Tsutomu Nishioka (Chairman of the Historical Awareness Research Committee)
Korean Wartime Labor and the Sado Mines
1. Overview of Korean Wartime Labor
I would like to begin by providing an overview of Korean wartime labor.
Though the wartime mobilization of Korean workers began in September 1939, it is worth
noting the following Cabinet decision which was made five years earlier in October 1934,
stating the “urgent need to further reduce the number of Koreans traveling to the mainland.”
significant spike in the number of Koreans traveling to the Japanese home islands from the
southern provinces. Not only has this caused a marked worsening in unemployment among
domestic Japanese and the difficulties they face in finding employment, but it is also having
an increasingly negative impact on the unemployment of Koreans already residing in the
home islands. This has given rise to various crimes involving Koreans, disputes over leased
housing, and various other issues. In addition to hindering the integration of Koreans into
Japan, it is also causing a worrying situation in terms of security.
In order to address this situation, appropriate measures must be adopted in both Korea and
in the home islands. In other words, there is an urgent need to stabilize the living
arrangements of Koreans both on the peninsula and the mainland while also relocating those
in densely populated regions to Manchuria and to further reduce the number of Koreans
traveling to the home islands. ＞
During this period, those who wished to travel from Korea to the Japanese home islands had
to appear at either their local police station or sub-station, provide evidence including that
they had found employment, that they had at least \10 JPY of surplus funds in addition to
travel expenses, and that they had not been recruited by a broker, after which they had to
obtain a letter of referral for passage to the home islands addressed to the Busan Coast Guard.
Without meeting these criteria, they could not travel to the mainland.
With the Cabinet decision of 1934, however, it became difficult to acquire this letter of referral.
It is also worth noting that according to the statistics of the Government-General of Korea, in
the six years from 1933 to 1938, 727,094 people applied at police stations to travel to the home
islands but were denied travel permission. Thus before the start of wartime mobilization, there
were many Korean workers on the peninsula who wished to go to work in the Japanese home
islands and were seeking ways of traveling there.
There were many illegal travelers who did not follow the required formal procedure; according
to the statistics of the Ministry of Home Affairs, 39,482 illegal travelers were discovered in
the home islands over the course of 13 years between 1930 and 1942, of which 33,535 were
deported back to Korea.
What should not be overlooked here is the fact that even in the middle of wartime mobilization,
19,250 of the 22,800 illegal travelers apprehended in the home islands in the four years
between the start of mobilization in 1939 and 1942 were deported back to Korea.
The fact I would like to emphasize here is this: the “recruitment” stage of Korean wartime
mobilization, began in September 1939 as an exception to the Cabinet decision in 1934 to
“further reduce the number of Koreans traveling to the home islands”.
Following the promulgation of the National Mobilization Law in April 1938, conscripted labor
began in the Japanese home islands, though it did not yet extend to Korea. Then, in July 1939,
the Vice-Ministers of both the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Health and
Welfare announced a policy whereby Korean laborers would be introduced into Japan as an
exception to the October 1934 Cabinet decision.
What I would like more Japanese and Koreans to understand is the fact that, although a
Cabinet decision had been passed which intended to curb the number of migrant Korean
workers traveling to the Japanese home islands in search of work (a number which, if left
unchecked would swell enormously), the wartime mobilization of Koreans began as an
exceptional measure to this decision. Though it had only been intended as an exception, once
the gate was open, all those would-be laborers who had thereto been unable to travel due to
the severe restrictions descended on the mainland like an avalanche.
2. Korean Wartime Labor at the Sado Gold Mines
Next, I would like to outline the Korean wartime labor at the Sado gold mines. Primary sources,
that is, contemporary documents from the mines either at the time of, or immediately
following, the enactment of wartime labor, and the testimonies of those concerned at that
time are scarce; the only known sources are the three listed in Notes 2 to 4 of HARC’s recent
newspaper advertisement.
Hirai Eiichi’s edited History of the Sado Mines (Volume II) in Note 2 is an unpublished
manuscript compiled in 1950. Hirai Eiichi, a former mining section chief who managed the
Sado mining operations, summarized the history of the Sado mine across two volumes
spanning from the Edo period to the Showa era at the request of Mitsubishi Metals.
The whereabouts of the original copy of this historical document are currently unknown.
Although facsimiles are stored in both the Aikawa Local History Museum in Sado City and
the Mitsubishi Historical Archives, the document was not released to the public. On January
26, the Historical Awareness Research Committee, of which I am the chairman, obtained,
from a certain source, photographs of the table of contents and “Section 9: The Circumstances
of Korean Laborers” on pages 844-846 from the manuscript, and published them on the
Committee homepage.
