Souls Call for Revenge

Every page of the Japanese history is stained with the blood of the Korean nation.

After occupying Korea militarily through vicious plots and by strong-arm methods, the Japanese imperialists cruelly killed a huge number of Koreans during their colonial rule of Korea (1905-1945). The massacre of Koreans in the Kanto area of Japan is a typical example.

A great earthquake unprecedented in the history hit the Kanto area around 12 o’clock on September 1, 1923. The victims raised their voice of protest against their government for no appropriate relief measures.

Flustered at this, the Japanese authorities hatched a plot to divert the rising public discontent to the Korean residents and thus to alleviate public dissatisfaction with the government while using it for an opportunity to crack down on and kill the Koreans massively.

At an extraordinary cabinet meeting at the residence of the prime minister, the ministry of intelligence was ordered to quell the public anger by every possible means. According to this, the ministry started false rumours like the one that Koreans were setting fire and poisoning wells.

Soon, a “royal ordinance” was issued giving an order to label the Koreans as “enemy” and kill the Korean residents mercilessly, and the Kanto martial law command was organized with the most vicious officers. Notices were ubiquitous saying that “the Korean rogues have risen up” and that “there will be no problem with killing those who are in resistance.” The policemen bustled about the city, shouting publicly through megaphones to kill the Koreans. The “vigilante corps,” organized by mobilizing hooligans at the dictation of the Japanese regime, went into cooperation with the army and police.

The scoundrels put anyone who was identified as Korean to death--by shooting, stabbing, burning and throwing them to water. They built checkpoints everywhere and made all the passers-by to pronounce some difficult Japanese words. Once they identified Koreans, they killed them by beheading or disemboweling. They shackled Koreans in groups and stood them on embankments before shooting them to death; they threw some of them into flames for incineration; they cut pregnant women in the belly and took out the embryos to trample them to death. As many as 23 000 Koreans were put to death in the massacre.

This was the worst-ever inhumane crime, the kind of which could be committed by butchers like the Japanese samurais who were deep steeped in national chauvinism. The sanguinary massacre of Koreans in Kanto is just a part of crimes Japan has committed against Koreans, and a page of its history of aggression filled with destruction and massacres.

It is Japan’s legal and moral obligation to pay for its crimes against the Korean nation during its military occupation of Korea last century. Nevertheless, it is making desperate efforts to shirk the responsibility.

Just a few months ago, the Japanese regime declared at a Cabinet meeting that it is “inappropriate to describe mobilization of workers from the Korean peninsula for work in Japan during the Second World War as forced drafting.” And at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council it termed the forced recruiting of “comfort women” by the imperial Japanese army a cooked-up story.

This clearly proves that Japan has no guilty conscience for its past history of aggression, and, instead, it has become all the more reckless to return to its old position it had when it used to profess itself to be the “leader of Asia”.

The more desperately Japan tries to shirk the responsibility for the atonement for its crime-woven past, the stronger the Korean people’s determination will become to settle accounts with it.

The souls of those days call for revenge, condemning the unforgivable crime-woven history of Japan.

The Korean people are determined to settle a score with Japan for all the crimes to the end and make it pay for them dearly.