Ministry of Defense of Japan [자료사진]
■ Japanese military power ascending to heaven
The Japanese Ministry of Defense is very busy these days. One day, Russian military aircraft and battleships provoke, and if you forget, North Korea fires missiles overhead or China fires ballistic missiles at Okinawa. With North Korea, China, and Russia taking turns threatening, the Ministry of Defense comes up with plans to strengthen its military almost every day.
① Deployed 1,000 long range cruise missiles
In August, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the Ground Self-Defense Force plans to deploy more than 1,000 long range cruise missiles with a range of 1,000 km that can attack North Korea and China by 2024. (Of course, Korea will also enter the range.) This is an improved version that increases the range of the Japanese Type 12 surface-to-ship guided missile currently in possession.
② JAXA hypersonic missile engine test flight
Japan Aerospace Research Institute JAXA completed a test flight of the ‘Scram Jet’ engine in Kagoshima Prefecture in July.
The official announcement was an engine test flight of a ‘hypersonic vehicle’, but it was the Defense Equipment Administration that paid 17.5 billion won to JAXA for development. So there were concerns that Japan might soon have hypersonic missiles.
③ Next-generation fighter FX, jointly developed between England and Japan
The Yomiuri Shimbun reported in May that Japan and Britain had started developing a next-generation fighter together. Sweden has already joined the development of Britain’s next-generation fighter ‘The Tempest’. It is said that they will also add strength to Italy, a military industrial powerhouse. The Tempest is drawing attention as a fighter that combines augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Now Japan will also have a sixth-generation stealth aircraft equipped with AR and AI.
④ 20,000-ton class ‘dinosaur’ Aegis
Japan builds two of the world’s largest displacement 20,000-ton Aegis ships. Neither the United States nor China weighed more than 14,000 tons. The new Aegis ship plans to be equipped with various advanced weapons, such as cruise missiles with a range of 1,000 km developed in ①. It is said that each ship costs about 5 trillion won, but it takes more than five years to build, so one ship in 2027 and one in 2028 are scheduled to be commissioned.
⑤ Combined training of German Eurofighters and Japanese F-2 fighters
It is considered the most absurd news. Germany and Japan, the war criminals of World War II, conducted joint fighter training in ‘September 2022’. Even the Air Force Chiefs of Staff of Japan and Germany held a press conference and said, “We will continue to strengthen cooperation between our two countries.
In this way, the Japanese military power is literally rising.
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force frigate Izumo [자료사진: 일본 해상자위대 제공]
■ 440 trillion won ‘money bomb’ dropped on defense spending
To this end, 440 trillion won will be spent on defense by 2027. The plan is to increase the defense budget incrementally from this year, and to double the current defense budget in five years.
I think it would be better to name it the ‘Five-Year Arms Expansion Plan’.
Japan’s defense budget this year is 54 trillion won, similar to Korea’s defense budget. (Part of our defense budget is spent on building buildings, so in reality it will be less.)
As of 2022, South Korea’s military power ranks sixth in the world and Japan ranks fifth in the world (Global Firepower Index).
We are the result of ‘sprinting’, and Japan is the result of only ‘warming up’. If we pour 440 trillion won into the future and ‘sprint’, 5 years from now, Japan will become a military power that we cannot surpass.
The Japanese government is contemplating how to suddenly raise this enormous amount of money.
That’s why I’m fiddling with the ‘Significant’ card. The plan is to pay more than 50 trillion won in defense spending every year by raising corporate tax on corporations and consumption tax on individuals.
Today, Japan is struggling with an unprecedented low yen, record inflation, stagnation in domestic demand and a trade deficit. In such a situation, the Japanese people would not stand still if they were to ‘increase’. Surprisingly, as a result of an NHK opinion poll, 55% of Japanese people supported an increase in defense costs.
Even squeezing out a dry towel, the Japanese government as well as the Japanese people are thirsty for ‘increasing military power’.
However, this is not the first time Japan has stepped up its military force as a ‘public-private unit’.
There was a time when the ‘Eight-Year Military Expansion Plan’ was pushed forward as it is now to confront the military power of the Qing Dynasty at the end of the late Han Dynasty.
