[Kokkomu's review] A history of anger and sadness 'Battleship Island'... Two faces of Japan saying "there was no forced labor"

The story of that day in history that we should not forget, 'Jang Trio' Jang Hyeon-seong, Jang Seong-gyu, and Jang Do-yeon tell the story of SBS 'The Tale of Biting the Tail' (hereafter 'Kkokomu').

For those who missed the main broadcast, or for those who have watched the broadcast but want to review its contents, SBS Entertainment News summarizes it in one room.

, which aired on the 21st 

 .

As story friends, actors Song Young-gyu, Lee Yi-kyung, and comedian Lee Eun-hyung appeared (reviews are conducted in a semi-speaking mode to match the characteristics of 'Kokkomu').

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The time was January 1943, 15-year-old Jang-seop Choi, who lived in Iksan, Jeollabuk-do.

He was the youngest son of a poor farmer, a boy who studied hard and never missed an honors prize.

One day when Jang Seop was at home, Yoon, an employee of the village office, came to visit.

At Yoon's words to follow along, Jang-seop did not even know English and followed him.

The governor, whom Jang Seop met at the county office, looked at Jang Seop and said, "Isn't he too young?"

Then, Mr. Yoon said something inexplicable, saying, "The younger you are there, the better."

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Besides Jang-seop, some children were called by the head of the neighborhood, and some children were told to come by a detective, so the children were caught by the calls of adults.

Locked the children in one room and locked the door from outside.

A series of boy abductions were taking place all over the country.

The children were forced to follow the threats that if they refused this call, their parents would be bullied, or they would cut off rations to go back to their families.

The next day, Seop Jang got on the train at Iksan Station.

People in the same situation on that train didn't know where they were being taken.

When the train entered the station near the house, Jang Seop found a woman in the platform far away, wearing a chima jeogori, looking around anxiously.

Upon hearing that her son was being dragged away, she was her mother and sister to the station.

When her mother found Jang-seop, she gave her Injeolmi to tell her not to get hungry on the way, saying, "Come back safely."

With her injeolmi in her hands, Jang-seop left his hometown with a desperate heart.

After a long drive, we arrived at Busan Port.

Suddenly, a Japanese man appeared and said, "Now you guys are going to Japan," and said that you can go to Japan to learn techniques and earn a lot of money.

So, the children departed from Busan Port by boat and arrived in Japan, and then boarded the train again and traveled by boat for several days.

Then something starts to appear in the distance.

It was an ugly island floating in the middle of the sea.

The whole island was surrounded by gray retaining walls, and high-rise apartments were lined up inside.

The name of this island is 'Dando', or 'Hashima' in Japanese.

At the narrow entrance in front of the marina, there were four letters 'Gate of Glory' written on it.

What kind of 'glory' was waiting for them?

As I entered the island, a landscape I had never seen before unfolded.

There were a lot of high-rise apartments with 4 stories low and 10 stories high, and there were hospitals, schools, police stations, theaters, and even pachinko.

There were too many people.

It is said that over 5,000 people once lived on this small island the size of two baseball fields.

The population density is said to be nine times that of Tokyo.

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In this cutting-edge city ahead of its time, the accommodation to which Koreans including Jang Seop were guided was a semi-basement room located at the bottom of a 9-story apartment.

There was a musty smell of the basement, and even in broad daylight there was no light coming in.

Banjihara, on the edge of the island, when the waves were high, the sea water came into the house and the floor was muddy.

Forty or fifty Koreans share a single room under such poor conditions.

So where did the Japanese live?

it was above

The Japanese worker lived on the middle floor of the apartment, and the Japanese manager lived on the royal floor of the apartment.

From the lowest to the highest, they are strictly divided according to their status.

The next morning, Jang-seop, who went out at the call to gather, received a number called '6105'.

From now on, I will call you by that number instead of your name.

Then he put on a head lantern and a hard hat, and took the lift and the wagon down hundreds of meters underground.

People were digging for coal in a low burrow about 50-70 cm high, where they couldn't even straighten their backs.

I now understand what Myeon Office Yoon said earlier, "The younger the better."

To work in a cramped coal mine, you needed small children.

An island that looks like a warship floating in the middle of the sea.

An island that everyone has heard of at least once.

An island in a painful history where Japan forced Koreans to do hard work.

yeah right

That's the story of 'Battleship Island'.

The warship island was purchased entirely by Mitsubishi, one of Japan's leading companies, and operated the coal mining business.

Because of the good quality of the coal here, it was called 'black diamond'.

The warship island that appeared above the sea was just the tip of the iceberg.

There was a huge coal layer buried beneath it, and it was the Koreans who had to go down 1,000 meters underground and dig coal the most in the most dangerous place.

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The temperature at the end of the tunnel was over 40 degrees, and the humidity was so high that I was sweating profusely even if I stood still.

So let's say you wore only one underwear to work.

Also, outside the tunnel is the sea, and the seawater fell from the ceiling like rain and kept hitting it, so it was salty, so my skin was aching.

Then, if you touch something wrong, gas will come out.

In that dangerous place, Seop Jang's job was to fill in the empty space created after mining coal with stones or wood so that it would not collapse.

It is said that Jang-seop was hit by a rock and his head was broken.

Fortunately, Jang-seop survived, but not everyone was lucky.

If you look at the record of cremation of Koreans who died on the Battleship Island, a 'Cremation License Permit' discovered by a Japanese civic group on the Battleship Island, the number of deaths was recorded.

From 1925 to 1945, it is estimated that 122 Koreans died here alone on the Battleship Island alone.

Even this is not the whole number, but a part of the number.

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'Hunger' was more difficult than risky hard work.

To the Koreans, three rice balls made with soybean paste per day were returned.

