This passage examines the National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation in Busan and criticizes the South Korean government’s exhibits on wartime mobilization and the comfort women issue as a state-sponsored propaganda apparatus designed to implant anti-Japanese sentiment in children without proper factual verification.
Pointing to the legal background of wartime conscription of Koreans and to the absence of evidence for claims that Japanese military or police authorities forcibly abducted Korean women as comfort women, it denounces the reality that this large museum, built with state funds, functions as a place where distorted historical views are instilled in the next generation.

2019-03-02
And yet, they are planting hatred of Japan in children by teaching them that “conscription” was unjust and that comfort women were raped in comfort stations.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
2-3. The National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation.
In Nam-gu, Busan, the “National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation” opened on December 10, 2015, as “a place that brings together the entire history under Japanese colonial rule and remembers the pain of history.”
This facility was built by the South Korean government on a vast site of 12,062 square meters at a cost of more than 5 billion yen in Japanese currency.
It is one of the grand “anti-Japan indoctrination facilities” created to teach children about the supposed “atrocities” of Japan.
Here, records of people said to have been “forcibly mobilized” to the Japanese mainland and to the South Seas during the period of Japanese rule are displayed on a large scale.
A scene is recreated with wax figures showing Koreans said to have been “forcibly taken” to a southern island and made to dig air-raid shelters, and a signboard erected there reads, “Koreans must not enter the air-raid shelters,” but there is no explanation of when or where such a signboard was actually erected.
In the section dealing with comfort women, a room in a comfort station appears on a television screen, and a scene is shown in which a Japanese soldier rapes a Korean girl.
This “reenactment video” is being openly shown even to children in a national facility.
In South Korea, many people criticize Japan by claiming that large numbers of Koreans were “conscripted” during the Second World War and exploited in the Japanese mainland and the South Seas, but conscription was not invoked on the Korean Peninsula until September 1944, at the very end of the war, which was five years later than the start of conscription for Japanese on the mainland.
Responding to conscription was a duty of Japanese nationals, and since Koreans at that time were Japanese nationals, applying it to them posed no problem under either the domestic law or international law of that time.
As already stated regarding the comfort women issue, there is no fact that the Japanese military or police authorities forcibly took Korean women away and turned them into sex slaves in comfort stations.
And yet, they are planting hatred of Japan in children by teaching them that “conscription” was unjust and that comfort women were raped in comfort stations.
To be continued.