history

The Japanese imperialists who occupied Korea by force of arms in the last century were hell-bent on plundering human resources.

After starting the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, they tried to realize their ambition for aggression at the cost of the blood and sweat of the Koreans by mobilizing the manpower resources of Korea for the execution of war through the requisition of all of its labour resources including “conscription”.

Accordingly, they promulgated the “special ordinance on Korean volunteers of the army” in February 1938, enforced it from April that year, enacted the “regulations governing volunteers training centre” with a six-month-long course and set up “volunteers training centres” extensively.

They also cooked up the “law on national mobilization” in April 1938 and the “national personal service drafting law” in October 1939 to take away Korean young and middle-aged men to the sites of backbreaking labour of death. At the munitions factories, coal and other mines and construction sites of military installations, the Koreans were forced into slave labour usually for over 16 hours a day.

The Japanese imperialists also forced all the able-bodied Koreans to do hard labour for the execution of the war of aggression under the signboard of the “national service corps” and “labour service”.

In May 1938 Japan issued an order to organize “national service corps” for the purpose of forcibly drafting Koreans into coal and other mines, railways, roads, harbours, timber felling places, the construction sites of airports and elsewhere.

The “national service corps” was aimed at forcibly requisitioning labour involving the old, women and even children. In November 1941 Japan proclaimed the “law on national service cooperation” in order to build up the "national service corps".

It forced even students into compulsory labour under the pretext of "labour service".

It not only drove a large number of Koreans into wartime forced labour, but also treated them as “talking tools”, killing them in group or crippling them at slave labour sites.

Thus, many Koreans were mercilessly exploited and overworked at coal mines across Japan including Hokkaido, and the number of those killed amounted to over 60 000 between 1940 and 1944.

The Japanese even buried many Koreans as sacrifices in dams, claiming that the dams would become solid and always be protected by God only when the human body was added to the concrete mixture.

They maltreated and killed Koreans not only in Korea and Japan, but also in the occupied territories of Southeast Asia.

Thus they forcibly drafted and abducted more than 8.4 million Koreans.

Japan’s plunder of human resources in Korea was not merely the appropriation of manpower and military force. It was a heinous crime of completely obliterating one country and nation.

The DPRK people never forget the crimes committed by the Japanese imperialists in the past, but will settle accounts with them without fail.