After the Japanese armed occupation of northeast China and the transformation of northeast China into their colony, the exploitation and oppression of Chinese workers was extremely deep. In December 1937, the Japanese rulers enacted the Manchurian Labor Association Act, and in January 1938, the Manchurian Labor Association was established to monopolize labor services. In June 1938, the so-called labor registration was introduced. On October 22, 1941, the so-called "Labor Rejuvenation Congress Act" was promulgated, replacing the "Manchurian Labor Association" with the "Labor Rejuvenation Congress" and ruling over labor services.
Some, known as laborers, are special coolies, distinguished from ordinary workers, and are tantamount to going to hell and living in concentration camps. When laborers, poor peasants make up the vast majority. Some were apportioned, some were arrested. Some are sold out of poverty, and some are deceived. "Sending laborers", "catching laborers", and "catching floating waves" were the main ways for the Japanese colonial rulers to forcibly recruit labor.
The "Rules for the Urgent Work of Workers", promulgated in 1942, stipulate that when the so-called public utilities and national policy undertakings are urgently needed, the people may be forced to engage in labor designated by the puppet regime. The indicator of labour is apportioned downward through local pseudo-governments. Many farming families were destroyed by being sent as laborers.
The Japanese pseudo-military police and gendarmes often intercept pedestrians in broad daylight, or hunt down tourists in guest houses, and sometimes even break into people's homes and forcibly arrest people for labor. As for those who were charged with "floating waves" and thrown into the "correctional counseling home", they were escorted to the mines to perform hard labor, and there was no day to come out.
Laborers mainly engaged in slave labor in the construction of military facilities, industrial and mining enterprises, and civil engineering by the Japanese colonial rulers. Of the tens of thousands of laborers used by the Japanese army every year, some of them were violently requisitioned in the three northeastern provinces, and the other part was fraudulently requisitioned in the kannai provinces. As Japanese imperialism plundered Northeast China day by day, more and more laborers were being forcibly recruited every year.
In 1942, the Kwantung Army alone captured nearly 220,000 laborers, and a total of 1 million people were recruited throughout the year, according to the Shengjing Daily in 1943, on April 27 and June 22 of that year, Fengtian (Shenyang) alone captured 3576 and 3500 "floating waves". A total of 1.2 million laborers were arrested that year, 1.3 million in 1944 and 1.6 million in 1945.
Laborers lived inhuman lives and endured suffering. The Japanese fascists never treated Chinese laborers as human beings, and the Chinese laborers who were conscripted and deceived were forced to work in the tightly set up layers of power grids and under the sentry of the Japanese and puppet military and police. The laborers in the Fushun Coal Mine and the Xiaomanman Hydropower Station are engaged in cattle and horses under close surveillance.
In order to prevent laborers from escaping and resisting, the Japanese army in Jixi Didao Coal Mine set up two large power grids, established 4 institutes, more than 20 departments with military police, constitutional, special and other 8 organs, and also set up more than 80 large and small heads, the entire Didao Coal Mine is a spooky hell on earth.
When the Japanese invaders built the Jingpo Lake Hydropower Plant, they built a total of 15 security facilities to prevent "laborers" from fleeing. Three power grids were set up, two Japanese detachment barracks were established, two shelters were built in the fort, five guardhouses, and one police station. The Japanese garrison was equipped with military dogs, and telephones were directly connected to the city of Tokyo.
The captured laborers were dressed in uniform cloth, written with lead oil on their backs, and formed in formation, and the laborers were not allowed to call each other names, only numbers, let alone turn their heads and ears, and walk with their heads up. The Japanese invaders used even more cruel methods against the laborers arrested on charges such as "floating waves" and "ideological prisoners."
They were held in correctional counseling homes and training centers, where each person was shaved off their eyebrows, shaved off half of their hair or branded on their shoulders with a soldering iron, and then left to do the most dangerous and onerous chores day and night. When escaped laborers were caught, they were either killed or pushed onto the grid to electrocute or have wolfhounds bitten alive, and some were even buried alive. In order to prevent the laborers from escaping, the Japanese troops in the Jixi Didao Coal Mine put the captured laborers on the number, shaved off their eyebrows on the grounds of haircuts, and went to the coal mines to work under the supervision of the mining team armed with rifles.
The labor force worked fifteen or six hours a day, and the intensity of the labor reached an intolerable level. In the military, mines, and civil construction sites, the Japanese used Chinese laborers as cattle, horses, and tools. In 1942, after the Mashan Coal Mine in Jixi City, Heilongjiang Province, put forward the slogan of "Great Charcoal Production, Supporting the Great East Asian Holy War", the Japanese invaders successively carried out the "Day of Striving to Produce Charcoal" and forced laborers to dig coal under the pit for 24 hours continuously.
