In the past Japan militarily occupied Korea by unlawful and illegal means and committed barbarous crimes against the Korean nation. Among them is the vicious and outrageous distortion of the history of Korea.

In July 1915, Japan set up a mechanism for compiling the Korean history at the advisory council of the Japanese government-general in Korea. Following the anti-Japanese popular uprising that started on March 1, 1919, it buckled down to revising the Korean history. In December 1922, the “Korean history compilation committee” was established according to the government-general’s instruction No. 64.

Afterwards, in June 1925, Japan made public regulations on Korean history compilation and fabricated the “Korean history compilation society” in a bid to distort the whole history of Korea spanning thousands of years.

The superintendent-general in charge of state affairs under the government-general in Korea was appointed chairman of the society, and pro-Japanese traitors and the Japanese government-patronized scholars notorious for cooking up the Korean history became its members.

The society had published the alleged “History of Korea” (35 volumes) from the 1920s to the 1930s, all of which were full of falsity.

The Japanese, who set it as the principle of the activities of the society to rewrite the history of Korea in favour of their colonial rule, whitewashed the history of the ancient states in Korea and brought the period when a state was formed in Korea down to the Christian era. In this way they tried to conceal the fact that Japan lagged behind Korea in view of the transition to a civilized society and to portray Japan as a big country that had developed earlier than Korea.

Meanwhile, they made vicious attempts to describe the history of Korea as the one subordinate to those of Asian powers.

This despicable act was originated from a scheme to infuse into the mind of the Korean people that they were an “incompetent nation”, which had never been independent in history, and to eradicate their national pride and self-esteem.

Japan distorted even the modern history of Korea.

It erased the history of the Koreans’ struggles against foreign forces and aggression and portrayed its invasion of Korea as justifiable. It described the “Unyogo incident” in 1875 as self-defensive, “Kanghwado Treaty” in 1876 as “Korea-Japan friendship treaty” geared to bringing happiness to Korea, and the Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895) intended to seize exclusive domination of Korea and the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) as “righteous wars” for ensuring “peace in the East” and “maintenance of independence of Korea.”

Japan’s moves to revise Korea’s history were a wicked and shameless scheme to deprive the Korean people of their sense of patriotism and national pride and a criminal act to justify its aggression and domination of Korea and exterminate the Korean nation itself.

Not content with banning the use of the Korean language and depriving the Koreans of their names to obliterate their consciousness of national independence, it committed such an unprecedentedly outrageous crime of distorting the time-honoured Korean history.

Over a century has passed since then. Not to be outdone by their ancestors who made no bones about rewriting the Korean history, the Japanese reactionaries are now hell-bent on dressing up their crime-woven history. They are totally denying the heinous past atrocities such as the sexual slavery by the imperial army of Japan, the butt of international criticism, while spreading false information they concocted.

This reveals their sinister intention to justify their sinful past of aggression.

History can neither be erased nor faked. Japan is well advised to draw a lesson from its crime-ridden history, rather than obsessing about denying the truth of history.

Kang Kum Chol