If you have done any searching on the internet for Korean History you have probably come across Kimsoft. I won’t claim that I agree with his writing, but I will say this - he does do his research. I ran across this purely by accident - an old paper he did “Japanese Militarism Resurfaces” dated July 27, 1997.
I will let you read it for yourself - but I will post some of the parts that caught my attention and let you make your own decisions. Got to wonder if he still believes this?
Japan has been waging vicious disinformation war in collaboration with Kim Young Sam, a pro-Japanese whose family got rich working for the Japanese during the Japanese occupation of Korea, against North Korea. For examples:
- N Korean agents kidnapped 12 young Japanese girls.
- N Korean nukes are hidden in Tokyo ready to go off.
- N Korea is behind the gas attack in Tokyo.
- N Korea controls the Japanese Red Army.
- Rev. Moon of the Reunification Church is a N Korean agent.
- N Korean army and police hijacked food aids from America.
- N Korea sold food aids for cash.
- N Korea prints counterfeit US bills.
- N Koreans practice cannibalism.
- N Korean soldiers mutiny.
- N Korean army generals plot a coup.
- Kim Jong Il is an alcoholic, a lunatic, sex-maniac, temperamental, etc.
- Kim Jong Ii’s ‘wife’ lives in Los Angeles
Japan has some 500,000 tons of rotting rice unfit for Japanese (or animal) consumption. North Koreans would not mind getting the rice, but Japan would rather dump the rice into the ocean than help feed the starving people of Korea. Japan has benefited greatly from the Korean War. In fact, Japan has been making money from turmoil’s in Korea since the turn of the century. The more troubles in Korea, the more money to be made for Japan.
And now his closing:
A ‘global’ war in the Far East will destroy Japan, Korea and parts of China. Russia will most likely join in on the side of Korea-China and help destroy Japan. Will the United States join in the war against China and Russia? How many Americans will die for the Emperor of Japan?
The American people should pause and recall the memory of all those American soldiers and civilians who died in the Pacific, those POW’s abandoned and betrayed by their own government, those American children and women raped by the Japanese. Some impure elements of the American society may see big bucks to be made in a war in the Far East and may salivate at the prospect of a “contingency” in the region. But the great majority of the Americans will not die for the Japanese Emperor. The American people will not be fooled by any more ‘national security’ scam concocted by the war-profiteering minority.
20 Comments
Never realized Kimsoft was one person. I was in Tokyo watching this closely during that time and many of the accusations he says Japan made against the DPRK never were made (at least by other than fringe groups). But some of these have been shown to be true (with modifications of slight details or more precise use of language):
N Korean agents kidnapped 12 young Japanese girls.
N Korean army and police hijacked food aids from America.
N Korea sold food aids for cash.
N Korea prints counterfeit US bills.
N Koreans practice cannibalism.
Kim Jong Il is an alcoholic, a lunatic, sex-maniac, temperamental,
Lee Wha Rang is also the guy that says Korea is 9203 years old. He also says that it was Koreans, not Chinese that invented Chinese characters and Chinese medicine. I wonder how you can justify saying that “he does do his research”, Mr Neff.
That’s a blast from the past. Kimsoft I mean.
Here’s another blast from the past, Purcell Connors who often wrote that Korea was a gateway to sewage or hell hole (take your pick). It couldn’t have been such a bad place after all, if he misses the place so much.
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/.....mp;start=0
I heard when I was living in Los Angeles there were some North Korean sympathizers living in the Los Angeles area. I blew it off as nonsense. Until I met 1 out of 1000 encounters in which I was convinced that these people were a little too knowledgable about North Korea, and they appeared to be in contact with North Korea. One was during the Clinton era, when I was too young to ask a grown adult questions. I suspect the lady who rented us a house had some kind of tie with North Korean spies. That was the Orange County area. Another was when I had dinner with a certain family. And they said “this” era was known to harbor some North Korean sympathizers for a long time. That was North of Los Angeles. I’m being very vague, but it’s not all nonsense. Afterall, South Korea caught US citizens of South Korean origin who were spying for North Korea. Very recently, too. Thus, I wouldn’t totally blow off the idea that the promiscuous fat pig has a woman living in Los Angeles whom he loved for maybe 5 minutes.
