Japanese imperial police committed torture and sexual violence against Korean school girls to quell pro-independence protests about a century ago when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule, a U.S. document showed.
The 27-page document, drawn up by the Commission on Relations with the Orient of Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, is yet another piece of evidence of the brutality Japan employed during its 1910-45 colonial rule.
The document, which is believed to have been written around June 1920, was recently found at the Korean Methodist Church & Institute in New York, and Yonhap News Agency obtained a copy of it. The church, founded in 1921, served as a New York base for Korean independence fighters at the time.
The document's findings coincided with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to the United States. Abe has snubbed calls for a sincere apology for Japan's wartime atrocities, including its sexual enslavement of Korean and other Asian women for its troops.
Titled "The Korean Situation," the document contains accounts by Christian missionaries of pro-independence protests in Korea since the 1919 nationwide uprising, known as the "March 1 Independence Movement," and Japan's brutal crackdown of protesters
"Among the tortures and brutalities ... were those dealing with young women and school girls who were stripped and examined, tortured and maltreated," the document said. "No charge is made of rape under these conditions. Inquiry as to the number thus treated brings the reply that no exact statistics are available."
The document also said that in October and November 1919, a "fresh outburst of torture was resorted to, with new methods not before used in Korea."
It also showed how peaceful and persistent Korean demonstrations were.
"No more remarkable 'revolution' has taken place in recent history than that which occurred in Korea beginning March 1, 1919. The plan was to secure independence by moral force, without resort to violence," the document said.
"Though fired upon by the police, sabred, bayonetted, arrested, beaten, tortured, and punished by court judgments, the persistence of the movement has been phenomenal, and the slight amount of retaliation by the Koreans has been amazing," it said.
The harsh Japanese colonial rule left deep scars on the hearts of Koreans as they were banned from using their own language at schools and forced to adopt Japanese names. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were also mobilized as forced laborers and sex slaves.
The sexual slavery issue still remains unresolved as Japan has refused to formally apologize and compensate victims while attempting to whitewash the crime. It has been the biggest thorn in frayed relations between South Korea and Japan. (Yonhap)
