A spokesperson for the Lawyers Committee of Korea issued the following press statement titled "No one can infringe upon the sacred right of Koreans in Japan to democratic national education" on April 23:

April 24, 1948 is recorded in the history of the movement of Koreans in Japan as the day when the Koreans in Japan defended the right to democratic national education at the cost of their blood, resolutely countering through a massive struggle the fascist suppression by the US and the Japanese reactionaries to wipe out the Korean schools in their cradle.

Even after Japan’s defeat in August 1945, the Japanese reactionary government persistently forced the Koreans in Japan to receive "assimilation education" in the period of the Japanese imperialist colonial rule and, at the instigation of the US imperialists, issued the "closure order" to Korean schools in January 1948.

Moreover, it issued to all the prefectural governors of Japan a brigandish order that the establishment of Koreans' independent schools can never be recognized and all the Korean children in Japan must enter the Japanese school.

Enraged by this, many Koreans in Japan turned out in a protest campaign to defend the democratic national education, but the Japanese reactionaries, ignoring their just demands, declared the "emergency situation" on April 24, 1948 and ran amuck in such bloody suppression as firing water cannon and bullets and arresting and detaining them by mobilizing huge police force.

It has been nearly 80 years since the defeat of Japanese imperialism, but there is no slight change in the Japanese authorities' extreme national chauvinism and unethical discrimination policy to obliterate the national education of Koreans in Japan.

A typical example is that in August 2019 the Japanese authorities, aiming at kindergartens under the Korean schools, issued an instruction to all autonomous bodies not to receive the application for licencing of childcare facilities but to dismiss all the applications they had already received.

It is quite natural for Koreans in Japan to teach their children the Korean language and it is the basic requirement of international law that the children should be provided with the best interests and financial assistance.

Article 28 of the Convention on Children Rights adopted by the United Nations stipulates that all countries concerned shall recognize the right of the child to education, and provide this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity.

However, the Japanese authorities are foolishly attempting to interpret the Convention on Children Rights in conformity with their chauvinism-stained law, and they have not kept even their commitment to equitably apply the "Child Rearing Support Act" to all the children.

It is a hideous violation of human rights that can never be found in the history of any country to deprive people of even their elementary right to teach the rising generations their mother tongue.

The Japanese authorities are imposing on Koreans in Japan the same tax-paying obligation as the Japanese, but they are excluding only the Korean schools from various educational assistance systems including the application of "tuition-free programme for senior high schools" and "free education and upbringing of children" under the unreasonable pretext, thus wounding the innocent children in their hearts.

The enforcement of democratic national education by Koreans in Japan is a natural exercise of their rights which fully conforms to international human rights conventions including the Convention on Children Rights and the Convention against Discrimination in Education of UNESCO and many other international laws accepted by Japan, and to Japan's national laws such as the Constitution and the Fundamental Law of Education of Japan.

The Japanese government has a legal obligation as well as moral responsibility to provide the Koreans in Japan, the direct victims of the Japanese imperialists' colonial rule over Korea and their children, with national rights such as the right to education and the right to life.

The legitimate right to national education of Koreans in Japan is a sacred one which can neither be denied on all occasions nor infringed upon by anyone.

The Lawyers Committee of Korea strongly demands that the Japanese authorities immediately withdraw all illegal institutional and administrative discrimination measures encroaching upon the democratic national rights of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan and Koreans in Japan and fulfil their legal and moral obligations.

KCNA