On April 13, 1592, Japanese invaders mobilized huge forces to launch an armed invasion of Korea, absurdly demanding that Korea make way for them to the Ming dynasty of China.

This was called Japanese invasion of Korea recorded as the Imjin Patriotic War (1592–1598) in the history of the country. It was a direct result of Japan’s greed for territory and policy of overseas invasion and its first state crime against Korea.

Under the barbarous slogan “Kill all the Koreans!”, the Japanese invaders committed atrocities of indiscriminate slaughter. Starting the war with an assault on the Pusan Fort of Korea, they recklessly killed the people, young and old, men and women, in the fort. About the situation in the fort at the time, a history book says, “They climbed up the three man-high stone wall … killed all including even the elderly, women, dogs and cats.”

Such massacre was not limited to the Pusan Fort.

After occupying the Jinju Fort in June 1593, the invaders massacred innocent people at random and caught and locked all those who had narrowly escaped death in a warehouse to burn them to death. There was not a single person left alive in the fort.

There is a tomb of 214 752 noses and ears of Koreans in Kyoto, Japan. The tomb, the kind of which cannot be found elsewhere in the world, remains as the historic evidence that still reveals the atrociousness of Japan though hundreds of years have since passed.

During their invasion of Korea, the Japanese aggressors randomly kidnapped excellent talents of science, technique and the arts, including ceramists, physicians, architects, painters, embroiderers, type-makers and printers, and even ordinary people as manpower.

According to the confession by the Japanese, the Korean victims of the abduction numbered over 100 000.

The Japanese aggressors forced the kidnapped into slave labour and even sold them to other countries.

Most atrocious was that the aggressors abducted lots of women to be used as sexual slaves to satisfy their carnal desires. They raped all women they caught, regardless of elderly or married women or young girls and took them about when moving to other battlefields to commit barbarities that would make even beasts blush with shame.

This tells that Japan’s crime of sexual slavery censured as the most heinous in the last century already started by samurais hundreds of years ago.

This was not all

The Japanese invaders also destroyed and plundered valuable cultural assets of Korea at random.

According to History of Japan, a book written by a Portuguese, even Japanese boatmen and carriers and low-class Japanese, to say nothing of the chiefs of the Japanese aggressor forces, were hell-bent on making money by plundering cultural assets of Korea. The Japanese aggressors not only burnt and destroyed valuable books and excellent buildings as national treasures but also plundered innumerable ceramics, bells, Buddhas and art works.

Even a Japanese scholar confessed that Hideyoshi’s aggressive war was also the one for plundering and taking away all the Korean cultural assets to Japan.

Later, too, Japan ceaselessly committed aggression and plunder against Korea.

Particularly, it made desperate efforts to completely obliterate Korea as a state with a 5 000-year-long history and culture by militarily occupying the country and fabricating the aggressive Ulsa Five-point Treaty (on November 17, 1905), Jongmi Seven-point Treaty (on July 24, 1907) and Korea-Japan Annexation Treaty (on August 22, 1910).

The Japanese imperialists occupied Korea for over four decades and pursued a barbarous policy for exterminating the Korean nation. They forced sufferings and deaths on a huge number of Koreans as cannon fodder for their war of aggression and as labour and sex slaves, and plundered the country of an immeasurable amount of cultural assets and natural resources.

Far from reflecting on all sorts of criminal acts it committed in the past, Japan is embellishing them in an attempt to repeat its history of crime. Such shamelessness and impudence add fuel to the burning hatred of the entire Korean nation against Japan.

The Korean people will never forget Japan’s heinous crimes of murder and plunder against the Korean nation but make it pay for the crimes.

Kim Kwang Song