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During their military occupation of Korea between 1905 and 1945 the Japanese imperialists used large numbers of Korean youth and students as bullet shields and cannon fodder for carrying out their aggressive war policy.

In the latter half of the 1930s they expanded the aggressive war to the continent. And as the fronts of the war increased and they got short of military forces, they planned to fill them up with the Korean young people.

To this end, they adopted in June 1943 a law on wartime military education, called the “general plan for establishing a wartime mobilization system of students”, to be enforced at schools at all levels in Korea and ordered provincial governors and schools to execute it after the discussion of it at the Government-General in Korea.

And they enacted and proclaimed the “ordinance on student soldiers” in November 1943, setting students of universities, colleges and high schools as targets of the forced conscription. 

They applied a coercive method when their “student soldier” system was faced with a barrage of protest and denunciation by the Korean people as well as youth and students.

While preaching the ready consent of Korean students to their “student soldier” system, the Japanese imperialists committed such threatening and violent atrocities as arresting “evaders of the student soldier system” and forcibly drafting them to the battlefields of the aggressive war under guard and control by mobilizing the police and military police.

The Korean youth and students, who had been taken away that way, were treated like cattle. The Japanese brutally punished Koreans on the pretext that they did not understand what they said and forced them to blindly obey the orders of their seniors. And once battles began, they used them as bullet-shields.

As a result, a large number of Korean youth and students were forced to grievous unnatural deaths.

Just before their defeat on August 15 1945, the Japanese imperialists killed a large number of Korean young people on the pretext of keeping military secrets.

These are only one small part of the crimes committed by the Japanese imperialists during their military occupation of Korea.

But the Japanese reactionaries have not yet admitted their past crimes. Instead they are hell-bent on realizing the wild ambition for reinvasion while persisting in distorting history.

The statute of limitation does not apply to Japan’s past crimes and they should be punished severely without fail.