However, the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization by Imperial Japan, a South
Korean government agency that is conducting field surveys and research in a bid to prevent
the registration of the Sado Mines as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site, received these
same documents from “an anonymous Japanese researcher” earlier this year on January 14.
This researcher reportedly obtained it in August 2015 from the World Heritage Registration
Promotion Office in the Cultural Affairs Department of the Education Bureau of Niigata
Prefecture. This is according to the paper “New Material: Hirai Eiichi’s A History of the Sado
Mines” by Jeong Hye-Gyeong (ARGO Institute for Research in Humanities), recorded in the
reference material of the aforementioned foundation’s January 27 webinar titled “How Japan’s
World Heritage Registration Distorts the History of Forced Labor at the Sado Mines”.
Written utilizing internal documents from the Sado mining operations, A History of the Sado
Mines discloses previously unknown data on the total number of Koreans mobilized every year
as well as the number that remained at the end of the war as follows.
“We recruited a total of 1,519 workers from Korea to come and work at the mines: 98 in
February 1940, 248 in May, 300 in December, 280 in 1941, 79 in 1942, 263 in 1944, and 251
in 1945. Of these 1,519 workers, 1,096 were immediately repatriated following the end of the
war. ”
In addition, as briefly summarized below, not only was the treatment of these Korean laborers
the same as that of domestic Japanese workers, but management took great care in treating
the laborers well, such as by providing them with lodgings and meals.
“There was no discrimination between Koreans and domestic Japanese workers in terms of
how they were treated in the workplace, the wage system, or incentive schemes. Laborers were
employed primarily as pit workers and paid based on a piece-rate system according to how
much they mined. A bonus for work attendance was awarded once a month based on days
worked, rice purchases were subsidized according to the number of family dependents and
the number of days worked, and a bonus for diligence was granted twice a year. In general,
for those with families, company housing was provided free of charge, there were communal
baths, rice, miso, soy sauce, and other daily necessities could be purchased inexpensively
through the company store, and medical examinations were conducted for sick or injured
family members. Those who were single were permitted to stay in one of the three dormitories
for free. Meals were the same as for the Japanese, the daily cost of which was \0.5 JPY with
any difference in the actual cost being borne by the company. Bedding was rented out for \0.5
JPY per set per month, while utility costs and bathhouse fees were covered by the company.
Other daily necessities such as work supplies, clothes, and footwear were also sold cheaply
through the company store. Whenever there was a shortage of vegetables, stocks were
replenished from a farm under the direct management of the mines”.
The second primary source is the document in Note 3 from the Sado mining operation titled
Concerning Korean Personnel Management. This is a report that was submitted by the Sado
mining operations to the “Committee on the Management of Korean Workers”, a gathering
of personnel managers from mines nationwide that employed Korean workers which was
organized by the Tokyo Mining Supervisory Bureau and held on June 7, 1943 at the Sado
mining operations. Shigeru Nagasawa, a researcher of the history of Korean residents in Japan,
received this report from a person named Shizuo Suto. Published by Nagasawa in 1983 in
issue 12 of Studies in the History of Korean Residents in Japan, it has since been widely used
by researchers. As this report was also created based on internal documents of the Sado
mining operations, it often overlaps with Hirai’s account. Naturally, however, it provides no
account of the situation after June 1943.
What this historical document reveals is that all Korean laborers hired to come work at the
mines across six waves in the period between 1940 and 1942 were hired on a recruitment basis,
as well as the total number of these workers. 98 were hired in February 1940, 248 in May, 300
in December, 153 in June 1941, 127 in October, and 79 in March 1942, for a total of 1,005.
It is also clear that the contract period was three years for the first three waves of recruitment
in 1940 and two years for the three waves from 41 to 42.
421 people left the Sado mines for various reasons, and as of the end of May 1943, 584 Korean
workers remained. The reasons for leaving are also organized and accounted for. There were
ten deaths, 148 runaways, six repatriations due to injuries sustained on the job, 30
repatriations due to non-work-related injuries, 25 repatriations for misdemeanors, 72
temporary returns to Korea, and 130 transfers.
What I would like to focus on here is the 25 repatriations for misdemeanors. In other words,
those who did not do their job efficiently were deported to Korea. If this was, in fact, forced
labor, that would most certainly not have been the case. In a sense, for those who wanted to
work in the Japanese home islands, “repatriation” would have been seen as a punishment. In
1943, gold mining was suspended with only the mining of copper for its use as a war material
being permitted, and because there was a surplus of workers, Korean laborers were sent to
construction sites in areas such as Saitama Prefecture.
