Foreign News: "Aigo"
Throughout Japan the local police vainly attempted to suppress "loud-wailing parties" (Aigo) indulged in by friends of the late (TIME, April 19, MILESTONES) Emperor Yi of Korea (deposed 1910). The Japanese Cabinet voted to expend 100,000 yen ($47,000) upon a stupendous funeral, to be held over his remains.
Japanese pridefully recalled that the onetime great Empire of Korea is now administered by a Japanese Governor General.
I don't get the pridefully recalled thing.... What were they on back then?
ReplyDeleteI think it's a case of people believing their own propaganda.
ReplyDeleteThe Korea bashers would be loath to admit it, but Choson was at one time a big deal. It did become a decrepit shell of a kingdom as the rigidity of neo-Confucianism led to corruption and an inability to respond to new challenges and threats, but it was at one time, in the vernacular of today's youth, "the shit." Before it went to shit.
So being lord over a once great kingdom would be something to be prideful about, especially if you thought your country was responsible for bringing a new glorious era to that erstwhile imperial has-been.
Kushibo, are you really claiming that Japan did not liberate Korea in 1910, and that Korea was not Japan's greatest ally in the World War 2?
ReplyDeleteI also believe that Estonians were liberated by the Soviets in 1940, and that Estonia was the Soviet Union's best ally during the Afghan war.
I had this already in my own place, but I find the following quote from Andre Schmid's Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, pp.169-70, (a great book!) quite illustrative:
When Taehan Maeil Sinbo [March 10, 1910] asked about foreigners' impression of Korea -- "Is the image of Korea in the eyes of Europeans and Americans a true view of Korea? Or is the image of Korea in the eyes of Japanese a true view of Korea?" -- it assumed that the former wass indpendent of the latter. But just as with Korean self-knowledge, Western understanding of Korea was also engaged with Japanese colonial discourse. Although these theories were variously, even critically, treated in some Western accounts, the fact that the principal subjects such as Jingû and Mimana came to be reproduced shows how Japanese colonial discourse had insinuated itself into Western knowledge on Korea. Able to shape Korean nationalist self-perceptions, Japanese colonial writing also was the source of information for much Western writing. Knowledge about Korea -- whether inside peninsula, in Japan, or in the West and whether about the peninsula's present or its past -- came to be deeply informed by the politics of colonialism.
Yeah great, liberation of Korea. Liberation from what? Nazi Germany was quite good at liberating Western Europe too... Hell Saddam liberated Kuwait, Soviet Union liberated Afghanistan... scuse my language but that's a bunch of bullshit
ReplyDeleteAntti said:
ReplyDeleteKushibo, are you really claiming that Japan did not liberate Korea in 1910, and that Korea was not Japan's greatest ally in the World War 2?
I assume you're kidding, right?
I also believe that Estonians were liberated by the Soviets in 1940, and that Estonia was the Soviet Union's best ally during the Afghan war.
Yeah, now I'm pretty sure you're kidding. But there are some people who really do believe that. GBev, I think it was, has referred to Korea as Japan's closest ally in World War II.
When a country has forcibly been completely absorbed and has absolutely no say in its foreign affairs, it's quite a stretch to say that the absorbed country is an "ally" of the other. And in Korea's case, when the Japanese had so little trust of the people (evidenced by the need for a large, oppressive police force, and the fact that the Japanese authorities didn't trust the loyalty of Koreans—"volunteers" or conscripts—in uniform) it is an even harder case to make.
The blatant collaboration of a handful of opportunists (different from people who were just trying to get by) does not make Korea Japan's closest ally, or an ally at all.
It's even more absurd when some of the people who make that claim (that a forcibly occupied Korea was Japan's closest ally) also suggest that Korea—in voluntary association with the United States by treaty and by on-going cooperation—is not an ally of the US. Something of a double standard there, but a double standard unified by basic disdain for Korea.