August 15 is the date of defeat of Japan in the World War II, while it is a day of independence of Korea. Today’s trade conflict between Republic of Korea (ROK) and Japan has ushered in a critical phase due to ‘export regulation’ policies taken by the Japanese government. The Abe administration refuses to discuss the issue of war-time forced laborers, too, stirring up anti-ROK feeling. At the occasion of August 15, 2019, the Japanese government should recover right mind.

JAPAN MUST REVIEW SINCERELY HISTORY OF COLONIAL RULE OVER KOREA

According to statistics compiled by Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), during the colonial rule over Korea beginning in 1910, six to eight million Koreans were forced to work as slaves and were drafted as soldiers. Two hundred thousand young women were mobilized to be made ‘comfort women’, being put in the military’s brothels as sexual slaves. Some 1.5 million Koreans were sent against their will to southeastern Asian nations and Sakhalin which were occupied by Japan as well as Japanese islands.

Statistics of the then-Japan’s Ministry of Interior

These figures are not politically exaggerated. The official data of the former Ministry of Interior of Japan, too, say that Koreans living in Japan in 1911 counted approximately 3,000, which grew rapidly in 1920s and reached over 300 thousand in 1930s. The Government-General of Korea committed in land investigation, which deprived peasants of their terrain, drove them out of native villages. Thus, Koreans were compelled to sail to Japan for a job.

From the year 1939, when Japan was ready for war-time preparedness, forced labor was practiced systematically and openly in order to fill labor shortage inside Japan. Over one million Koreans were taken into the country. As the draft system was implemented in 1944 to recruit Koreans, the figure rose to over two million.

Liberation and New Pains

The today’s reparation issue of the war-time Korean laborers who fight in the law court constitutes a tip of iceberg, considering the extraordinary sacrifices of Koreans, namely a tiny demand of restitution. Koreans who were recruited as soldiers have not been paid any benefits, nor compensated for deaths and injuries.

Even those who came to Japan ‘voluntarily’ in order to survive led an unbearable life. In the aftermath of the great earthquakes in the Kanto area in 1923 several thousands of Koreans were massacred. An exact number of deaths is unknown even today. Recently a group of Koreans living in Japan petitioned the Japanese government to make an apology for the violation of human rights. The government flatly denied it.

August 15 is for the Korean people an anniversary of liberation from the sufferings. Simultaneously, however, it meant a beginning of new agony.

The colonial rule of Japan which lasted for 36 years destroyed a nation building by Koreans, disturbing to set up a single administrative body of state. The vacuum immediately became a stage of East-West Cold War, thus the peninsula was divided and governed separately by the United States and the Soviet Union. Struggles for a unified nation, including the insurrection in the Jeju Island, were fought, but they were cracked down by the domestic rightwing forces and the US military violently.

Several dozens of thousand of residents were killed in the island. People fled to Osaka and other regions in Japan. Then, the Korean War broke out. The same one people fought against each other. How many perished and how many families split tragically during the eight years from 1945 through 1953 when the war was ceased? Even today the divided nations keep facing sorrows.

Have rich imagination

The root cause of today’s inconsistency lies in the colonial rule of Japan over Korea. The day August 15 must be a day when we should think over imaginatively.

Recently Prime Minister of Japan told the Korean Ambassador stationed in Japan ‘lack of trustful relationship’. When the ambassador asked for talks, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Japan shouted to him, ‘you are rude’. Weeklies incite, saying ‘disrupt relations with ROK. The government and mass media stoke the flames of general public. This is out-of-the-way.

August 13, 2019