In addition, the report also discloses the average, highest, and lowest monthly incomes. In
April 1943, the average income was \83.88 JPY, the maximum was \169.95 JPY (28 days
attendance), and the minimum was \4.18 JPY (1-day attendance). In May, the average was
\80.56 JPY, the maximum was \221.03 JPY (28 days attendance), and the minimum was
\6.75 JPY (2 days attendance). Since wages were calculated based on a piece-rate system,
there was a considerable difference between the highest and lowest wages, but considering
that the starting salary of public elementary school teachers in Tokyo at the time was \50 to
\60 JPY, these were quite substantial wages. Can this really be described as “forced labor”?
As we have thus seen, these primary sources testify that the Korean labor at the Sado gold
mines was not the reputedly inhumane “forced labor” it has been made out to be.
South Korean and certain Japanese researchers cite the fact that Koreans were primarily
engaged in dangerous underground work as evidence of “forced labor”, but it was precisely
because Korean workers performed such dangerous work that they were paid the high salaries
mentioned earlier. The designation of this work to Korean workers fit the interests of both the
Koreans, who sought to earn as much money as possible in a short period of time, and those
who ran the mines, which were understaffed due to the drafting of its young, male, Japanese
miners. It is therefore unjustifiable to assert that this was “forced labor”.
3. Concerning Descriptions of “Forced Mobilization” in the History of Niigata Prefecture and
Aikawa Town
Finally, I would like to point out that in Japan, too, there are many media, political parties,
and scholars who claim that there was “forced labor” and offer a counterargument to their
claims.
On February 2, the Mainichi Shimbun published a column “The Peril of the Sado Gold Mines”
by editorial board adviser Kou Koga, in which I was singled out by name for criticism. Mr.
Koga wrote:
Korean researcher Tsutomu Nishioka wrote in his counterargument in the Sankei Shimbun
on January 26 that the mines were “inundated with applications” from Korean laborers and
that “they were treated quite well”. Nishioka’s argument is based on A Comprehensive History
of Sado Aikawa (1995), compiled by what used to be Aikawa Town.
However, in a comment on January 29, chairman of the Communist Party, Kazuo Shii, advised
him to look to the negative history of the mines, quoting the “unusual cases of forced labor of
Koreans at the Sado mines” written in the same book.
The eighth edition of A Comprehensive History of Niigata Prefecture: Modern History
Volume 3 (1988), published before the history of Aikawa Town, contains a more
incriminating description: “although the labor mobilization plan initiated in 1939 changed in
name from “recruitment” to “official mediation”, to “conscription”, this does not change the
fact that Koreans were forcibly mobilized.”
Though it may have been independently compiled by a local government, there is no doubt
that this public history constitutes an inconvenient truth for the Japanese government, which
maintains that there was no forced mobilization.
In his comment on January 29, Communist Party chairman Kazuo Shii argued the following:
I would here like to refute the claims of both Mr. Koga and Mr. Shii. In discussing history, the
most important thing is primary sources. The terms “forced labor” and “forced mobilization”
did not exist at that time; left-wing Japanese scholars began to use these terms in the 1960s,
some 20 years after the end of Japanese rule in Korea, and they later began to be used in South
Korea. In other words, this is a historical evaluation (or theory) formulated in a presentist,
ahistorical way.
The descriptions of “forcibly mobilized Koreans” and “unusual measure of the mobilization
of Koreans” in the History of Niigata Prefecture and History of Sado Aikawa quoted by Mr.
Koga and Mr. Shii are simply the theories of the scholars who wrote them. These are outdated
theories of the 1980s and 90s, when the study of this issue was dominated by the left-wing.
In response to these obsolete theories, I published an article utilizing primary historical
documents (namely the statistics from the Ministry of Home Affairs) in the Sankei Shimbun
on January 26, in which I denied these claims and submitted the new theory that
I first introduced this theory in my 2005 book The Truth about Japanese-Korean “Historical
Issues” (PHP Institute). As I continued my research, I published The Fabrication of the
Forced Labor Issue in 2019 (Soshisha Publishing) and later developed this theory further in
2021 in the book The Realities of Korean Wartime Labor (National Congress of Industrial
Heritage), which I also edited. Academia advances with new research. Simply quoting an
outdated theory is not sufficient to disprove mine. I would like to request a counterargument
that takes full account of the basis of my theory.
Also, I did not write that there was no forced labor based solely on the History of Sado Aikawa,
and I would like to add that I did not say that Korean laborers “were treated quite well” based
on the History of Sado Aikawa, but on the basis of the above-mentioned document
Concerning Korean Personnel Management (1943) from the Sado mining operations, which
is a vital primary source in understanding the situation at that time.
Furthermore, although Mr. Koga failed to mention it, I also cited Hirai Eiichi’s A History of
the Sado Mines as the basis of my January 26th column, as it is also a first-class primary source.
