‘ … 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.

Yup … this is what “smokin’ dat cheap shit” does to your brain.

You mean crack, right?

His site has not been updated at least since last year. I think he might be in bad health.

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?

Voted with my feet? I did no such thing.
You assume too much.

But you obviously did. Aren’t you in Korea?

Voted with my feet? I did no such thing.
You assume too much.

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.

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.

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.

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.