Korean Liberation Day (August 15, 1945) - End of Japanese Colonialism (Part-1)

 

The National Liberation Day of Korea is celebrated annually on 15 August in both South and North Korea.

At the diner, he exclaimed in excitement, "Don't you know, coming Monday is the  Korean Red Calendar Day ." 

He is happy about the day, coming after seven long days, I wondered. He stared at me with a sensation of restlessness. He expected me to join him in this excitement. He emphasized it again, " We are going to have an additional holiday on Monday." This time, I smiled to pretend similar feelings. However, I was still thinking about the significance of the coming Monday?  Yasir, our neighbor, enjoys every bit of life, unlike a researcher who always tries to find reason and logic. Then it evoked in my mind, "The National Liberation Day of Korea celebrated annually on 15 August in both South and North Korea. It commemorates the victory over Japan's colonial rule of Korea that lasted from 1910-1945.  

The historical relations between Japan and Korea is an obscure story netted with wars, occupation, sufferings, hostilities, sorrows, and anguish.  They have battled on and off, and Japan has frequently attempted to invade the Korean peninsula for ages. After years of wars, the Korean peninsula became a Japanese colony when the Empire of Japan overrun it in 1910. 

History is witness to it that after occupying the territories, the next phase of the colonial invasion has been to change the demography of the occupied lands, disengage the inhabitants from cultural bonding while mutilating the religion and cultural heritage. Japanese colonialism was not an exception. Plundering the Korean people and their culture was considered a fair game.   

In his book, Korea in World History, the historian Donald N. Clark writes that the imperialists made Koreans worship the gods of imperial Japan, including dead emperors and the spirits of war heroes who had helped them conquer Korea earlier in the century. 

Approximately 725,000 Korean workers were taken as slave-workers to Japan and its other colonies. Japanese forced the Korean people to serve in the industries and quarries or soldiers to burn them as fuel in the locomotive of their expansion desires in the pacific. The darkest part of the agonies of Korean was that the Japanese sent tens of thousands of Korean women into military brothels to service Japanese soldiers. The victims became known as "comfort women." 

A photo that was found after Allied troops captured the city of Tenchong from the Japanese on Sept. 7, 1944, shows a Japanese soldier posing with Korean comfort women. The pregnant woman on the right of the photo is Park Young-shim, whose testimony later revealed to the world the existence of the comfort women.
(courtesy of the Seoul City government and the Seoul National University (SNU) Human Rights Center)

To tighten control over its new protectorate, the Empire of Japan waged an all-out war on Korean culture. The Korean language was forbidden in educational institutions, and public places adopted Japnese. The invaders emphasized manual labor and loyalty to the Emperor. To wipe out the historical consciousness of Korea, the occupiers burnt over 0.2 million archives. To teach history from non-approved texts was outlawed. The imperialists went so far that they pushed the Koreans to change their names to Japanese style. ('continued...)