Past Crimes Committed by Japanese Imperialists against Korean Nation

Pyongyang, April 22 (KCNA) -- The Korean nation is a homogeneous nation with Tangun as its ancestral father and proud of 5 000-year-old history.

But, during their colonial rule over Korea, the Japanese imperialists forced the Koreans to accept "Omikami Amateras", the founding god of Japan, as their ancestral father and pledge "loyalty" to the Japanese king and the "Great Japanese Empire" at Shinto (Japan's native religion) shrines.

After illegally occupying Korea, they had massively built shrines at all levels.

In 1915 they announced a "shrine rules" and built the Shinto shrine in Kyongsong (Seoul). Since then, they had built 50 shrines and 186 small shrines in different parts of Korea till the end of 1931 and expanded the number of Shinto shrines and other shrines into two and 820 each till the end of 1942.

Meanwhile, in the 1930s the Japanese imperialists forced the Korean people to worship at the Japanese shrines as a part of their policy for "making Koreans Japanese subjects".

After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Governor-General in Korea Minami gave an order to the provincial offices to carry worship at the shrines.

On his orders, the Korean people were compelled to bow to the shrines on "national holidays" and "memorial days" of Japan. In particular, students at all levels were forced to make a compulsory group visit to the shrines once in a week. The Japanese imperialists also forced any persons passing the shrines to bow down to them.

If they did not comply with such demand or grumbled over it, they had to be arrested on the charge of "sedition" or suffer all sorts of persecution as "unpatriotic persons".

As seen above, the Japanese imperialists' demand for visit to the shrines was a shameless and vicious scheme to exterminate the Korean nation, which was not inferior to political and military oppression, pressure and massacre and economic exploitation