Park Chung-Hee was a product of Japanese colonial Korean army, trained in Japanese military academy in Manchuria. Chong-Sik Lee, one of the leading Korea scholars in United States, describes him as a “Japhanophile,” fascinated by the “Meiji model,” and bent in steering Korea along the Japanese path to modernity. South Korean leaders often covered such proclivities with an anti-Japanese rhetoric here and a nationalist flourish there. Desirous mainly on high economic growth, however, such as Park Chung-Hee knew well that the key elements of the “model” left behind by the Japanese were still intact in the early 1960s, a highly pervasive and penetrating state that could be turned authoritarian, purged of corruption and made to refocus attention on matters economic; a state dependent business strata that understood the business cooperating with a purposive state; and highly controlled working class. Since this “model” had worked in the past, until proven to the contrary, or unless it had to be abandoned, there was no reason why it ought not also work for sovereign South Korea