam University.

Under the heading of Dynamic Degeneration, which refers to the Chosun Dynasty:

“Population growth came to a halt around 1800, and a century of demographic stagnation followed due to a higher level of mortality. During the nineteenth century, living standards appeared to deteriorate. Both wages and rents fell, tax receipts shrank, and budget deficits expanded, forcing the government to resort to debasement. Peasant rebellions occurred more frequently, and poor peasants left Korea for northern China.

“Given that both acreage and population remained stable during the nineteenth century, the worsening living standards imply that the aggregate output contracted, because land and labor were being used in an ever more inefficient way. The decline in efficiency appeared to have much to do with disintegrating system of water control, which included flood control and irrigation.”

The next heading is Colonial Transition to Modern Economic Growth:

“Less than two decades after having been opened by Commodore Perry, Japan first made its ambitions about Korea known by forcing the country open to trade in 1876. Defeating Russia in the war of 1905, Japan virtually annexed Korea, which was made official five years later. What replaced the feeble and predatory bureaucracy of the ChosǑn dynasty was a developmental state. Drawing on the Meiji government’s experience, the colonial state introduced a set of expensive policy measures to modernize Korea. One important project was to improve infrastructure: railway lines were extended, and roads and harbors and communication networks were improved, which rapidly integrated goods and factor markets both nationally and internationally. Another project was a vigorous health campaign: the colonial government improved public hygiene, introduced modern medicine, and built hospitals, significantly accelerating the mortality decline set in motion around 1890, apparently by the introduction of the smallpox vaccination. The mortality transition resulted in a population expanding 1.4% per year during the colonial period. The third project was to revamp education. As modern teaching institutions quickly replaced traditional schools teaching Chinese classics, primary school enrollment ration rose from 1 percent in 1910 to 47 percent in 1943. Finally, the cadastral survey (1910-18) modernized and legalized property rights to land, which boosted not only the efficiency in land use, but also tax revenue from landowners. These modernization efforts generated sizable public deficits, which the colonial government could finance partly by floating bonds in Japan and partly by unilateral transfers from the Japanese government.

“The colonial government implemented industrial policy as well. The Rice Production Development Program (1920-1933), a policy response to the Rice Riots in Japan in 1918, was aimed at increasing rice supply within the Japanese empire. In colonial Korea, the program placed particular emphasis upon reversing the decay in water control. The colonial government provided subsidies for irrigation projects, and set up institutions to lower information, negotiation, and enforcement costs in building new waterways and reservoirs. Improved irrigation made it possible for peasants to grow high yielding rice seed varieties. Completion of a chemical fertilizer factory in 1927 increased the use of fertilizer, further boosting the yields from the new type of rice seeds. Rice prices fell rapidly in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the wake of the world agricultural depression, leading to the suspension of the program in 1933.

“Despite the Rice Program, the structure of the colonial economy has been shifting away from agriculture towards manufacturing ever since the beginning of the colonial rule at a consistent pace. From 1911-40 the share of manufacturing in GDP increased from 6 percent to 28 percent, and the share of agriculture fell from 76 percent to 41 percent. Major causes of the structural change included diffusion of modern manufacturing technology, the world agricultural depression shifting the terms of trade in favor of manufacturing, and Japan’s early recovery from the Great Depression generating an investment boom in the colony. Also Korea’s cheap labor and natural resources and the introduction of controls on output and investment in Japan to mitigate the impact of the Depression helped attract direct investment in the colony. Finally, subjugating party politicians and pushing Japan into the Second World War with the invasion of China in 1937, the Japanese military began to develop northern parts of Korea peninsula as an industrial base producing munitions.

“The institutional modernization, technological diffusion, and the inflow of Japanese capital put an end to the Malthusian degeneration and pushed Korea onto the path of modern economic growth. Both rents and wages stopped falling and started to rise from the early twentieth century. As the population explosion made labor increasingly abundant vis-a-vis land, rents increased more rapidly than wages, suggesting that income distribution became less equal during the colonial period. Per capita output rose faster than one percent per year from 1911-38.

“Per capita grain consumption declined during the colonial period, providing grounds for traditional criticism of the Japanese colonialism exploiting Korea. However, per capita real consumption increased, due to rising non-grain and non-good consumption, and Koreans were also getting better education and living longer. In the late 1920s, life expectancy at birth was 37 years, an estimate several years longer than in China and almost ten years shorter than in Japan. Life expectancy increased to 43 years at the end of the colonial period. Male mean stature was slightly higher than 160 centimeters at the end of the 1920s, a number not significantly different from the Chinese or Japanese height, and appeared to become shorter during the latter half of the colonial period.”

It concludes with the heading South Korean Prosperity:

“In the quarter century following the policy shift in the early 1960s, the South Korean per capita output grew at an unusually rapid rate of 7 percent per year, a growth performance paralleled only by Taiwan and two city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore. The portion of South Koreans enjoying the benefits of the growth increased more rapidly from the end of 1970s, when the rising trend in the Gini coefficient (which measures the inequality of income distribution) since the colonial period was reversed. The growth was attributable far more to increased use of productive inputs — physical capital in particular — than to productivity advances. The rapid capital accumulation was driven by an increasingly high savings rate due to a falling dependency ratio, a lagged outcome of rapidly falling mortality during the colonial period. The high growth was also aided by accumulation of human capital, which started with the introduction of modern education under the Japanese rule. Finally, the South Korean developmental state, as symbolized by Park Chung Hee, a former officer of the Japanese Imperial army serving in wartime Manchuria, was closely modeled upon the colonial system of government. In short, South Korea grew on the shoulders of the colonial achievement, rather than emerging out of the ashes left by the Korean War, as is sometimes asserted.”

The South Koreans have installed a billboard on Times Square in New York demanding that the Japanese Emperor get down on his knees and apologize for his nation’s crimes in Korea as Willy Brandt did in Warsaw. (It is coupled with a billboard for a bibimbap restaurant. Synergistic advertising.)

Getting down on one’s knees is the appropriate reaction, but they’ve got the actors confused. South Koreans should get down on their knees and thank the nation of the Japanese Emperor that the people in Seoul and Busan don’t live like the people in Pyeongyang. (At least the ones not sympathetic to the Kim Dynasty should.)

But that wouldn’t be necessary. The Japanese would probably be fine to let the dead bury the dead, look to the future, and just get on with it.