Having occupied Korea by railroading the Korea-Japan Agreement (Ulsa Five-Point Treaty) in 1905, the Japanese imperialists resorted to the “residency-general” administration at first. They then enforced the heinous “governor-general administration” for 36 years from October 1, 1910, inflicting untold disasters, misfortunes and sufferings on the Korean people.
They concocted a “security law”, “publishing law” and other evil laws, and mercilessly trampled down all the rights of the Koreans, including the freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association and religion.
Frightened by the anti-Japanese spirit of the Korean people after the March 1 Popular Uprising in 1919, they switched over from “sabre rule” to a deceptive “civil government” in a bid to cover up the criminal purpose of “government-general administration”.
Under the signboard of “civil government”, they expanded the police and other repressive machinery on a large scale and suppressed in a coldblooded way the anti-Japanese struggle of the Korean people.
Their brutal nature is vividly manifested in the fact that Terauthi, the first governor-general of Korea, asserted that “Koreans should obey the Japanese law or die.”
They pursued the policy for “turning the Koreans into subjects of the Japanese Emperor” under such deceptive slogans that “Japanese and Koreans are of the same descent” and “Korea and Japan are one”, and made desperate efforts to deprive the Koreans of their language, spoken and written, and even their names.
They cooked up “conscription ordinance”, “ordinance on labour drafting” and “ordinance on student soldiers” one after another and forcibly drafted and abducted Koreans everywhere they lived.
During their military rule, they took away over 8.4 million young Koreans to serve as their cannon fodders and to do slave labour, and reduced 200 000 Korean women into sexual slaves of the Japanese army.
The Japanese “government-general administration” in Korea was a fascist repression and man-killing politics indeed.
Nevertheless, the Japanese reactionaries are scheming to cover up their past crimes committed against the Korean nation, claiming that their colonial domination brought civilization to Korea and that Japan dominated Korea according to the latter’s demand.
Despite the full disclosure of the criminal facts about the cruelest abduction and modern-version sexual slavery enforced by the imperial Japanese army, Japan attempts to evade the legal and moral responsibilities for its past crimes. It is quite a brazen-faced act.
The Korean people will surely make it pay dearly for the sufferings and misfortunes the Japanese imperialists inflicted upon the nation in the past.