The Japanese imperialists enforced more atrocious and oppressive colonial policies from the latter half of the 1930s during their military occupation of Korea (1905-1945).

One of them is the forcible drafting of many young and middle-aged Koreans on the pretext of “compulsory labour draft” and forcing slave labour on them.

Their “compulsory labour draft” was aimed at meeting the manpower shortage in munitions factories needed for aggressive war, construction projects for expanding military installations and mines and coal mines by taking out all young and middle-aged manpower in Korea. Another purpose was to help Japanese capitalists bring in maximum profits by sweating Korean workers.

The Japanese imperialists cooked up and enforced a series of laws and methods to make forcible “drafting” of manpower as a policy and legalize it.

It was the “national personal service drafting law” promulgated in October 1939. The Japanese imperialists stipulated in the law that the “state shall draft manpower for compulsory labour at its discretion and provincial governors shall issue the writs for labour draft to those to be drafted”.

After the law was made public, many Koreans were taken to Japan.

The Japanese imperialists actually “hunted” Koreans at random throughout the country.

They raided villages and houses to catch Koreans who were passing by, working and sleeping and loaded them into trucks. Sometimes they drove trucks to the middle of paddy fields in the daytime and forcibly took away working peasants.

When they carried away the draftees, they posted watchmen holding clubs to control the Koreans so that they could not talk with each other. The Japanese even drafted them by binding their waists with ropes.

Later, they enforced the “revised national personal service drafting law” in September 1943. Japan announced the “personal service drafting law for all middle-aged people” in August 1944 and tried more viciously to forcibly draft Korean manpower.

The draftees kidnapped by the Japanese imperialists were subjected to backbreaking labour at munitions factories, coal and other mines and military installations in Korea and Japan, in Southeast Asia and on many islands in the Pacific. Over 16 hours of labour, dangerous working conditions, no rest, insufficient sleep, poor lodging and boarding and others threatened the lives of Korean workers every moment. Eventually, many Koreans lost their lives in foreign lands.

After the Sino-Japanese war alone, the number of Koreans forcibly drafted by Japanese imperialists reached over 8.4 million. As they suffered continuous defeat in the Pacific war, the Japanese imperialists drafted many Koreans and assigned them to underground factories and military installations in 549 places throughout Japan from 1944 to 1945 to prepare for a decisive battle in Japan proper.

Despite the facts, Japan plays dirty tricks to cover up these crimes behind the black curtain of history by burning up many national documents related to the forcible drafting of Koreans. It even goes so far as to distort history while beautifying the blood-stained past crimes.

History can neither be erased nor covered up even if it is denied or distorted. No matter how desperately Japan uses cunning tricks, every sin brings its punishment with it.

The A-class unethical crimes Japan committed in the past can never escape stern punishment of history.