The government Tuesday made public old lists of Koreans killed during the March 1 Independence Movement of 1919 under Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula (1910-1945) and Korean victims of Tokyo's massacre following a powerful earthquake in 1923.
The National Archives of Korea said a list, which was found at the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo, contained information on 630 people killed during the 1919 uprising against Japan’s occupation of Korea.
Another official list discovered has information on 290 people who were among thousands of Koreans murdered by the Japanese following the 7.9-magnitude Kanto earthquake 90 years ago.
It is the first time that such a list of victims of the massacre has been discovered. Up to 20,000 Koreans were said to have been killed in the massacre.
Those lists were made in 1953 during former President Syngman Rhee’s administration and they were found when the embassy prepared to relocate its office in June this year, the archives said.
In addition to the records, the archives unveiled 65 volumes containing the names of 229,781 Koreans who were put into forced labor by Japan during the 35-year colonial period. Those documents were also found in June at the embassy.
There has been a list of 285,771 forced laborers for the past decades. The list was made by the South Korean government in 1957.
Park Kyung-guk, chief of the archives, said the newly found documents will serve as “precious materials for both compensation and study.”
