今度の世界遺産の登録に関して、問題意識のある日本人はどうしてこんな下手な交渉をするのだろうかと思ってしまいます。小生が北京駐在時、交通事故を起こして死亡した社員の遺族との賠償金問題で2週間に亘って交渉したとき（本当は亡くなった社員が勝手に車のｷｰを持出、運転して実家に帰るときの事故、立証できるﾍﾟｰﾊﾟｰが会社になかった）に、賠償金の振込と協議書（本件について訴えることはもうしないという条文は当然入れていましたが、その後やはりというか数か月後彼らは北京で裁判に訴えました）とのサインは同時にやりました。外務省と言うのは本当に知恵がない。学力があると言っても実際の役に立たないのであれば「屁のツッパリにもならない」のでは。基本的に中韓は「騙す方が賢く、騙される方が馬鹿」という文化です。誠実に付き合おうとしても無理。外務省の人間は国益を賭けて交渉しているという自負がなさすぎ。小生は2005年に中国から帰国し、中国の実態をありのままに述べました。会社は「右翼」とか「国粋主義者」、「人種差別主義者」扱いでしたが、今私が過去に言ってきたことを並べれば殆どの人が賛同すると思います。如何に先が読めないかという事です。今の日本人は国益・社益より自己の保身が大事と言う人が多いという事でしょう。それをうまく中韓はついてくるという事です。小生が入っています「防人と歩む会」のﾌﾞﾛｸﾞｻｲﾄに日露戦争時の東郷、上村長官のことについて渡辺利夫拓大総長と平間洋一元拓大教授の記事が掲載されていますので、是非ご覧ください。

http://www.sakimori-japan.org/?page_id=14

四方田犬彦がこういう風に言っているというのはこの記事を読んで意外の感じがしました。リベラルにありがちな「日本がすべて悪い」というGHQの刷り込みそのものを体現している人物の印象が強かったですから。知的誠実さがあれば、日本のﾏｽﾒﾃﾞｲｱ、学会が如何に事実を捻じ曲げているか分かるはずです。中韓は相手にしません。「騙す方が賢く、騙される方が馬鹿」という文化ですから。

ここは珍しく、”Japan Times”が日本の立場の主張をしてくれていると思います。やはり、対外的には英語で主張しないと世界には広がっていきません。“forced to work”の定義は”forced labor”と違うとの外務省の説明ですが、世界の一般大衆がそんな違いが分かるはずもない。それは「強制連行」と取りますよ。当たり前でしょう。敵はもう外交通商省のHPに堂々と「日本は強制連行を認めた」と主張しているのですから。相手の善意を信じてなんてのは外交官失格です。民間の方がまだましな交渉ができます。でも中国在勤時代、上司に「簡単にｻｲﾝしてはﾀﾞﾒですよ」と念を押したにも拘わらず、簡単にサインしてしまいました。中国人は賢いから文句を言う小生とﾄｯﾌﾟの席を離したのです。「このイ●ポ野郎」と言う言葉が出かかりました。40年前以上の大学で流行った“coward”の意味です。佐藤ユネスコ大使は女性ですからこういうときには何と言ったらいいのでしょうか？

この記事のように諸外国、ｱﾒﾘｶ、ﾌﾗﾝｽ、ﾍﾞﾙｷﾞｰ、ｵﾗﾝﾀﾞと比べれば日本が韓国併合時、鎮圧して殺害したのは可愛いものでしょう。ですから日本の善政を否定するため「南京大虐殺」「従軍慰安婦」とかでっち上げるのです。でも日本人の中には「そんなことを言ったって少しはあったのでは」とか言うのです。挙証責任は相手方にあるのに、何故日本人がそんなことを言うのか理解できません。自分の家で言いがかりを付けられ（事実かどうかも分からないときに）、そんなに簡単に相手の言い分を認めますか？自分のお金が絡めば躍起になるけど、日本人の名誉に関しては相手の言い分を信じてしまうのはおかしいでしょう。所詮、他人事だからです。“For one thing, many of the managers of comfort women were Korean.”と文中にもあるではないですか。第三者的に客観性を装うのは“hypocrite”以外の何物でもありません。

記事

NEW YORK – Inuhiko Yomota writes from Antananarivo that the Madagascar capital is so dusty and so polluted with car exhaust that he’s almost gotten sick.

“Madagascar is said to be the poorest country in Africa and its capital has just one bookstore, small and Catholic. Japan’s former colonies, both Taiwan and Korea, have made remarkable economic and technological advances, but none of the former French colonies has accomplished anything of the sort.”

Yomota, the international traveler-scholar par excellence, has taught at a dozen universities outside Japan, from Columbia University in New York to Federal Fluminense University in Rio de Janeiro. In South Korea, he has taught at Konkuk and Chung-Ang universities, both in Seoul, and in Taiwan, at the National Tsing Hua University, in Hsinchu.

