Why did Park Chung-hee and the young officers stage the May 16 coup?
Why did Kim Jae-gyu have to shoot Park Chung-hee, whom he had followed so closely?
Was ‘For the eternal glory of the fatherland and people…’ just an empty phrase to hide one’s lust for power?
Park Chung-hee and Kim Jae-gyu were samurai addicted to ‘Yushin’!
From the Meiji Restoration to October 26, we delve into the inner workings of modern and contemporary Korean and Japanese history, bound together by the "Meiji Restoration."

Although he came to power through a military coup, Park Chung-hee became president as the winner of three presidential elections.
Park Chung-hee's dictatorship began in earnest with the 'October Yushin'.
The October Yushin was Park Chung-hee's own 'national reform project'.
Why did Park Chung-hee insist on embracing the idea of ​​a "restoration" originating in Japan? The Meiji Restoration, the Showa Restoration, and the Restoration leaders...
To Park Chung-hee, Yushin was not just a political event of a bygone era.
The spirit of the Restoration, which made it possible to willingly die for the 'country,' the 'emperor,' and 'Japan,' was the dark core and decisive factor in Japan's modernization.
Japan became strong through the 'Meiji Restoration' and fell through the 'Meiji Restoration'.
Park Chung-hee was fascinated by the 'Yushin'.

Park Chung-hee and Kim Jae-gyu were born during the Japanese colonial period and grew up in the world of Yushin.
The May 16 coup was different from the coups that were common in the Third World at the time.
It was a Korean version of the Meiji Restoration, following the footsteps of Kita Ikki and the young officers of the Imperial Way faction who instigated a revolution led by the samurai and military before and after the Meiji Restoration.
The Showa Restoration, which failed in Japan, succeeded in Korea.
Just as Japan's Yushin regime ran wild and killed tens of millions of people, Park Chung-hee's Yushin regime also ran wild and reached the brink of massacre of its citizens.
The last 'Yushin leader', Kim Jae-gyu, was the one who narrowly stopped Park Chung-hee, who was willing to kill millions of people during the Buma Uprising.

The main character of this book, “Yushin Samurai Park Chung-hee: A History of the Romantic and Violent Yushin Period in Korea and Japan,” is “Yushin.”
It is the very same restoration that is attached to Japan's 'Meiji Restoration' and Korea's 'October Restoration'.
This epic story, which begins with the invasion of Japan by the Mongolian-Goryeo allied forces back in time, ends with the October 26 Incident, when Kim Jae-gyu assassinated Park Chung-hee.
I began working to understand the strange story of the one who shot the bullet and the one who was shot, two people who had a passionate relationship with their monarch and subject, and who ended up in their respective deaths.
---From "Introductory Remarks: A Condolence for a Death"

We can all support or criticize Park Chung-hee according to our own thoughts.
But whatever choice we make, we must first understand him holistically.
We must look at a complex human being caught between hero and devil.
To understand the October 26 incident, I first wanted to understand Kim Jae-gyu.
And to understand why he fired the pistol, I had to understand Park Chung-hee again.
In doing so, I confirmed that we cannot talk about our modern history without overcoming the mountain called Park Chung-hee.
What happens if you follow Park Chung-hee?
There is a monster named 'Yushin' lurking there.
(…) The various wars and invasions waged by Japan, along with the overnight prosperity of Japan, were all the result of the ‘Meiji Restoration.’
Yushin seemed to have died with two nuclear bombs, but he was resurrected across the sea on the Korean Peninsula with Park Chung-hee and young officers.
And finally, he is killed by the last Yushin governor, Kim Jae-gyu.
For Yushin, born with a self-destructive destiny, death was the end.
To compose all these stories into a single narrative, I had to chronicle the life of the blind monster known as Yushin, traveling back and forth between modern and contemporary Korean and Japanese history.
It was a history of romance and violence that explored death.
---From "Introductory Remarks: A Condolence for a Death"

The scale and strength of the Yeomong-Mongol allied invasion force were unimaginable from Japan's perspective.
The Japanese warriors who fought against the Goryeo-Mongol allied forces were brave, but they were fighting to the death.
Bravery became tragedy, and tragedy was romanticized by the kamikaze.
After fighting hard and dying hard, heaven helped me.
This is not a war, but a structure of sacrifice.
It is the most aesthetic human sacrifice in the world.
Two typhoons made the war against invaders from another world for the Japanese a matter of heaven, not of man.
Our ancestors fought with all their heart and died repeatedly, performing human sacrifices to pray for rain, and the heavens responded to the romantic deaths of humans with kamikaze.
At the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese drove themselves endlessly to suicidal deaths.
The so-called "100 Million Deaths," in which the entire nation resisted the US military and died while completely losing the ability to wage war, was not a tactic, but a massive sacrificial plan.
By human common sense, it was an act that led to destruction, but the result was already a work of heaven, not of humans.
---From "Chapter 1: Seed: Wind, Become Fierce"

