As far as the Hashima coal mine is concerned, it was a submarine coal mine on Hashima Island in the waters off Nagasaki City. As its living and labor conditions were so poor that it was called a hell by even Japanese from the outset of its development.
Commenting on it, a spokesman for the Association of Korean Victims of Forcible Drafting and Their Bereaved Families issued a statement on Monday.
Disclosing that the Japanese imperialists brought some 1 000 Korean people to the small island without source of edible water and forced them into slave labor unfit for humanity on a permanent basis, the statement said:
The scars on the bodies of the victims, the remains of Koreans across Japan and under the sea, and the tears of agony shed by the bereaved families waiting for their unreturned members are the living evidence which can’t be substituted for anything.
As this is just the hard historical fact that no one can deny, the cruelty and viciousness of the crimes the Japanese imperialists committed by forcibly drafting Koreans and forcing them into slave labor are utterly unquestionable.
Nonetheless, the Japanese government has staged the above-said nasty farce in a bid to dodge the responsibility for the crimes against humanity.
By doing so, they also seek to evade their obligation to pay compensation and to keep the Japanese people in ignorance by labeling their proper understanding of history “self-tormenting outlook on history” in a bid to use them as a shock force for overseas invasion again.
The Japanese government should honestly reflect on Japan’s past sins and make a sincere apology and due reparation to the victims, instead of making useless efforts, like a drowning man catching at a straw, to evade the responsibility for the atonement of the high-profile human rights abuses. -0
