Japanese Kindergarten Accused of Promoting Hate of Korea and China

What this Japanese Kindergarten is doing is wrong, but South Korea has little creditability to complain considering the anti-Japanese hatred taught to kids in their country:

Screen shot from Tsukamoto Kindergarten’s website. / Yonhap

Tsukamoto Kindergarten, a preschool in Osaka city, Japan, is being investigated for allegedly handing out flyers containing hate speech against Koreans living in Japan and against Chinese people, Kyodo News reported on Thursday.

“Korean residents in Japan and Chinese people are devious,” read the flyer that the kindergarten allegedly distributed.

Kyodo News also pointed out that the flyer called Chinese people “shinajin,” a derogatory term.

The kindergarten is known to have sent out flyers in December 2016, criticizing Korean residents in Japan.

“The problem is that people, who are Korean at heart, reside in Japan as Japanese,” read the flyer.

The school has previously been criticized for making students memorize the “Imperial Edict on Education,” used during Japan’s imperial rule of other countries.

During a field day in 2015, the school also allegedly made students take an oath blaming Korea and China for making Japan a malevolent nation.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but the Osaka government has sent a warning to the school to stop their anti-Korea and China activities.  Has the Korean government ever warned any of their schools to stop anti-Japanese activities?

Korean school children post anti-Japanese art at a subway station.
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SouthKorean
SouthKorean
7 years ago

First of all, the Korea Times report’s original source is from the Kyodo News service in Japan, in which the same story was picked up by the Reuter news service. The ones who are complaining are the Zainichi Korean parents who are Japanese citizens with Japanese nationality, whose children were targets of these hate materials sent out to all parents of the students in the school. The victims are Japanese citizens who just happen to have Korean ethnic heritage. So South Korea isn’t the one complaining, therefore this has nothing to do with South Korea. There was no official Korean response to Japan over this news, nor have there been any official stance on this issue at all from the Korean government, media, or NGO’s. So your unsubstantiated charge that “South Korea has little creditability to complain” is totally baseless and unfair, when there have been no complaints at all, and the South Korean side hasn’t even said anything on this regard.

Second, you’re bringing up the incident in 2005 where the leftwing Korean Teacher’s Union (KTU) brainwashing the Korean kids in a Seoul school, is irrelevant to what’s going on with this school in Osaka Japan whose curriculum includes the teachings of the WWII Imperial Japan. What happened in Korea 12 years ago, doesn’t mitigate what is going on in Japan. Two wrongs do not make it right.

Third, as for your question, if the Korean government has done anything about the anti-Japanese education, the answer is yes. The last ten years saw considerable attempts by the Korean government in curtailing of the KTU activities in Korean schools. This includes the firing of the KTU members, as well as attempts at curtailing leftwing North Korea-friendly curriculums (at the same time anti-South Korean, anti-American, and anti-Japanese) that often were used by KTU member teachers who spread their ideology within South Korean classrooms. This has been a huge concern for many South Koreans that the classrooms were becoming ideological battlefields by the leftwing teachers. The clash between the government and the KTU on what history to teach has been well documented over the last several years. Much of the power that the KTU held has been whittled away due to the muzzling of KTU’s ideological operations and teachings in school classrooms. One of the examples is the attempt by the government to make schools use only the government’s version of the history book, in which the history book portrayed the Japanese rule over Korea, a bit more neutral and less ideologically biased. However that lead to storm of criticism. All this has lead to charges by the Korean liberals that the government was against freedom of speech trying to impose one view of history in Korea. And this has backfired on the government, and the attempt failed,which was one of the reasons of why there are mass protests against the government right now.

My only concern is that once the next government which is much more North Korea-friendly comes to power, the abuses that KTU teachers enjoyed under the leftwing governments of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun governments, will come back strongly than ever. That means more anti-South Korean/American/Japanese teachings in South Korean classrooms.

SouthKorean
SouthKorean
Reply to  SouthKorean
7 years ago

I apologize for the long reply, blog owner. Please feel free to break up this post into separate pieces so that it’s more readable for others. Thank you.

Jon Paul
Jon Paul
7 years ago

Just read the comment below; it adds a bit more nuance to the situation. Still, my own take would probably be similar, in that Koreans probably have more to complain about, as the victims of colonialism, than do the Japanese, who persist in seeing themselves as the victims of history, rather than (what was in fact the case, from the late 1890s through to 1945) the victimizers.