Workers in coal mines such as Jixi and Fushun must be escorted by armed police in a queue to and from work, and after the workers enter the pit, the mine police hold the mouth of the pit with guns and are not allowed to leave the pit if they fail to complete the task. The laborers were hungry and thirsty under the pit, so they had to drink the dirty and smelly pit water. Because the devils only care about accelerating the coal, the mine does not have any safety measures, the ventilation under the pit is poor, the production environment is extremely bad, the accidents of gas explosions and roof collapse continue to occur, and the casualties of miners occur repeatedly.
Some laborers in Jixi and other coal mines could not withstand the cruel torture, so they committed suicide by hanging beams under the pit. Jixi Didao Coal Mine, in order to save pit wood, implements a large area of empty roof operation underground, so there are often roof accidents, resulting in a large number of deaths of miners. Once, when a miner found himself about to take the roof while working, he came out, but he was accidentally seen by the devil who "slipped the field", who pointed at his nose and said, "Your conscience is greatly damaged if you don't work!"
He pleaded bitterly, saying that the roof was about to fall, and the devil, instead of taking preventive measures, was furious: "It doesn't matter what is the roof, it doesn't matter if you die or die." Saying that it was a few pickaxes, and even the bands pushed him into the palm face. As soon as he was pushed in, the roof came down. At that time, the lives of laborers were not even worth the money.
In 1942, the Jixi Mashan Coal Mine adopted the cannibalization and stumps coal mining method of "killing chickens and eggs", as well as the large-area empty roof operation of the "big stage", which was the most primitive coal mining method used by the Japanese invaders to save pit wood and speed up the progress of coal mining, regardless of the lives of workers.
They forced the laborers to grab coal in the tiger's mouth, while ignoring the drainage and ventilation under the pit, and the laborers mined coal under the pit tens or hundreds of meters deep, and due to poor ventilation, the air was thin, and they were breathing heavily and sweating heavily. Some of the laborers fainted on the ground, were dragged outside the pit by the overseers and dragged their heads, woke up with cool water, and were driven into the pit to continue digging coal.
The laborers worked as cattle and horses, but ate rationed acorn noodles, wild vegetables, and nest heads. In 1944, during the construction of the Dongliao River Reservoir Project, the laborers ate three bowls of sorghum rice and a little pickle every day. In 1943, the Fuxin Coal Mine once distributed rations once every three days and two days except the Japanese, but the mines knew that the rations distributed were far from enough, lest they be eaten by the workers after a distribution, so they adopted the method of distributing them once every two or three days to maintain the half-dead living conditions of the laborers.
The Jixi Didao Coal Mine rations one-third of its acorn noodles every month. The oak noodles are ground into flour from the fruits of the oak tree, which is both astringent and bitter, difficult to swallow, and is a feed that even pigs do not like to eat. The dishes eaten are also spoiled and sour. Jixi Didi Road Coal Mine Training Institute people many pots small, once made of dishes are not enough to eat, they will make a pot first poured in a large vat, to open the meal and then on a pot of heat, because of the perennial months do not brush the tank of vegetables, the dish pour will soon ferment and deteriorate, turbid sour taste is difficult to enter.
And such meals are not enough for the laborers, and after the laborers have finished their work, they fill the kitchen door and stand there one by one, expecting the kitchen to pour out the radish root and cabbage head. In addition to picking these to eat, in the spring, the laborers dug up artemisia sprouts on the ground to eat. Some laborers risked their lives to pull out a handful of grass outside the power grid and eat it.
The laborers lived in sheds and board houses, and in the summer the air was dirty, flies flew wildly, bed bugs crawled, rats were rampant, and plague was prevalent. In winter, the smoke is burning and the cold is overwhelming. In the northeastern foothills, kilometers southeast of dalian's docks, there is a Chinese workers' shelter that "named "BishanZhuang" and boasted as a model for the "welfare" facilities of similar Chinese workers, but it was actually tantamount to a prison. The total area of the building is 12,000 pyeong (the japanese unit of area, each ping is equal to 3.03 square meters), and it often takes 30,000 to 40,000 people to live.
The laborers called each room here "shacks", each shack was five or six meters long and more than three meters wide, except for the passage of more than one meter wide, the slab beds on both sides were more than one meter wide, only one foot high above and below, three layers of partitions were nailed, and they could not sit up, and some shacks had four hanging bunks, and a square meter of space to sleep four people.
In the hot summer, the shack is like a steamer, and mosquitoes and bed bugs are swarmed, stirring up the laborers to sleep through the night; In the middle of winter, the shacks were as cold as ice kilns, and the laborers were covered with straw bales. Covered with sacks, half-cut bricks to pad the head, curled up on both legs to sleep, I don't know how many times I was frozen in one night. It was such a place, and the surrounding walls were still covered with barbed wire.
