history

After militarily occupying Korea in the last century, the Japanese imperialists made vicious moves to obliterate the Koreans’ sense of national independence.

A typical example was the fabrication and announcement of an “ordinance on private school” in September 1908.

At that time patriotic cultural campaigners and other Koreans from all walks of life regarded the promotion of national education as a fundamental condition for the restoration of national sovereignty and the country's modern prosperity and development and directed efforts to it. This led to the formation of academic societies in different local areas of the country and a campaign to establish private schools as part of the anti-Japanese national education movement.

Many private schools were established and run across the country and they paid special attention to implanting national consciousness and anti-Japanese patriotism in youth and schoolchildren while imparting modern knowledge to them.

The “ordinance on private school” fabricated and proclaimed by the Japanese imperialists in an attempt to stamp out the anti-Japanese patriotism of the Korean people was a licence system to legalize a condition for depriving the Koreans of all rights to establish and operate schools and supervising and controlling their establishment and operation.

The Japanese imperialists extensively suppressed private schools in different parts of the country on the basis of a survey of the personal histories of the founders, principals and teachers of the schools. And they cooked up various draconian laws including the “rules on controlling the collection of donated money and articles” and the “regulations on collecting local business cost fees” to check the possibility of establishing schools and financing their operation.

After stipulating that only “examined and authorized” books could be used as textbooks at private schools, the Japanese imperialists banned all lessons dealing with anti-Japanese patriotic contents and closed the schools that defied the ban.

And in October 1911 they forcibly closed down a number of private schools by cooking up the “private school rules”, a more detailed version of the “ordinance on private school”. In March 1915 they revised and promulgated the “private school rules” again to exclude Korean teachers from private schools, appoint Japanese teachers and prohibit all anti-Japanese elements from teaching plans and contents of textbooks.

They also concocted and proclaimed various other draconian laws such as the “Korean education ordinance” and the “regulations on primary school”, in an attempt to imbue Korean students with the worship of the “Emperor” of Japan and make them cannon fodder for the war of aggression.

The crimes committed by the Japanese imperialists to stamp out the Koreans’ sense of national independence and turn them into their eternal colonial slaves can never be pardoned even with the passage of time and with the change of generation.

The international community does neither idly look on Japan’s moves to embellish its past in a bid to get rid of the yoke of its past crimes.

The settlement of its past is the legal and moral obligation of Japan.