Yoshida Shoin is not a very important person.
His thoughts are too short, illogical, and unfounded.
People with that level of knowledge are quite common in any era.
I am not ignoring Yoshida Shoin.
Rather, it is a question of why he is treated so importantly now.
The way we remember a person's life and death is determined by the tastes of future generations.
And people originally like to create 'holy places' and visit them.

The Restoration that established Japan → The Choshu Domain, which became the center of the Restoration → The ideology and spirit of the Choshu Domain samurai → Their teacher, Yoshida Shoin

If they want to turn the order around and make Songha Village a holy place, that is their freedom.
By the same principle, small springs that become the source of large rivers receive special treatment.
However, the truth is that numerous streams, groundwater, and rainwater come together to form a large river.
---From "Chapter 2: Conception: The Uninvited Guest"

When the survivors 'ultimately' came to rule Japan, the result justified the process.
Instead of savoring the fate of the Mito clansmen, they savored their own success story.
All that recklessness and aggression was ultimately justified.
Japan is the right country, so it must now take on the outside world, that is, the Qing Dynasty, Russia, and the United States.
It does not mean that we fight because it is a 'right' war 'despite the fact that the opponent is strong.'
There is a scary notion here that 'it is a reckless war because the opponent is so strong / so it is right.'
In that respect, the fate of Choshu and Satsuma, which survived and were recorded in history in place of the Mito clan that failed to survive and was erased, remained as an ominous sign foreshadowing the path of tyranny that Japan would later experience and its consequences.
---From "Chapter 3 Birth: The Divine Fall"

Wasn't the miraculous victory of the Sino-Japanese War the result of heaven responding to a prayer?
Japan, as always, prepared another sacrifice.
Japan evolves into a full-fledged war nation.
The warring states that emerged in history took the form of war enterprises.
For example, the Mongol Empire founded by Genghis Khan maintained its growth momentum by continuing war.
For a nation at war, war is nothing more than a tool.
But Japan was different.
Japan's transformation into a war nation was a way for the nation to exist for war.
The idea of ​​pouring everything into the sacrifice and leaving the results to heaven began.
Japan's war expenses incurred in the Russo-Japanese War are estimated at 1.73 billion yen.
It was more than eight times the cost of the Sino-Japanese War and more than six times Japan's annual gross national product at the time.
---From "Chapter 4 Expansion: Addiction to War"

For the Japanese military, Koreans in Japan were like fuel for Hitler, just like Jews living in Germany.
The Japanese military used the most effective method to win over the general public to the Yushin ideology that they were intoxicated with.
It is 'making them accomplices to violence'.
Persuasion takes a long time, and requires repeated rebuttals.
There is no need for accomplices to discuss.
Within the Shinto ideology of protecting Shinto from external filth, the massacre became a holy war.
Japanese militarism was completed on the corpses of Koreans.
And as per the established procedure, the next sacrificial table is filled with the corpses of the Japanese.
In 1925, two years after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Restoration completed the framework of militaristic Japan.
Through the Public Security Preservation Act.
The National Security Preservation Act is the father of Korea's infamous National Security Act.
The two core points of the Public Security Preservation Act, which was implemented under the pretext of dealing with the social chaos caused by the great earthquake, are as follows.
Do not dare to doubt the sanctity of the imperial system and do not deny the system of private property.
---From "Chapter 5: Runaway: Savagery Protecting a Pure World"

Emperor Showa had no choice but to ask the military ministers.
Why did a war break out without my knowledge?
Hajime Sugiyama declared in front of the Emperor that he could not stop the war that had already begun.
He then comforted the emperor by saying that he would conquer all of China in one month, so he should not worry.
The Japanese military rebuked Hajime Sugiyama in front of the emperor, saying that he was too optimistic and that it would take three months if he analyzed it coolly.

