Living in an apartment in Seoul, with my beloved Korean wife and children attending local schools, I picked up one of their history textbooks and experienced a profound “historical shock”—so intense that I nearly dropped the book.
What I read wasn’t merely a difference in historical interpretation.
It was a distortion of fact so extreme—as if teaching science fiction or fantasy as historical truth—that I could only describe it as bordering on indoctrination.
As a Japanese person deeply rooted in Korean society, this sense of contradiction was impossible to ignore.
However, let me be perfectly clear: This is not a criticism of the Korean people. With a family and neighbors I deeply cherish, I could never conclude that they are inherently “wrong.”
This is the story of a tragic system, a sorrowful entanglement created by the collusion of Korean politics and history.
