Tag: Hashima

Koo Hyun-chul, who, along with his father, was taken to Japan’s Hashima Island for forced labor at the age of nine in 1939, touches the model of a forced laborer statue displayed in front of the Japanese consulate in Busan on Sept. 18, 2017. At a news conference, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, one of the nation’s two largest umbrella unions, declared a plan to set up the statue in front of the Japanese mission next May Day. Tens of thousands of Koreans were forcibly taken to the island for coal mining during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea from 1910-1945. (Yonhap)

Here is the latest South Korean movie that is expected to rekindle anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea:

When Choi Jang-seop left for Japan more than seven decades ago, the 16-year-old did not know that the journey would change his life.

He was one of hundreds of Koreans who were conscripted into forced labor on Japan’s Hashima Island as part of the country’s mobilization of Koreans during World War II. Korea was under Japan’s colonial rule from 1910 to 1945.

Choi — wearing only underwear — toiled eight hours in a hot, cramped undersea coal mine with the constant fear of death. Other survivors said they worked for 12 hours at a time as three eight-hour shifts gave way to two 12-hour shifts with the rising demand for coal during the war.

What’s worse is that forced laborers, mostly in their teens and 20s, were given food that was mostly remnants of beans after the vegetable oil had been extracted, a situation that led to malnutrition and starvation among some forced laborers.

“I was hungry all the time and life was miserable beyond description,” Choi recalled of his days on the island between 1943 and 1945 in a recent interview with Yonhap News Agency at his small apartment in Daejeon, some 160 kilometers south of Seoul.  [Yonhap]

You can read much more at the link, by the way has anyone seen the movie yet?