What can Koreans learn from the Japanese?

Well, I'm not about to ask any Koreans what they think they can learn from the Japanese. The anit-foreign sentiment is just too high nowadays. But to my amazement I read an interesting article about one Japanese professor that could teach the Koreans a thing or two.

Professor Yuji Hosaka of Sejong University, who was naturalized as a Korean citizen two years ago, is a unique person. He is 49 years old and was born in Tokyo. After graduating from Tokyo National University, he made up his mind one day that he would jump into research on historic relations between Korea and Japan.

The reason I take time to explain Professor Hosaka's life story is to make you understand how different the background of his Japanese studies is from that of Korean scholars. He speaks whatever he wants to say on Japan's distortion of history. He is thorough and corroborative when it comes to history research and analysis.

That is why his studies of Japan's territorial claim of the Dokdo islands hold up. He not only analyzed the old maps of Japan, but he also analyzed all recent maps published by the National Geographical Institute of the Japanese government.

The result is a study showing that Dokdo was not included as Japanese land from the Meiji administration until 1988. (The study is published in the July issue of NEXT). Japan's reaction to this study was huge. There were groups that called Professor Hosaka a traitor, but there were a lot of Internet users who said they were surprised to see the evidence he produced. He immediately started to respond to the criticisms of the Japanese government and readers one by one and resumed debates on historic issues.

He uses hidden historical data to expose the fabrication of Japanese awareness.There is definitely a difference between Professor Hosaka's attitude to research and those of Korean historians. One Korean professor declined to give an answer when he was asked to historically analyze his contention that Dokdo is part of Korean territory. He did not so much as decline to answer as he ran away from the debate.

Another scholar got the media's attention when he produced some unreliable evidence and had failed to unfold his view logically. Korean people were too fragmentary and shallow in their research. One Korean professor clung to an anti-Japan report that was totally emotional. One elder professor ignored young scholars who objected to his Dokdo theory by saying, "What bad-mannered people..." and tried to clamp down on the freedom of study and the freedom of speech. The field of history studies in Korea is not free from the criticism that there are sanctuaries, whether right or wrong.

Professor Hosaka's study on Dokdo and other historic studies were all done by first approaching all the information he could find both in Korea and Japan. That is why a reasonable and logical discussion is possible.
-by Choi Chul-joo

Can it be? Can there be a reasonable editorial out there? Was this actually in the Joonan ilbo?

All I can say is, I hope this thought catches on.