The Japanese reactionaries have long tried to register forced labor sites for exploiting Koreans including the Hashima Island as UNESCO’s world cultural heritage. But they faced strong opposition at home and abroad and were compelled to admit the forced labor of Koreans in July, 2015 and commit themselves before the international community to taking a proper step to keep the memory of the victims and establishing an information center telling the whole history.
At that time the UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, considering Japan’s such attitude, adopted a decision on advising Japan to make public the history about the forced labor of Koreans in every site.
However, just after attaining their purpose, the Japanese reactionaries openly exhibited fabrications denying the forced labor of Koreans, far from the above-said commitment and decision.
This is another unpardonable mockery of the Korean nation and the international community and unethical crime as it is an impudent distortion of history.
As far as the Hashima coal mine is concerned, it had been called by even Japanese a hell from the outset of its development owing to its poor living and labor conditions.
The Japanese imperialists brought some 1 000 Korean people to the island without source of edible water and forced them into painful slave labor of more than 12~14 hours every day. The Koreans were the targets of all sorts of national discrimination and maltreatment.
The testimonies by a Korean who had a narrow escape from the island of death and the Japanese who lived on its neighboring islands and a book written by Eidai Hayashi, a Japanese writer, go to clearly prove the crimes of the militarist murderers who maltreated and massacred Koreans brutally on the Hashima Island.
This being a hard fact, the Japanese reactionaries are spreading false information, describing it as “testimonies” by islanders, terming such act the one following the resolution and advice from the UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. This is, indeed, an unpardonable provocation to the mankind calling upon the island nation to sincerely atone for its crime-woven past.
The Japanese authorities are desperately resorting to distortion of history while labeling the proper understanding of the criminal history of the Japanese archipelago as “self-tormenting outlook on history”.
Their purpose is to evade their responsibility for atoning for the unethical crimes at any cost and to keep the Japanese people in ignorance, so as to use them as a shock brigade for overseas invasion again.
This is, indeed, outrageous.
The more desperately the Japanese politicians try to deny their past history and revive militarism, the bitterer denunciation and hatred of the international community they will meet, and this will cast a shadow on the future of the archipelago state.
In the final analysis, they are rejecting “self-tormenting outlook on history” to write another history of their self-ruin.
The Abe regime would be well advised to stop the useless act, though belatedly, and sincerely reflect on the past crimes and make due reparation for them as it is legally and morally obliged to do so. -0-