■ 군확8개년계획Army Expansion Eight-Year Plan
Kim Ok-gyun, who had studied Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and other pro-Japanese Gaehwa Party forces caused the Gapsin Coup in 1884. When the Qing dynasty tried to make Joseon a vassal state in partnership with the Sugu factions, it brought in the Japanese army and executed the Sugu factions and established a reform government.
However, the Japanese army, who encountered the Qing dynasty, betrayed Kim Ok-gyun and fled. The coup lasted only three days, and the key figures fled to Japan.
In our history textbooks, it is evaluated that ‘even though Japan was brought in, it has great significance as it is the first modernization movement’. Even though I was young, I remember thinking what kind of mutton meat it sounded like.
No one teaches us in Korea, but the Gapsin Coup was an incident that ‘changed’ Japan. To be precise, it was an event that paved the way for Japan to militarism. Therefore, Japanese historians call the Gapsin Coup ‘Joseon Incident’ and attach great significance to it.
First, we abandon the plan to expand our influence in Joseon by cultivating pro-Japanese factions. Instead, they devise a strategy to overthrow the Qing dynasty with military force and take over Joseon.
Second, the militarization of Japan. During the Gapsin Coup, the Japanese army suffered the humiliation of being kicked out by the Qing army. In Japan, in shock, the theory of arms expansion came out. In spite of the sluggish economy in Japan at the time, we increased our military budget to 20-30% of the country’s budget. This was called the ‘Eight-Year Military Expansion Plan’, and it is very similar to the ‘Five-Year Arms Expansion Plan’ of 2022.
The third is the emergence of Tal Aaron 脱亜論. Japan, which had been trying to bring the Joseon Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, and Japan together to flourish and stand shoulder to shoulder with Western empires, gave up on Joseon and Qing with the ‘Gapsin Coup’ as an opportunity. Yukichi Fukuzawa, a reformer of the Meiji Restoration, argues that “Now Japan must abandon its bad friends in the East and go on its own path like the Western Empire.” 脱亜入欧, which meant that Japan, like Britain and France, was going into a full-scale war of colonial aggression.
Ten years after the Gapsin Coup, the Sino-Japanese War (1894), and ten years later, the Russo-Japanese War (1904).
All of them were won by Japan, and Japan never went to war with Joseon, but Joseon lost its country to Japan.
data photo
■ Japan transformed from a comrade into an aggressor
Yukichi Fukuzawa, a Japanese reformist who advocated de-Aaron, was the teacher of Ok-gyun Kim and Young-hyo Park. Kim Ok-gyun and others started the Gapsin Coup to imitate Japan’s Meiji Restoration. It means that they were ‘comrades’ with Japan both ideologically and militarily.
“Let the Joseon Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, and Japan bloom together and stand shoulder to shoulder with Western empires”
However, when the Gapsin Coup did not succeed according to their wishes, Japan expressed itself.
In particular, as Aritomo Yamagata, later called the “father of the Japanese army,” stepped forward, the number of the Japanese army rapidly increased. According to the military doubling plan in 1885, the Japanese army from three divisions was greatly increased to seven divisions. According to records, the Japanese army had 39,315 men in 1876, but by 1893, at the end of the eight-year military expansion plan, the number soared to 73,963.
Japanese scholars write that it is a turning point in which the Japanese army, which used to be the ‘National Defense Forces’ was changed to the ‘foreign military force’. The foreign government is an army that conquers foreign countries. And ‘foreign’ meant Joseon.
Aritomo Yamagata, who performed all these tasks, drove the foreign military forces that he had trained by hand to Joseon and led them to victory in both the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War. Yamagata Arimoto, who laid the foundation for the invasion of Joseon together with Hirobumi Ito, later became Japan’s first Prime Minister.
■ History flows but repeats itself
History will not change if we have to blame Ok-gyun Kim, a disciple of Yukichi Fukuzawa now. They believed ‘sincerely’ that they must join hands with Japan in order not to become a vassal state of the Qing Dynasty. It was not ‘pro-Japanese’, but ‘friendship loyalty’ for the country, as they said by the riverside.
However, if they were to blame, it would be the ‘sin of ignorance’ of not knowing Japan. It is a crime of simple belief that Japan could truly become an ally of Joseon even after the Imjin War. In the new year of Gapsin, the crimes of friendship and loyalty that grew out of ignorance had to be paid painfully with the national government being deprived of the country 26 years later.
alliance between Korea and Japan.
Again, the shadow of Kim Ok-gyun has been cast on our history.