Among the past crimes committed by Japan against Koreans is the massacre of them at the time of the Great Kanto Earthquake.

On September 1, 1923 a devastating earthquake unprecedented in Japanese history hit the Kanto area around Tokyo and Yokohama.

Numerous people were killed or wounded or went missing, and a large amount of properties were buried or burnt, resulting in a huge economic loss.

But the then Japanese government took no relief measures but it rather only provided assistance to the capitalists on the verge of bankruptcy. This sparked growing unrest and discontent among the public. To provide against the prevailing situation, the Japanese government hatched a plot to get out of the socio-political crisis caused by the earthquake by diverting the anti-government feeling by sacrificing innocent Koreans in Japan.

On September 2 the Japanese emperor issued a “royal ordinance” on declaring a martial law, and the Japanese government spread rumours that Koreans were setting fire and poisoning wells to ferment hostility against them. Along with this, it made its home minister issue an urgent order on killing Koreans across Japan.

According to the order, the Japanese army, police, reserve soldiers, and members of “vigilante corps,” “youth corps,” right-wing “anti-communist” groups and other hooligans killed Koreans in Japan mercilessly.

They shot, stabbed or burnt the Koreans to death whenever they found the latter. They threw them into water and lined up children in front of their parents before they beheaded them, sawed their limbs and gouged their eyes with a kitchen knife. Moreover, they set up “check points” in various places where they detained the evacuees or forced the passers-by to pronounce Japanese words which were hard for Koreans to utter. In this way they singled out Koreans and killed them there and then. They set fire to a ship carrying 250 Koreans with gasoline and sank it in the sea off Yokohama.

Those Koreans killed by the Japanese during the Great Kanto Earthquake amount to more than 23 000.

Many decades have passed since then, but Japan does not feel any sense of guilt or responsibility, far from giving an explicit explanation of the incident.

Japan insisted that it could not find any records authenticating the facts although it had received questions over the Kanto massacre several times at Diet sessions and press conferences. The governor of Tokyo went to great lengths to say that the local government would no longer send a message of condolence to the memorial service for the Korean victims.

However, the truth of history can never be distorted or covered.

However desperately Japan tries to hide its crime-woven past, the Korean people remember the history of suffering and harden their determination to settle the old scores by all means.

Han Kyong Ho