He wrote from Madagascar this time because he is writing “Yomota Around the World” for the publisher Chikuma. He adds: “France didn’t even bother with infrastructure in Madagascar” — France annexed the large island country in 1896 and gave it independence only in 1960 — “while Holland thought only of trade in Jakarta and Britain nothing but exploitation in India.

“In contrast, Japan first thought of sanitation, education, and infrastructure” in its colonies.

Yomota’s letter came when I was thinking of George Akita and Brandon Palmer’s “The Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea: 1910-1945: A New Perspective” (MerwinAsia, 2015). For decades now, what John Kenneth Galbraith would call “conventional wisdom” on Japan’s rule of Korea has been markedly negative, and this historiography attempts to correct it, at times in great analytic detail, at times as fascinating anecdote.

Martin Fackler expressed this conventional wisdom most typically in his dispatch from Seoul for The New York Times (March 22, 2014, “U.S. as Central Stage in Asian Rivalry”).

“The conflict is rooted in grievances going back to Japan’s brutal colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, and its attempts to extinguish the Korean culture,” he wrote.

Here Fackler was reporting on the Korean success in taking the “campaign” on “comfort women” to the U.S. and beyond, although for Korea this internationalization of the matter is “an irony,” Park Yuha, professor at Sejong University, in Seoul, argues in “The Empire’s Comfort Women” (2014), a deep, thoughtful study of the comfort women controversy from a global perspective of imperialism.

That’s because, she points out, Koreans have “lived for nearly 70 years since the liberation (in 1945) by erasing their memory of collaborating with the suzerain” — Japan — “and subordinating themselves to it.” For one thing, many of the managers of comfort women were Korean.

For anybody who needs evidence for what Park says, I might point to the diary that one such Korean manager of “comfort stations” in Burma and Singapore kept during the war. An Byeong-jik, emeritus professor at Seoul National University, uncovered it in 2013, and Kazuo Hori, a professor at Kyoto University, has translated it into Japanese.

The Koreans also “ignore their other face,” Park points out. It is the fact that they have procured comfort women for American soldiers stationed in Korea, just as the Japanese had done following their defeat in 1945.

By ignoring these things, they have “enjoyed a moral arrogance through a moral superiority” over Japan. This “moral arrogance” is not just utterly unwarranted; but it also makes the Koreans blind to “the shame and regrets of those who have committed crimes.”

Was Japan’s colonization of Korea “brutal”? The New York Times editorialists, ever ready to condemn others, gladly adopted the “brutal colonization” branding in reporting on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stance (“Another Attempt to Deny Japan’s History,” Jan. 2, 2013). Shin Yong-ha, professor at Hanyang University, in Seoul, went further and said: “Koreans lived under the most ruthless colonial rule ever known in history.”

Naturally, one basic question arises, and Akita and Palmer ask it: In comparison with what?

Japan committed one extensive brutal act after it annexed Korea in 1910. On March 1, 1919, Koreans calling for independence started to gather to protest in large numbers. Assemblies were illegal. The governor-general of Korea reacted and set out to suppress the demand. The GGK’s persecution ended more or less only at the end of the year.

The number of Koreans the Japanese authorities killed in the process ranges from 553 (Japan’s official figure) to 7,509 (the figure that the Korean independence-fighter Park Eun-sik, 1859-1925, cited in his history, “The Bloody History of the Korean Independence Movement” (1920)). Either figure you take, it’s a large number of people to kill.

But, if you compare the Japanese killings with some others, the scale may pale. For example, take the number of people the Americans killed in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902. As a result of the harsh U.S. actions and measures, “600,000 Filipinos died of disease and in concentration camps or on the battlefields of Luzon alone,” Gen. Franklin Bell (1865-1919) testified before a Senate committee.

Still, the GGK was distressed enough by the uprising and the consequences of its suppression to reverse its policy, from a “military (budan) governance” to a “cultural (bunka) governance.” Thereafter, the Japanese policy concentrated on “a modern infrastructure, education system, and economy,” Akita and Palmer point out.

More notably, throughout its colonization period, Japan never practiced any of the “forced labor, economic exploitation, and destruction of recalcitrant villages, with occasional forced relocation and racial segregation,” Akita and Palmer say.

Many are likely to object to this statement, so let’s modify it by saying everything is relative. And let’s see what some of the major imperial powers did.

Among them, Belgium’s forced labor in the Congo Free State (1885-1908), which Joseph Conrad memorably depicted in “Heart of Darkness” (1899), reduced the Congo’s population from 20 to 30 million to 8.5 million by 1911.

Holland’s compulsory labor and taking as much as half of the harvest of crops in Indonesia led to frequent famines, “including one in 1850 that killed upwards of 300,000 people.” Portugal’s forced labor in Angola killed over 300,000 Africans.

And, yes, France practiced forced labor to harvest coffee in Madagascar until after World War II.

Of course, killings and exploitation in some form or another continue to this day. But relative to the era of colonialism, Japan’s rule of Korea was “moderate,” even “almost fair,” Akita and Palmer judge. I must agree with them.

Hiroaki Sato is an essayist and translator based in New York.