Isn’t this the same guy who’s spewed forth such gems as “Blacks are the smelliest” and basically asserts that the ancient ‘Korean’ race were basically the most powerful, most advanced culture in Asia (some 4000 years ago) — which he thinks there’s some sort of conspiracy amongst historians to cover up? Heh… I went on his site once or twice. Definite tinfoil hat zone there.
Wow… now I know where Baduk gets his rhetorical style. Hasn’t he pretty much used these exact same lines in more than a few of his posts? Kinda makes you wonder who’s copying whom.
Well, don’t know about 4000 years ago, but many historians believe that the Mongol Empire would not have lasted long if it wasn’t for the Emperors’s Korean engineers, administrators, and scientists. The mother of one of the Khans of the Mongol Empire (and possibly two) was Korean, by the way.
I almost forgot…We know that one of Genghis Khan’s wives was Korean (Queen Khulan). He lived 3 years in Korea, not that it’s relevant to the point I was trying to make. Just interesting trivia.
It’s like a episode of Star Trek, one of the ones where the crew crosses a boundary of space-time continuum into a parallel universe. Do extreme Korean nationalists ever feel any obligation to try and provide any proof of their assertions?
An example from his “paper”:
>>….In July of 1950, Japan dispatched 4,200 ground troops to Korea as part of the ‘US Forces’ to engage N. Korean troops closing on Pusan. On October 2, 1950 a Japanese Navy Flotilla commanded by Vice-admiral Takeo Okubo was sent to Korea. The Japanese warship s operated near Wonsan, Inchon, Kunsan, Haeju, and Nampo on the Korean coasts providing transport escorts, shelling and mine sweeping.
The Japanese Navy played a key role in the planning and execution of MacArthur’s Inchon landing.
In a recent article, “Korean War and position of Japan”, Prof. EijiTakemae of Keijai University (Tokyo) states that Japan mobilized 120 ships and 1,300 crewmen of the Tojai Kisen Shipping Company to ferry the invading troops. Over 50 Japanese warships and 30,000 soldiers participated in the Inchon Landing….
I wonder why _you_ voted with your feet.
I’ve been saying this for years … having a kyopo finally admit it gives it more weight.
The remainder of my just previous disappeared in the ether. Maybe the ghost of Genghis Khan’s Korean wife intercepted it.
Anyway, from my quoted example of Lee Wha Rang’s paper, I surmise (without doing any research) that the second to the last sentence is true (ie the quote from the Japanese univ professor). Lee provides no footnotes for the other quoted “facts”, and they certainly don’t jive with any military history I remember.
But I suppose that if you’re going to just make up history out of whole cloth for a gullible audience, it’s a good idea to hang the invented history on at least one framework of fact.
Between the end of the battle for Okinawa (May? 1945) and the Japanese surrender on 15 August, numerous US carrier task forces (also at least one British one too I think) swept up and down the Japanese home islands and (I suspect) sank every remaining Imperial Navy ship larger than a patrol craft. There was one Japanese battleship left above water (the Nagoya?); a picture exists of it after the surrender, it’s still roughly recognizable as a battleship only because it had been sunk at dockside. It was later fixed up enough to be towed and used as a US atomic bomb target.
During the US occupation period (45-52), I doubt if MacArthur and his successor Ridgeway allowed the Japanese to have any naval vessels larger than coastal patrol boats. The Imperial Navy was formally dissolved in 1947 and the Japanese Maritime self-defense force was created in 1954 with surplus US WWII destroyers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.....anese_Navy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.....ense_Force
Maybe Lee Wha Rang just decided to do a little creative “projection” in time and space for a potential Korean audience. The whole thing seems rather unreal, like seeing a statue suddenly come to life and begin to speak, but maybe that’s just because I’m an American and therefore lack the mystic ethnic bond that automatically unites all Koreans in a common understanding without any words needing to be exchanged.
