Nagasaki City authorities in Japan has recently approved, though reluctantly, an installation of the Korean A-Bomb victims memorial service monument in Peace Park, which in fact had been deferred for seven years. It has been disclosed, however, that they opposed an inscription of the phrase “forced labor” on the monument.

The Korean A-Bomb victims who met the undeserved death in Nagasaki in August 1945 were those who had been abducted or coercively drafted, and forced into slave labor by the Japanese imperialists who had been frenzied in invading the Asian continent.

Japan militarily occupied Korea and inflicted immeasurable physical and mental pains, and material damages upon our people during the first half of the 20 th century, but they are avoiding clear apology and thorough reparation until today.

The more Japan struggles to omit the phrase “forced labor” and embellish its crime-ridden history through the textbooks, the more the crime will build up, and it will never be erased or altered whatever the passage of time and the change of generations.

The Japanese imperialists’ inhumane atrocities of having imposed sufferings and killing upon the hundreds of thousands of Korean people by reducing them into cannon fodder of their aggression war, labor slaves and sexual slaves are the gravest state crime the human history has even known, because the perpetration of the crime had stemmed from the policy of annihilating the Korean nation.

Forced Drafting of Koreans – Gravest Abduction Crime Perpetrated by State

Abduction and forced drafting of Koreans perpetrated by Japan in the 20 th century with the mobilization of government and military powers are the barbarious crimes which overshadow by far the slave hunting dating back to the time of Middle Ages.

Japan forcibly abducted or drafted in a gangster manner 8.4 million of young and middle-aged Koreans to impose slave labor on them, and reduced 200,000 Korean women to sex slaves.

With the escalation of aggression war, the Japanese warmongers came to face the deficiencies of both armed and labor forces.

The colossal consumption of human and material resources with the expansion of fronts led to a complete exhaustion of the armed and labor forces in Japan, and the Japanese imperialists sought to raise these forces in the colonial Korea.

To recruit and draft the Korean labor forces by mobilization of the government power, the Japanese imperialists concocted vicious legislation one after another including “National Mobilization Act” (April 1938) and “National Draft Ordinance” (July 1939) and forcibly introduced them in Korea.

In the face of continued defeats in the fronts in the early 1940s, the Japanese imperialists revised the mobilization ordinance, and cooked up and enforced new evil legislation one after another, thus forcibly recruiting the young and middle-aged Koreans without distinction as to job, age and sex, and driving them into the lethal working grounds.

Initially, the drafting was done in the form of so-called “laborer recruitment” and “brokering by authorities”, a combination of carrot and stick. But as the war became expanded, the Japanese imperialists threw away this form and perpetrated abduction and drafting overtly and forcibly under the signboard of “labor drafting” and “military conscription.”

The abduction method employed by the Japanese imperialists was the combination of kidnapping and power of authority, where the latter was most used and the former was underpinned by the latter.

The victims of labor drafting, military conscription and “comfort corps” perpetrated by the Japanese imperialists testified one after another that the course of drafting and conscription had been characterized as forcible abduction, kidnapping and arrest, not a simple “recruitment.”

The kidnapping and forced drafting of Koreans and the subsequent cruel slave labor imposed upon them are the gravest abduction crime perpetrated by the state of Japan from A to Z.

Kim Jong Hyok

Researcher, Institute for Studies of Japan

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, DPRK

(To be continued)