Japanese → English transcript

Well, since Germany has been coming up as a topic, let me just add something while we are at it: Germany, fifty years later, has already forgotten the earlier events, and—

Or people say it has been forgiven, but I think Germany will probably not be forgiven for a thousand years.

In other words, what Germany did is fundamentally different from what Japan did.

To wipe a single people off the face of the earth, they put six, seven million people into concentration camps and killed them in gas chambers.

As for that crime, well, perhaps Stalin did something similar,

but it is absolutely not something that can be compared with Japanese militarism.

And in that context, when we talk about the Japan–Korea relationship, people often bring up the relationship between Germany and Poland.

You may only be thinking about Jews or Gypsies when it comes to the crimes Germany committed,

but the crimes Germany committed against Poland were terrible. During the occupation of Poland, the Germans

did not allow education beyond the fourth grade of elementary school.

Being able to count to one hundred or five hundred and write your own name was considered enough.

Beyond that, in order to create obedient slaves for the Germans, they said that anyone who had received higher education should be purged,

and in fact, during the occupation, one million members of the leadership class were massacred.

One million people.

And those people—schoolteachers, lawyers, for example—were taken away across the board, without any reason, and massacred.

And so, although the relationship between Poland and Germany, which did such things, is complicated, even that Poland says it still prefers to lean toward Russia,

because Germany has culture.

It is still better than the Russians, because Germany has culture.

That is the brutal reality of world history.

And with that in mind, let us compare—let us make a comparison.

Has Germany, which said it would give no more than an elementary fourth grade education, or Japan, ever even once thought about exterminating the Korean people?

You have not even dreamed of such a thing, have you?

On the contrary, did we not say, “Become Japanese, be one of us”?

Listen, not just up to the fourth grade of elementary school, we even built Keijo Imperial University in Keijo.

Keijo Imperial University was established even before Osaka Imperial University.

We also built an Imperial University in Taipei.

And what did that mean? It was Japanese superiority, right, the feeling that “We are granting you higher education.”

There is no doubt that there was that kind of sense of superiority.

However, to say that this in no way helped open up the path of modernization in Korea afterward is something that absolutely cannot be true.

If we do not acknowledge that honestly, I do not think Japan–Korea relations will ever become normal.

That is to say, regarding Korea, there are Japanese who sometimes say strange things, right, that Germans have made sufficient amends to the Jews,

and that the Japanese have not done even one millionth of that for Korea.

But what was done in each case was different.

And probably, for example, The Economist said in July that the era is over in which foreigners keep on nitpicking and criticizing the Japanese,

and that the history of fifty years ago is not an issue for politicians to debate but something that should be entrusted to historians, and such statements are already coming out of Britain and America.