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Remembering the war dead
Remembering the war dead---- it is the innocent women, men, children and unborn infants who were brutally tortured and barbarically killed that deserve to be honored, respected and remembered. Always.
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Originally Posted by from [url
http://www.kimsoft.com/2004/3-YuKwanSoon.htm[/url] ]
Yu was one of the 40,000 or so Koreans arrested by the Japanese in the aftermath of the failed March First Movement of 1919, wherein patriotic Koreans of all social spectrum joined in a nationwide march for Korea's independence. She was only 18 at the time and died from 20-month long barbaric tortures by the Japanese savages. Today, she is worshipped as Korea's Jean d'arc by the under-40 generations of Korea.
Yu was born in 1902 into a Christian family. Her father (Yu Jung-kwun 류중권) was an early convert and established a Christian school with his own money. Yu attended the Yi-wha Girls' School (called the Yi-wha Girls' High School today) and became an ardent nationalist and a Christian. When she prayed, she held the Korean flag close to her bosom.
On March 1, 1919, Yu joined the "March to Death" squad with five other students. When the Japanese closed down her school after the March, she returned to her home town of Chunahn (천안) and carried on her work for Korea's independence. She persuaded villagers to join her on a march on April 1, 1919. The Japanese security forces attacked the marchers with guns and swords. Her father and mother were among the victims of the Japanese atrocity.
Yu was fingered as the main instigator of the march and was arrested. She was tortured by the arresting police in Chunahn, by the prosecutors in Gongju, and by the Japanese interrogators in Seoul. She was defiant to her last moment. She shouted "Long Live Korea" while being transported from jail to jail. On one occasion, a Japanese police escort struck her with his sword to silence her. At her trial, she threw a chair at her prosecutor. Her torturers inserted a water hose into her vagina and forced cold water into her. Her torturers placed her outdoors in freezing cold and then dowsed her with icy water. When she was half frozen, they revived her by placing her next to a hot stove, They would repeat this process again and again.
After 20 months of non-stop torture, she died in October 1920.
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Originally Posted by [url
http://www.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch6.htm[/url] ]
There was one incident in which more than 1,000 people who had been bound and marched into a square were separated into rows and made to stand still. Some were wearing long traditional gowns, while others were wearing western style clothing; some in the group were women and there were also children. The entire group was haggard, disheveled, and barefoot. First, the Japanese doused the people with gasoline and then they opened fire on the crowd with machine guns. When the bullets hit their bodies, the gasoline caught fire. The refugees' burning bodies quivered from head to toe causing the whole scene to flicker from the light of the gasoline fires on their bodies. The Japanese soldiers stood by laughing hysterically and taking pleasure from the scene they had created.
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Originally Posted by from [url
http://www.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch6.htm[/url] ]
One time, several Japanese suddenly charged into a butcher shop. They captured a young man, ordered him to remove his clothing, and poured acid all over his body from head to toe. Immediately, his body was burned. In order to speed up his death, the youth began cursing indignantly at the Japanese. From behind the young man, the Japanese followed along raising a clamor and enjoying themselves. They forced the young man to walk around until he died. There were some other Japanese who tied up a group of about 100 captives. They divided them up, gouged out their eyes, cut off their noses and ears, and then used gasoline to burn them to death.
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Originally Posted by from [url
http://www.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch6.htm[/url] ]
Even worse than this incident, one time a group of Japanese gang raped a middle-aged woman. Later, when they discovered that the woman was pregnant, they wantonly cut open her stomach, pulled out the foetus, and used it as a plaything. Laughing, they carried their toy out onto the street where they ran into a Japanese officer. They brandished the foetus, which was pierced onto one of their bayonets, in front of the officer causing him to let out a chuckle.
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Originally Posted by from [url
http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/jp-germ.htm[/url] ]
Japan's Germ Warfare Project - Unit 731
The most heinous act of the Japanese was the participation of former officers of the Unit '731' (germ warfare) of the Imperial Army in the Korean War. The Unit '731' of the Kwantung Army conducted secret experiments in germ warfare at Mukden in China du ring World War II. It performed experiments on American, Chinese and Korean war prisoners and dropped germ bombs on a number of Chinese cities.
In 1939 the Japanese army set up a top-secret, germ-warfare research center near Harbin, China where Japanese medical experts experimented to their hearts' content on American, Chinese, Soviet, Korean, British and other war prisoners. Over four thousand were exterminated in bestial fashion: some were frozen infected with bubonic plague, others were injected with syphilis, and many were roasted alive in furnaces. When the Soviets took back Harbin in 1945, the Japanese hid all trace of the base.
The secret would probably have remained buried forever, but a tenacious Japanese journalist dragged out the truth by invoking the Freedom of Information Act in America only recently. Japan's medical profession was rocked by the news that some of its lead ing members had a criminal past which had hitherto escaped detection. Another disturbing angle to the story was the claim that the Americans granted freedom to the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity in return for their research data.
American war prisoners in Mukden were housed with people infected with contagious disease. A recent article by San Jose's Mercury News relates an eyewitness of the germ warfare experiment on PO W's. Greg Rodriquez, Frank James Herman Castillo are few of the lucky Americans to survive to expose this war crime. The POW's were injected with germs or placed in contact with victims infected with various germs.
When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Japanese germ specialists destroyed war crime evidence and fled to Japan. The Soviet Army occupied the germ warfare facilities but it took them several months before they learned of the true nature of the 'resea rch' facilities.
US secret documents -- 1945 intelligence reports of the US Military CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, Douglas MacArthur, Commanding --, unearthed by the Japanese journalist, make it clear that the CIC agents failed to pursue sources indicating US POW in Manchuria were the victims of Japan's germ warfare experiments.
It is believed the Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army killed at least 200,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians with germs. The Japanese utilized dissemination methods such barbaric act as giving Chinese children chocolate laced with anthrax and droppin g insects and rodents infected with various germs.
War crime historians in America have documented that the Japanese routinely used Chinese, Russian and Korean POWs for medical experiments. The live test subjects were called maruta (''logs of wood'') and were injected with bubonic plague, typhoid, cholera, syphilis and other germs. The prisoners were often dissected alive without anesthesia to see the effect of the diseases on their vital organs.
Many of the 1,500 American soldiers captured in the Philippines were taken to Mukden, Manchuria. Captured Americans, along with several hundred British and Australian soldiers, were met in Mukden on Nov. 11, 1942, by a team of Japanese medical personnel wearing masks. They sprayed liquid into the prisoners' faces and gave them injections.
By the end of the winter, about 250 Americans had died, and their bodies were stacked like cordwood. When spring came, the surviving prisoners were ordered to work with a Japanese medical team, picking up the half-thawed bodies.
The prisoners were told to dump some bodies in a mass grave and take others, identified by tags on their toes, to a dissection table. A medical team dissected the bodies and placed their vital organs in wooden boxes, clearly labeled with POW numbers. La ter, the medical team returned to Mukden to measure various parts of the prisoners' anatomies with calipers. The team photographed each POW.
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Originally Posted by from the Forward in Poetry of Peace, by Terry Tempest Williams
"Peace is the act of remembering. War is the act of forgetting; otherwise, we would not repeat the horrors of human suffering over and over again.
Peace requires actions of a different sort. The act of restraint. The act of listening. The act of compassion, to feel in one's body another point of view. Peace, like poetry, is an act of the imagination offering us a path toward our highest and deepest selves.
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Last edited by hkRT; 11-27-2005 at 11:25 PM.
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