Four years later, Hajime Sugiyama was reprimanded by Emperor Showa for not conquering China yet.
In this way, Yushin was drawn into the path of the Sino-Japanese War, or rather, death.
It was the fate of a suicidal Yushin from birth.
Conquering China required money and resources.
To secure resources, it was necessary to occupy Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific.
Finally, to achieve this goal, they had to fight the United States for dominance in the Pacific.
Japan wages war for the sake of war, and starts another war not to stop the war, but to 'maintain' or 'expand' it.
Since the final destination was inevitable death, Japan, which had now become the Meiji Restoration itself, began to have a crush on death.
Slaying, banzai charge, kamikaze are all other names for love.
---From "Chapter 6 Madness: The Age of Innocence"

Why did the Yushin regime entrust its fate to low-quality people like Tojo Hideki, Mutaguchi Renya, Sugiyama Hajime, and Tominaga Kyoji?
If we go back a few decades, the Yushin leaders were at least not cowardly.
They slept, wandered, fought and assassinated, and gave their lives in the belief that it was for others, not for themselves.
I find this passion for death philosophically problematic.
However, no matter how much we criticize the Yushin leaders, we cannot deny the fact that they decided to die 'for others'.
However, the Japanese Empire in the 1940s was driven by people who sacrificed others for themselves.
This is in fact the predetermined fate of Yushin.
The struggle of pure people and the struggle for purity are different.
But the struggle of the pure brings about a struggle for purity.
In times of struggle for purity, the pure do not win.
Those who 'claim and act pure' win the internal struggle.
It is unlikely that they are truly pure.
Because pure fighters are too busy taking action to waste time on words.
---From "Chapter 7: The End of Life: Emperor Heika Banzai"

If he had not been the son of a poor farmer, Park Chung-hee would not have chosen Kita Itki as his ideological mentor.
In the February 26 Incident, those whom the unit sought to save were the miserable peasants of the countryside who made up the majority of the Japanese population.
Of course, the method of salvation is arbitrary, violent, and coercive.
And it was self-destructive.
So, was Park Chung-hee a socialist, a militarist, or an embodiment of desire? None of them.
One word that describes Park Chung-hee's complexity is 'Yushin.'
---From "Chapter 8 Resurrection: The Ethical World and the Aesthetic World"

The people chose Park Chung-hee in the 1960s because they thought he was useful, even though he was a 'commie' and a 'Manchurian soldier'.
The people decided that they had had enough of Park Chung-hee and turned their attention to democracy.
Now, in the eyes of the people, the new product called Kim Dae-jung, with its new features of democracy and an American-style market economy, appeared to be more effective.
Just as the Choshu clansmen tried to kidnap the emperor out of love for him, Park Chung-hee tried to kidnap the people for the sake of the people.
He knows that his rule must continue, but the people do not.
If so, we must raise the people.
That kind of breeding is nothing but oppression.
But to Park Chung-hee, ‘complete breeding’ was ‘love.’
---From "Chapter 9: Climax: The Greatest Love, Perfect Breeding"

The people of South Korea did not recognize Chun Doo-hwan as much as they did Park Chung-hee.
Throughout his seven years in power, Chun Doo-hwan and his wife Lee Soon-ja were the targets of ridicule and insults.
If Kim Jae-gyu played a decisive role in democratization, that statement is far off the mark.
Korea's democratization was achieved entirely through the power of the people.
However, it cannot be said that Kim Jae-gyu's bullet was not a factor in the people's victory over Chun Doo-hwan in the June Struggle of 1987.
Therefore, as time passes and Koreans are able to calmly reflect on the past, it is only natural that Kim Jae-gyu has become the subject of a reevaluation.
As I write this book, Kim Jae-gyu is called both a traitor and a righteous man.
But I assure you.
He is not a doctor, he is a governor, and he is the last governor of Yushin.
---From "Chapter 10: Shooting the Heart of the Goddess with the Heart of a Beast"

Park Chung-hee's death was a kind of legacy.
Koreans lost Park Chung-hee without being mentally prepared to say goodbye to him.
History moves according to the 'spirit of the times', but it returns the residue left behind by the 'sentiment of the times' with interest.
Lee Myung-bak, the 17th President of the Republic of Korea, was a 'salaryman legend' who rose from a rank-and-file employee to the position of president of Hyundai Engineering & Construction.
His presence brought back memories of the industrial age.
Lee Myung-bak blatantly used Park Chung-hee's image as a marketing ploy during the presidential election.
The people were not satisfied even with a 'pseudo-Park Chung-hee'.
So, in the 18th presidential election, Park Chung-hee's genes were chosen.
As a result, all that was confirmed was the ghost of Yushin.
The old garden, which was the tomb of the god, was nothing but ruins.
A grave is just a grave.
Nothing can be resurrected there.

---From "Review: The Altar of the Spirit"