Opinion

Crimes the Japanese imperialists committed during the Second World War have recently been disclosed afresh: they took away a large number of Koreans to Okinawa, Japan, to reduce them to victims of aggression.

According to an investigation conducted by a teaching fellow of the regional institute of Okinawa University of Japan, at least 3 461 soldiers and army civilian employees were taken to Okinawa from Korea during the war, and 701 of them died a grievous death.

A “monument to peace” inscribed with the names of those who died in the battle of Okinawa was set up in the prefecture in 1995 and the Koreans out of them are said to number 463.

It has also been revealed that the Japanese authorities committed a human rights violation in an attempt to cover up the fact that the Korean women were reduced to sex slaves for the imperial Japanese army.

During the Pacific War, there were a total of 143 “comfort stations” in Okinawa, but the number of “comfort women” including Koreans is not known and the total number of Koreans and the general situation of victims in Okinawa have not been brought to light.

“I think the number of victims of Korean peninsula origin might have been more than 463 and we cannot say the figure correctly reflects the real situation. I hope that the soul of those who were killed after being abandoned like cleaning cloth would be saved in the form of carving their names on a monument at least,” said the teaching fellow.

As is known, the Japanese imperialists occupied Korea by force of arms in the last century and forcibly drafted and abducted Koreans to make them fall victim to their aggression.

The Japanese imperialists enacted various draconian laws such as the ordinance on special Korean volunteers for the army, the national mobilization law and the national labour drafting act to provide legal and institutional mechanisms for mobilizing all the Koreans for their war. They arrested, detained, suppressed and killed those who did not accede to military conscription by criminalizing them. More than 8.4 million young and middle-aged Koreans who were abducted and taken thus were brought to the construction sites of their secret facilities, coal and ore mines, railways, dams of power stations, battlefields and other places to be forced to do slave labour or to serve as bullet-shields.

They also raided Korean farmhouses late at night to take away women and forced women working in the fields, walking along and doing washing at wells into trucks in broad daylight to forcibly drive them away. They also seduced girls in groups, saying they would provide them with good jobs. As a result, 200 000 Korean women who were abducted, seduced and forcibly drafted that way were compelled to experience sexual slavery for the Japanese army. At that time the Japanese abandoned the corpses of many Korean “comfort women” in mountains or threw them into rivers, asserting that they had no right to be buried in the ground even after death. And they killed almost all the women to cover up their crimes.

Even a long lapse of time cannot conceal the wrongs done by the Japanese imperialists against the Korean people in the previous century.

The denial and distortion of history only show Japan’s foolish and infantile way of thinking.

If the Japanese authorities keep denying the past crimes, that will be only tantamount to perpetrating graver crimes.