After occupying Korea by force of arms in the last century, the Japanese imperialists plundered a lot of human and material resources while enforcing colonial rule. They institutionalized the plunder by means of the “national mobilization law”.

Japan, which waged the war of aggression against the Chinese continent in earnest in the latter half of the 1930s, cooked up the law in April 1938 to appropriate human and material resources needed for the war.

Article 49 of the law stipulated that the enforcement of the law should apply also to foreign lands (colonies).

On the basis of the "national mobilization law”, Japan promulgated the “special ordinance on Korean volunteers for the ground force”, the “ordinance on public labour drafting” and other acts in succession to forcibly draft and abduct a large number of young and middle-aged men and women of Korea.

In July 1940, it worked out the second “munitional mobilization plan” and hatched a plot to forcibly draft 150 000 Korean workers and replenish the workforces of all munitions factories and relevant companies. It drew up the “rules on labour recruitment”, “act on the recruitment of Korean labourers” and “law on the moving of Korean workers” and forcibly drafted the Koreans by exercising strict control and authority of state power, while setting the area and period of recruitment and employment conditions.

As a result, more than 8.4 million Koreans were abducted, kidnapped and forcibly taken away.

They were taken to coal and ore mines, shipyards, dam construction sites and railway project sites in Japan and even to China and the South Sea Islands to be forced to do harsh slave labour and become cannon fodder for Japan’s war of aggression. Many of them lost their lives in alien lands.

For example, over 60 000 Koreans died at coal mines across Japan including Hokkaido in the period between 1940 and 1944. In those days, the byword “one Korean for one sleeper” was coined.

Sex slavery practised by the Japanese imperialists was also legalized and regularized by the “national mobilization law”. They abducted 200 000 Korean women and forced them into sexual slavery under the draconian law.

They not only took away human resources.

In order to plunder Korea’s material resources, they fabricated all kinds of laws such as the “Korean bank law”, “Korean cereal control law”, “Korean munitions production responsibility system” and “munitions company law”.

Japan’s plunder of human and material resources caused huge damage to Korea’s socio-economic development.

Aforementioned crimes are hard historical facts that can never be buried in the moss of history and removed by the shameless history distortion by the Japanese authorities.

Japan can never evade the responsibility and reparation for the crimes it committed against the Korean people in the past.