history

The Japanese imperialists plundered enormous quantities of resources of Korea during their military occupation of the country (1905-1945).

A typical example was the pillage by dint of the “Korean mining act”.

Japan investigated the distribution of mineral resources of Korea from the early 1910s and cooked up and promulgated the act in December 1915.

The act stipulated that it makes it a rule to confer the mining right on the first applicant, except for specified regions or kinds of minerals. Based on its survey data, it informed its capitalists in advance of promising mineral fields and significant kinds of minerals and let them submit applications before others, thereby enabling them to monopolize the mining right to major mining areas.

The act also forbade foreigners, who were not Japanese, to have a new mining right and specified the condition that the mining right would be granted only to so-called corporate companies. It stipulated that the mining right, which was already possessed, would remain valid even if a new act would come into force, thus confirming and protecting by law the ownership of the mining right the Japanese capitalists had already seized.

The development and management of mines by Koreans were severely limited due to the mining act and Japanese businesses were allowed to plunder natural resources of Korea without limitation.

The plunder of resources by the Japanese imperialists reached extremes from the late 1930s.

At that time, they were hell-bent on expanding the war of aggression. They tried to plunder different kinds of minerals of Korea to use them as raw materials for the production of weapons and other war supplies. Hence, they developed mines in the northern areas of Korea on the pretext of “exploitation”, and shipped away large amounts of resources.

For the transport capacity failed to keep up with the ever-growing amounts of iron ore, they opted to produce iron in Korea and carry it to Japan. In this way, they took enormous quantities of iron and nearly 400 tons of gold.

While taking away lead, zinc, nickel, magnesite, manganese, graphite and large quantities of other resources, they even robbed the Koreans of such household goods as brassware in order to meet ever-growing material needs.

The past crimes of Japan who inflicted tremendous damages and sufferings on the Korean people must be punished at any cost.