In the last century the Japanese imperialists occupied Korea and inflicted untold sufferings and misfortunes on the Korean people. Among their crimes is the fabrication of the “Law on National Mobilization.”

The Japanese imperialists became hell-bent on frantic moves for aggressive war in the second half of the 1930s, and this caused them a huge consumption of human resources leading them to the shortage of labour force. Nonplussed by such situation, they promulgated the “Law on National Mobilization” on April 1, 1938 in a bid to replenish the shortage of labour force. They stipulated that the law shall be enforced even in its colonies, and forcibly drafted and abducted millions of Koreans, regardless of their age and gender, and drove them to slave labour sites.

The Koreans were forced to do medieval slave labour not only in the Japanese archipelago but in the South Sea Islands, the Philippines and other places the Japanese imperialists invaded.

The Japanese imperialists threw the Koreans into concentration camps, deprived them of elementary freedom and rights and did not provide them with minimum working conditions. The Koreans were treated as draught animals under inferior working conditions. The Japanese imperialists drove them to the most dangerous and difficult fields such as the sites of building military installations, coal and other mines and dams, bleeding them white.

A victim who had been forced to do slave labour at a coal mine in Japan testified as follows:

We worked in pairs. One dug up coal and the other carried it outside. If we failed to fulfil our norm, we were not allowed to go out. Sometimes, we worked for 19 hours from seven o’clock, and went outside at three o’clock the following morning. The meal was mainly defatted bean-cakes and other things which even pigs disliked eating. We were too hungry to work.

The cruel Japanese imperialists applied all sorts of penalties beyond human imagination to the Koreans: When the latter were disagreeable even a bit to their feelings, they hit them with a baseball bat, forced them to sit on knees with a square bar between them, seared any part of their bodies with red-hot iron rods, ripped up their flesh with a knife and crammed heated lead lumps there.

Even after bleeding the Koreans white and making them invalids, they mercilessly massacred them. According to data, over 60 000 Koreans died at the coal mines in Japan in the period from 1940 to 1944. Those who survived by chance were cruelly murdered to cover up the truth of forced labour.

The ashes of many Koreans, who were forced to suffer untold misfortunes, pains and death, are still buried in different parts of Japan.

Nearly eight decades have passed since the defeat of Japan. But the Japanese reactionaries are making such preposterous sophism that the draft was the “voluntary will of the Koreans” while embellishing their past crimes. It is the acme of shamelessness and brazenness which can be made only by such impudent Japanese reactionaries devoid of ethics and morality.

This is an insult not only to the Korean victims of forced drafting and their bereaved families but to the Korean nation as a whole.

The Korean people will never forget Japan’s A-class crimes against humanity and surely settle accounts with them.

Jo Myong Sun