In other words, I wrote that there was no forced labor based on primary sources. However,
the “forced labor” faction has refused to address my argument directly, instead merely opting
to take up the defunct theories that appear in these books from Niigata Prefecture and Sado
City. We must continue to assiduously refute these ill-informed claims within Japan, utilize
historical documents in clearly broadcasting the historical fact that there was no forced labor
of Koreans at the Sado mines to both South Korea and the international community, and
secure the listing of the mines as a UNESCO Cultural Heritage site at any cost.
4.Analysis of South Korean Expert Chung Hye-kyung’s Forced Labor Theory
As the principal researcher at the Research Center for the Forced Mobilization of Imperial
Japan and Peace Studies, a longtime researcher for the Foundation for Victims of Forced
Mobilization by Imperial Japan, and for the research she has conducted on wartime labor, Ms.
Chung Hye-kyung may be considered one of the South Korean forced labor faction’s most
prominent researchers today.
In December 2019, Ms. Chung issued a research report (hereinafter referred to as “Chung
1”) for the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization titled “The Actual Circumstances
of the Forced Mobilization of Koreans in Japan’s Regional Mines and Coal Mines, Focusing
on Mitsubishi’s Sado Mining Operations”.
Moreover, at an academic seminar held by the foundation on January 27 titled “How Japan’s
World Heritage Registration Distorts the History of Forced Labor at the Sado Mines”, Ms.
Chung delivered a presentation titled “The Reality of the Forced Mobilization of Koreans at
the Sado Mines as Indicated by Documents” (hereinafter referred to as “Chung 2”) ), which
is recorded in the reference materials of the seminar.
Chung’s arguments are based heavily on a 2000 paper by Japanese left-wing researcher Teizo
Hirose (“Korean Laborers and the Sado Mines (1939-1945)”, Proceedings of Niigata
University of International and Information Studies Faculty of Informatics and Sciences,
March 2000, hereinafter referred to as “Hirose”).
According to Nishioka’s analysis, Ms. Chung cites the following 13 points as the basis for the
theory of forced labor.
(1) Koreans were mobilized to prevent silicosis infection in Japanese
(2) Koreans were assigned to dangerous underground labor
(3) The contract system (piece-rate system) was disadvantageous to Koreans
(4) There were many deductions, and net income was negligible
(5) Workers were forced to continue working even after their contracts expired
(6) There were many fugitives
(7) Testimonies of mobilized Koreans
(8) Forced mobilization began on Sado even before the wartime mobilization policy
(9) Recruitment also qualifies as forced mobilization
(10) Recruitment, official mediation, and conscription all violate the International Labor
Convention
(11) High mortality rate among Koreans
(12) Workers could not receive their deposited wages
(13) Wages, treatment, and payment methods were unilaterally dictated by the employer
These are all factually obscure and structurally flawed concepts that can be easily rebutted. I
would here like to introduce my simple counterarguments for each of these 13 points.
Furthermore, points (1) to (5) are practically verbatim copies of Hirose’s claims as they appear
in his paper. The veracity of Nishioka’s theory that South Korea has been fueled by the
arguments of leftist Japanese researchers is also demonstrated here.
It should also be noted that, while Mr. Hirose wrote in the prudent and circumspect manner
of a researcher, Ms. Chung reflected his arguments in a crudely affirmative tone; Mr. Hirose
wrote reservedly on point (1), using the phrase “if this is the case”, and avoided assertion
concerning points (3) and (4), using the words “it would seem that”. However, Ms. Chung
deleted all these parts and wrote as though Mr. Hirose were relating facts.
(1) Koreans were mobilized to prevent silicosis infection in Japanese
Hirose: p.7
Chung 1: Page 120
Whereas Hirose expressed a certain degree of uncertainty in writing, “if this is the case,”
Chung arrived at her conclusion without having presented any evidence. Hirose’s argument
is based on the testimony of a recruiter, Mr. Soji Sugimoto, which is recorded in the History
of Sado Aikawa. Mr. Sugimoto’s testimony lacks credibility, as the period he gives for the first
recruitment is absurd, and the total number of mobilized laborers he claims is incorrect. The
company implemented dust control measures to prevent silicosis infection, and there was also
a hospital. Silicosis generally develops after continuous inhalation of dust for more than five
years, and it has not been confirmed that many Korean workers contracted the disease.
(2) Koreans were assigned to dangerous underground labor
Hirose: p.10
Chung 1: p.124
Korean laborers worked underground because the young, domestic Japanese workers had
been conscripted, not due to any kind of discrimination. In addition, the piece-rate system
meant that underground mining could be quite lucrative for those who were motivated and
greatly benefited Korean workers who wished to earn a considerable amount of money in a
short period of time before returning to Korea.
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