Hmm, in the interest of fairness to Mr. Lee, evidently former Imperial navy minesweepers were used in Korean waters during 1950. 95 (!) of them according to this source; so much for my surmise that US Navy/Air Corps had sunk everything worthwhile and that all Japanese Imperial organized military forces had been disbanded by MacArthur.
Maybe these craft had been based in bypassed central/south pacific islands, or Singapore/Dutch East Indies, or Chinese coast, don’t know offhand how sizable these vessels were.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/j.....erview.htm
This oral history is pretty abstruse and hard to read, mostly concerns Cold War history of the JMSDF, but if you can suppress your yawns enough to take a brief interest in military history, I skimmed it and found this (scroll down to Auer’s 6th answer):
“…Prior to being assigned as Political Adviser in Yokosuka, I was a PhD research student writing a history of the Maritime Self-Defense Force. I had done my Master’s thesis under Professor Edwin O. Reischauer. I had been able to get declassified the fact that during the Korean War, a number of former Imperial Japanese Navy minesweepers, which had been kept on active duty to sweep mines, were sent to Korea under the order of the U.S. Occupation….”
There’s a bit more which you can see for yourself, I don’t want to make the quote any longer.
Lee Wha Rang?
You’re kidding … right?
Please … tell me that you’re not publishing his ‘trash’!!
Originally, I’d thought his articles were tongue-in-cheek spoofs of the Korean situation … turns out that the guy was completely serious.
Yup … this is what “smokin’ dat cheap shit” does to your brain.
dogbertt, have you ever ran into a North Korean spy/sympathizer in the states?
Michael Sheehan. I thought a lot of what kimsoft covered were legit and made a lot of sense. That’s just me.
His site has not been updated at least since last year. I think he might be in bad health. Anyone else know of anything? I wish him a long healthy life. Thanks.
“I wonder why _you_ voted with your feet.”
Voted with my feet? I did no such thing.
You assume too much.
“I wonder why _you_ voted with your feet.”
Voted with my feet? I did no such thing.
You assume too much.
But you obviously did. Aren’t you in Korea?
You mean crack, right?
Smothered by his own bullshit, perhaps? Seriously, this guy has about as much credibility as Gene Ray. The lunatic fringers in the same class as the Kimsoft guy eventually do run out of steam… After all, Kimsoft’s been up for a decade or so, hasn’t it?
wjk wrote:
‘ … Michael Sheehan. I thought a lot of what kimsoft covered were legit and made a lot of sense. That’s just me.’
My reply:
I think there is some confusion between Kimsoft’s role as a portal for articles authored by others (whose sources were properly cited by Kimsoft and I found to be fairly distributed across the political spectrum) and the articles personally written by Lee Wha Rang which, in general, bordered on the delusional.
Stumbled across this paper by Kim Young-Sik, Ph.D (of the Korea WebWeekly, which appears to be also kimsoft). Evidently used at a MeetKorea-sponsored event at the U of W. Scroll down a bit and note that Kim cites Lee Wha Rang six times. Lee’s writings been used much by others?
Agree with Michael #18. My problem with Kimsoft is that he never seems to synthesize the articles he includes, opting for the obvious ultra-nationalist hyperbole even when his cited evidence contradicts the very point he is pushing. I think the drug allusions detract from understanding “Lee Wha-rang” motivation, and suspect that he would make an interesting study of how someone who has benefitted greatly from his association with both the United States and Americans, can become so internally alienated that they take on the mantle of ultra-nationalism. It is a phenomenon that afflicts more than Koreans, as a perusal of any Puerto Rican, Chicano, or Yellow Power nationalist website will show. Except in Kimsoft’s case, there is some worthwhile history included, though careful winnowing is required.