Soybean cake is the residue left after squeezing oil from soybeans, and is a material used as feed or fertilizer for livestock.

I made rice balls by mixing a little brown rice with it.

It was said that even the mice that roamed wouldn't eat those rice balls.

But Koreans died if they didn't eat it, so they ate even that to fill their meals.

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A Korean who was caught trying to escape from a warship island was beaten like an animal with a leather whip by a Japanese inspector.

There is only one way to survive on the battleship island.

cut off your leg

Then they said it would be useless, so they were kicked out of the island.

That's why there were people who deliberately put their legs under the wheel of a cart moving in and out of the tunnel.

Rather than working here, I desperately want to go back to my hometown.

The 'Gate of Glory' written at the entrance to the warship was called 'Gate of Hell' by Koreans at the time.

This hell wasn't just for warships.

It is said that there were about 4,300 forced labor camps in Japan alone, and the number of Koreans who were brought there was as much as 1.2 million.

At that time, Japan enacted the National Mobilization Act when Japanese people went to war and there was a shortage of workers due to the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War.

So, did I give you the money properly?

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A pay stub of a Korean who was taken to a coal mine in Hokkaido has been released.

Salary is divided into wages and deductions. The total wage was 31 won and 60 jeon, while the deductible was 37 won and 2 jeon.

If you subtract deductibles from your wages, it is negative, and the more you work, the more your debt increases.

Among the people who went to forced labor, there are very few people who were paid properly.

Jang-seop, who had endured on a hellish warship island, turned 17.

One day in 1945, a flash of light covered the sky.

The atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, which is close to the warship island.

And a few days later a Japanese manager called the Koreans together and said, "The Japanese Empire has lost the war and has surrendered. Now you all will go home."

On August 15, 1945, we were finally liberated.

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Everyone was excited to go home.

However, it was not Joseon, but Nagasaki, which was damaged by the atomic bomb, to the place where we arrived on the ship we had been waiting for.

After we got out of the warship island, this time we had the Koreans restore it.

without any protective gear.

When the Koreans found something to eat while working on restoration, they ate it, which may have been contaminated with radiation.

Since I only ate soybean paste rice for the past year, hunger beat the radiation.

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Three months after liberation, only then did the Japanese give up their ships, which consisted of three plump ships.

It was very dangerous to cross the rough sea with a plump boat, but people got on it without hesitation.

There is a phrase like this in the contents of a Japanese civic group.

"In September 1945, the return ship of Joseon people overturned in the rough waves of a typhoon that just hit me, and many people drowned."

Jang-seop returned home safely.

after three years.

Arriving at his hometown, he met his mother and father, whom he had dreamed of.

But his father's hand only shows his thumb.

Four of his remaining fingers were cut off.

Like Jangseop, my father was dragged and brought back.

My father said that when Jang-seop was forcibly drafted to the Battleship Island, he was dragged to the Aoji coal mine and got caught in his hand and lost four fingers while pushing a chariot.

The father, who lost his finger, could no longer farm the farm he had been building his whole life.

It is estimated that a total of 7.82 million Koreans were forced to mobilize by Japan, like Jangseop's.

Even including duplicates, that's a huge number.

People with no money and no power were taken away and subjected to hard labor in Korea, Japan, Sakhalin, the South Pacific, and Southeast Asia.

There are a lot of dead and injured people.

They should apologize and take responsibility, but did Japan really do that?

In 2015, Japan applied for inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, saying that the warship island was a proud heritage of industrialization.

Korea strongly opposed it.

UNESCO also placed a condition on "Make the entire history of the warship island known. Do not hide the history of forced labor."

At that time, the Japanese representative agreed to know, and for the first time in front of the world, officially acknowledged the fact of forced labor and forced labor.

Believing this promise, UNESCO decided to inscribe Gunham Island as a World Heritage Site.

But the Japanese government changed the word after just one day.

They said that what they meant wasn't 'forced to work', but just 'getted to work'.

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After that, the warship island became a famous tourist destination.

In Japan, the guidebook introducing the warship island reads, "Who is fabricating the history", "The warship island is not a hell island", and "there was no forced mobilization or forced labor".

There is even an article that says, "The people who lived on the Battleship Island were a coal mining community with food, clothing, and shelter, and they lived like a family."

You are claiming that Korea is distorting history.

Letting go of acknowledging their lifelong wounds, the victims of being denied went out to uncover the truth about the warship island.

Seo Jeong-woo, who was dragged to the Battleship Island at the age of 14, made a documentary about the scene of the search for the Battleship Island again after several decades.

Jang-seop, now a grandfather, Choi Jang-seop, started writing an autobiography about his experiences on the battleship island.

He is a memory he doesn't want to bring out, but in order not to be forgotten, he wrote down each letter carefully.

And Grandpa Choi Jang-seop passed away in 2018 at the age of 90.

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Grandpa Choi Jang-seop always said something during his lifetime.

"This must never happen to our descendants again. History must be written correctly. The only thing I hope for from our descendants with tears is to get the history right. That is my last wish."

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The same incident is happening again with the warship.

Recently, Japan is moving to register the Sado Mine as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It is a place where 1,200 Koreans were forced to work during the Japanese colonial period.

Again, Japan does not acknowledge that forced labor took place in this place, where the suffering of many Koreans resides.

Japan asserts that "the annexation of Korea and Japan was done legally, and Joseon was a Japanese colony at the time. Therefore, it is legal to mobilize Koreans."

藏頭露尾 (藏頭露尾) is a slang for a lion that says, 'The head is hidden but the tail is exposed'.

The truth is that no matter how hard you try to hide it, it will eventually come out.

In Japan, the torso is exposed, but only the head is hidden.

But one thing is for sure, the truth will come out one day.

Because history can't lie.

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(SBS Entertainment News reporter Kang Seon-ae)