opinion

In the past century, Japan occupied Korea militarily and expanded its overseas aggression to Asia. The Japanese imperialists proclaimed the fascist “Law on National Mobilization” on April 1 1938 in order to allocate human and material resources needed for expanding the war.

It was a draconian law aimed at forcing everyone to conduct economic activities as required by the wartime and addressing the shortage of labour force and materials by dint of legal power of ruling organs.

It stipulated that all material and human resources including weapons, warships, means of transport and raw materials and equipment should be mobilized for the protracted war of aggression.

It also specified that the Japanese government would have the control of financial resources and direct them to expanding the munitions industry.

The law was enforced more cruelly and heinously in Korea.

The Japanese imperialists wrote such a passage in the law that the “enforcement of the law will be applied to foreign land (colonial countries)”. By brandishing this draconian law, they committed a heinous crime of forcefully drafting over 8.4 million innocent people from Korea. 

The Koreans drafted that way were taken to China, the Philippines and South Sea Islands, to say nothing of their homeland and Japan, to be subjected to all kinds of slave labour, maltreatment and miserable death.

Under the draconian law, the Japanese imperialists pushed ahead with the drafting of sexual slaves for their army and abducted and took away more than 200 000 Korean women, ranging from girls in their teens to married women, to reduce them to sexual slaves for their brutalized soldiers. When the days of defeat came closer, they unhesitatingly committed heinous massacres of the women in every cruel way to cover up their crimes.

The Japanese imperialists reduced many Koreans to cannon fodder for their war of aggression and forced them into slave labour and disgraceful sexual service, giving them pain and killing them. Such inhumane outrage can never be pardoned as they are super-class crimes against humanity unprecedented in human history.

Japan with such blood-stained past, has not settled its crimes though it has been nearly 80 years since its defeat. Rather, it is distorting past crimes, beautifying and embellishing them and employing every possible means to evade its responsibility.

There is no today without its past and the criminal past should be settled without fail.

The settlement of the past is the historical task of Japan.