Published on November 26, 2019.
This article examines the distorted historical perception in South Korea that labels many Koreans who voluntarily went to Japan for work as victims of “slave labor” or “forced labor.”
It discusses how a photograph of Japanese victims of forced labor in Hokkaido was used in South Korea as an image of “forcibly conscripted Koreans,” appearing in publicity campaigns, memorial displays, and eventually elementary-school social-studies textbooks, thereby transmitting anti-Japanese tribalism through education.

November 26, 2019
Finally, in 2019, this photograph came to be printed in the social-studies textbook for sixth-grade elementary-school students.
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
Historical distortion in South Korean history textbooks.
Many of the Koreans who went to Japan did so voluntarily in order to earn money.
What kind of view do we Koreans have about the labor of those Koreans?
After all, everyone says that it was slave labor or forced labor.
Of course, such words as slave labor or forced labor did not exist at the time.
That is because it was not a fact.
It is merely a distorted historical perception held by Koreans.
There is a man named Professor Seo Kyoung-duk in the College of General Education at Sungshin Women’s University.
His main work is to publicize South Korea to the world.
Included in that work is the task of publicizing to the world how cruelly and viciously Imperial Japan ruled and exploited Koreans during the colonial period.
There is a film titled Battleship Island, which was released in 2017.
Mr. Seo promoted this film by using a large electric billboard in Times Square, the busiest district in New York City, in the United States.
For that purpose, he collected 200 million won in donations from the public.
In Busan, there is a place called the National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation, which opened in 2015.
When one stands at the entrance of this museum, one can see a tall tower commemorating the Koreans who were mobilized as laborers and lost their lives.
The same photograph as Photograph 5-1 was displayed behind that memorial tower until the author pointed out the mistake.
The photograph that Mr. Seo used earlier for publicity in New York is also the same one.
It was displayed in order to widely inform people how much suffering Koreans had experienced, Koreans who had become so emaciated that their ribs protruded and who had been made to work just like slaves.
However, this photograph has absolutely nothing to do with Koreans mobilized for labor.
It was published in Japan’s Asahikawa Shimbun on September 9, 1926.
It is a photograph of ten Japanese people who, in the process of developing Hokkaido, were confined at a civil-engineering construction site and suffered from forced labor.
In terms recently used in South Korea, they were people like “salt-field slaves” (note 17).
In particular, please pay attention to the second person from the right, whose ribs are protruding.
Of course, the business operator was arrested.
The photograph was taken by a reporter at that time of the victims.
In other words, Professor Seo went all the way to the United States and spread the claim that Japanese people were Koreans, resulting in an off-target publicity campaign toward third parties, saying that we had suffered such terrible treatment.
When one thinks about how Americans received this kind of South Korean anti-Japanese tribalism, it is nothing but shameful.
What is even more serious is the fact that history distorted in this way is being systematically and continuously injected into students, and that, through this, anti-Japanese tribalism is being passed down from generation to generation and becoming more serious as time passes.
From 2012, with the purpose of responding to Japan’s historical distortions, Korean history once again became a compulsory subject in high school.
Under the new curriculum, eight kinds of textbooks were published.
In seven of those eight textbooks, the photograph of abused Japanese people shown in the figure appears under titles saying that they were Koreans who had been forcibly conscripted or made to perform forced labor.
Finally, in 2019, this photograph came to be printed in the social-studies textbook for sixth-grade elementary-school students.