During their occupation of Korea for 40 years in the last century the Japanese imperialists fabricated various evil laws for colonial rule over the country, inflicting untold sufferings and misfortunes on the Koreans. Among them were the “Punishment Act in Korea” and the “Criminal Act in Korea” concocted in March 1912.

The two criminal evil acts were cooked up by the Japanese imperialists to impose medieval penalties on the Koreans and establish a colonial oppressive system by intensifying penal suppression on them.

They stipulated that the “Punishment Act in Korea” would be applied to the Koreans alone. By dint of the “act”, they imposed penalties on the Koreans who were imprisoned or detained for more than three months or fined less than 100 won in case they had no fixed address or property, according to their circumstances. So, the Japanese chief of a police station could try a Korean summarily and execute it by imposing punishment on him.

The “Criminal Act in Korea” was rigged up by adding “exceptions” in favour of their strengthening the colonial rule over Korea while applying such crime-related laws as the criminal law and the criminal procedure law effective in the Japanese mainland.

The Japanese imperialists granted the “Government-general of Korea, and provincial governors and gendarmerie” a judiciary police power, and expanded a prosecutor’s right to disposition by legal force than that under the criminal law enforced in Japan. Such right was also given to the judiciary police officers. Not content with this, they empowered the judiciary police officers to imprison and interrogate a suspect for ten days and thus enabled them to arrest and detain the Koreans at any place and at any time, even if they were not caught red-handed.

As the “Criminal Act in Korea” stipulated that Japan shall cooperate with the judicial police of Manchukuo at any time to suppress and kill the anti-Japanese fighters and communists who had moved the theatre of struggle to Manchuria while fighting against its colonial rule in Korea, it could be enforced outside Korea.

The Japanese aggressors were hell-bent on medieval suppression of the Korean people, wielding the two acts.

Claiming that the “Koreans must obey Japanese law or die,” they arrested, imprisoned and killed innocent Koreans at random, to say nothing of patriotic fighters. The cases that they arrested and imprisoned the Koreans amounted to over 13 500 in 1912 and over 142 000 in 1918. However, their colonial fascist laws could not break the Korean people’s spirit of independence and check their revolutionary struggle for national liberation.

Nearly eight decades have passed since the defeat of the Japanese imperialists.

The Japanese reactionaries are still resorting to all sorts of despicable tricks to cover up the history of their blood-stained crimes, far from sincerely reflecting on and apologizing for their past crimes. Moreover, they are getting more frantic in arms buildup to realize their ambition for reinvasion.

The Korean people never forget the hideous inhuman crimes committed by the Japanese imperialists, and their will to settle accounts with those crimes is further hardened with the passage of time.

The more Japan is on a headlong rush to the road of reinvasion, the more it will precipitate its own self-destruction.

Kim Nam Su