Japan is hell-bent on distorting historical facts to cover up its past wrongdoings.

Recently, the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science examined and approved high-school textbooks which totally whitewash the atrocities committed by Japanese imperialism during its military occupation of Korea, namely sexual slavery for Japanese troops and forced slave labour, claiming that what is described as forcible did not exist.

Such a move must never be overlooked as it is a sinister scheme designed to evade the compensation for the past wrongdoings and instil the spectre of militarism into the younger generations by teaching them distorted historical facts.

It is a stark historical fact recognized by the world that Japan inflicted untold misfortune and sufferings on the Koreans and other Asian people in the past.

In particular, in the last century Japan occupied Korea militarily and forced Koreans into unprecedentedly hard labour.

In order to forcibly mobilize human and material resources needed for the war of aggression, the Japanese imperialists promulgated the “National Mobilization Law” in April 1938, which stipulates that the current law shall be in force in their colonies as well. They went on to institute and revise all sorts of draconian laws so that they could seize and hurl Koreans into sweatshops at will.

Numerous Korean abductees were taken to different parts of Japan and forced into slave labour at munitions factories, air fields, power stations and mines.

Korean workers were compelled to work in places with no protective measures taken. As a result, as many as 60 000 Koreans lost their lives in coal mines across Japan in 1940-44. The Japanese worked Korean builders hard like horses at construction sites of dams of hydroelectric power stations, and they even buried some of them alive in the dams as “sacrificial offerings.”

A victim who had been forced into slave labour at a coal mine in Japan testified as follows:

“We worked in pairs. One dug up coal and the other carried it outside. If we failed to fulfil our norm, we were not allowed to go out. So we sometimes worked for 19 hours starting from seven o’clock in the morning, and went outside at three o’clock the following morning. The meal was usually so poor as to sicken even pigs. We were too hungry to work.”

The minutes of a meeting held in the then Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan in August 1942 contain what high-ranking officials said admitting the forced labour.

Such being the case, however, Japan continues to distort history, embellishing its past crimes with imprudent sophism.

But history can never be rewritten or erased.

The more Japan makes desperate efforts to cover up its past wrongdoings, the more it will highlight the despicable and dirty nature of the current Japanese rulers who are trying to deny the crime-woven history and repeat it.

Han Kyong Ho