This is not a terrible book but it makes an overly tenuous case of trying to argue that there is a link between South Korea to Imperial Japan and Manchukuo by stressing that Park Chung-hee, the third president of South Korea, rose to power because of his connections with Nobusuke Kishi (岸信介) formed when they were both in Manchukuo.
Yes, these two characters had known each other, the Manchukuo connection was there too. But the way things developed appeared to be more incidental than deliberate and one example alone could not convince me that there is a Manchukuo 'old boys' club'.
Worse, in order to make the argument a bigger deal, the author had to go into a biographical treatment of Park and then a history of South Korea of the 1960s and 1970s. In the end, I got lost in a myriad of threads and don't really know where I'm going.