The other complicating factor is that quite a few Korean families seem to have strong Japanese connections. My own (married) family’s case is that Grandfather went to Japan, made his fortune and came back to live the life he wanted, as a kind of Confucian scholar. Friends of ours who live in Greater Seoul have kids and grandkids who work in Japan, run businesses there, and go back and forth frequently, and speak both languages (English too). In part, such connections are the residue of a colonial past, but even so, they are also part of the family past, and the family present. And the two instances related above are, so far as I can tell, with only family and friends to go on, not at all uncommon.

The kindergarten teachers, I would say, are doing something a little different. They’re not promoting an historical grievance, as Koreans in a similar case would be doing. They’re promoting hatred of an ethnic group based on the idea that any ethnic group other than their own is inferior. This was a key teaching of the Imperial school system in the 1930s and 40s (see Bix’s excellent book on Hirohito), and its frankly racist. I’m not sure that the Korean lefty teachers are much better, and it is all to easy for exclusionist and angry teachings to turn into racism. Nonetheless, the basis for action is, in each case, quite different, with the one explicitly and from the outset racist, with the other only in danger of becoming racist, “if this goes on … “.

Is this just hair-splitting? Probably. But my suspicions about the Japanese kindergarten teachers are the more easily aroused, given the history behind their actions, and given that, as far as I know, the Japanese education system is still not telling the truth to Japanese children about the Empire’s involvements in Asia for the first half of the twentieth century. Even some Japanese immigrants I’ve met here in North America have been shockingly ignorant on these topics, and quickly revert to their standard fallback: “Ah, but what about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” which, if you think about it, is kind of a non sequitur.

Apologies for the length.

SouthKorean
SouthKorean
Reply to  GIKorea
7 years ago

GIKorea, Lee going to Dokdo had nothing to do with spreading racism against the Japanese. He went there in response to Japanese government’s plan to change their text book to include the islet as Japanese territory. He went there to assert South Korea’s national territorial claim. I don’t see why he can’t visit part of his own country. Can you give us a reason why you would consider this as a racist move like a school sending out racist materials to the parents of their students?

As for Park Geun Hye’s position. Common, you got to be kidding right? She was on the verge of being impeached, her poll numbers showed 5% approval rating. Millions of people were protesting on the streets. And one of the reasons for that was that she made a very unpopular decision last year to agree with Japan to try to put the Comfort Women to rest by literally reducing all of South Korean Comfort Women’s position to merely $10 million, without consulting with the women and getting their approval. That was a political suicide, and she was brave enough to do it. Now if you were in her position, are you going to further aggravate your standing with the public by getting rid of a statue using the police who would forcibly remove the statue while the Comfort Women activists resist violently? At this point, she could do nothing. Furthermore, this still does not equate to racial attacks against the Japanese. The Comfort Women activists that put up the statue can argue that it is their right to free speech. What law, can the government of Park Geun Hye use to remove the statue? They would have to give a valid reason and cite what law was broken to show why it had to be removed.

As for the KTU, it’s an ongoing fight in the classrooms, so the war isn’t by any means is over. But again I reiterate, this has nothing to do with how the schools in Japan behave. This is Japan’s problem in how to get rid of their unwanted population of Japanese nationals who carry dirty Korean genes. So again, this news has nothing to do with South Korea. South Koreans haven’t said anything on this, and South Koreans haven’t complained about any of this.

Lucy Tang
Lucy Tang
Reply to  GIKorea
7 years ago

“I agree the Japanese Kindergarten teachers are promoting hate against an entire race of people. With that said I think a lot of Korean complaints against Japan is an outlet for Korean nationalism”

It’s kind of amusing to hear that Japanese are considering themselves as victims. It takes two to tango. Do you think incidents where Japanese schools are teaching the militarist imperial Japan’s Japanese spirit, while treating the Koreans like how Nazi’s treated the Jews in 1935, should make Koreans all warm, fuzzy, and convinced that Japan has renounced their war time crimes? Of course not.

Lucy Tang
Lucy Tang
Reply to  SouthKorean
7 years ago

What law, can the government of Park Geun Hye use to remove the statue?

There’s nothing wrong with putting up memorial statues. But there’s something definitely wrong for a country that supposedly is apologetic for the Comfort Women, is trying so hard fanatically to remove the Comfort Women memorials not just in Korea, but also in other countries like in Glendale California. If Japan is really sorry, shouldn’t they be the ones leading the campaign to guard these memorials?

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