In a weeds shed of less than fifteen square meters in the Mashan coal mine, more than 60 laborers live. There are two upper and lower bunks in the shed, and the upper bunk is a paving frame made of several wooden sticks and branches, and hanged on the trellis with ropes. None of the laborers were covered, only a piece of wood or brick was used as a pillow, and the shacks were plagued with bed bugs and fleas, and the laborers were bitten and could not sleep all night, but before dawn, they were driven to work.
The cotton jacket worn by the laborers was made of cloth, the fibers completely lost their tensile force, and they were worn down to work in the well, and it took less than three days and five days to become cotton bales, plus the miner's lamps leaked acid and corroded, and the clothes were burned into pieces. Burned out, worn out, there is no more. In the middle of winter, the laborers really can't do it, just find out the paper pockets containing cement, the broken grass curtains, the broken mats and the sack pieces, and tie them randomly on the body. In the alternating autumn and winter seasons, these suffering laborers wrapped their butts around their butts with only a piece of cement bag paper, facing the wind and rain, and running around the streets with their shoulders hugged.
In addition, the Japanese army also lured and encouraged laborers to smoke opium YP. The Jixi Mashan Coal Mine and many coal mines in various parts of the northeast have set up YP rationing stations that monopolize narcotics. Some use YP as an encouragement, as a reward for laborers to exceed their coal mining tasks and as a substitute for their due wages. Some workers are addicted to YP and have to send all the money they earn every month to the YP ration.
When the laborers were addicted to YP and poisoned, the Japanese army put the poisoned people into the so-called "KangshengYuan" in the name of smoking cessation and forced them to work without compensation, which later became one of the means for the Japanese army to earn unpaid labor. Almost none of the laborers who were imprisoned in the so-called compulsory smoking cessation of smoking in the "KangshengYuan" suffered inhuman treatment and excessive labor, and almost none of them survived except for a few people who escaped by chance.
By the late Manchu period, many laborers were sick and disabled by torture. The "Industrious Fengshi Team" is composed of young people in their twenties, and it is reasonable to say that their health should be better. But only 25 percent of tonghua county's thousands of "diligent team members" were reportedly disease-free, and from January to June 1942, 1,003 of the 3,000 laborers of the Dongbiandao Development Company competed for 1,003 patients. In 1942, cholera occurred in the Fushun mine. The Japanese army did not give any treatment to the patients, but instead used barbed wire to seal off the epidemic area, guarded by the military police, not allowed to go out for medical treatment, they also checked one by one, and found that the patients were burned alive.
Inhuman life, poor working environment, so that laborers will be subjected to flying disasters at any time. Laborers who were tortured to death were every day. In the process of building the Xiaofengli Hydropower Station, more than 4,000 laborers were tortured and starved to death from 1937 to 1945.
The number of workers who died during the construction of the Jingpo Lake hydropower plant cannot be calculated, and more than 200 workers were crushed in a single landslide accident alone. According to statistics, about 3,000 people died of freezing and starvation during the construction of the entire power plant. After the death of the laborer, the body was thrown to the east ravine and the west slope, and the bones were tired and unbearable.
There is a special coffin in the "Floating Wave Worker Training" in the Jixi Didao Coal Mine, which is sometimes unable to carry out three or five dead laborers every day. The bones piled up in the warehouse of the dead man in the Didao Coal Mine in Hebei were like stacks of wood. Sometimes they even sent the living to the "warehouse of the dead" and then into the furnace. Later, because there were too many people who died, the refining furnace could not be refined, so the devils dug a "ten thousand pits" in the north ditch of the three pits of The Dripping Road, covering an area of more than 81,000 square meters. It is said to be a "mass grave", but in fact, it is not only ten thousand people buried. Until now, when Huang Shi is excavated, it is still layer after layer of bones.
From 1935 to 1945, there were 54 gas explosions at the Fushun Jinggong Three Mines, killing and injuring 851 laborers. Chinese workers at the Bow Changling Iron Mine die almost every day. The Japanese army did not have to bury the dead workers at all, but used a leaky coffin to pull countless dead miners to the "mass grave" and threw them away.
In 1940, the gunpowder depot in the Old Erkeng in Hebei Province of the Jixi Didao Coal Mine exploded, killing more than 300 people. In 1942, the old Dragon Boat Festival Jixi Didao Coal Mine hebei old pit gas explosion, less than ten days, the old second pit followed by a gas explosion. The Japanese blocked the wellhead on the pretext of protecting the coalfield, killing more than 200 miners. Five days after the incident, the wellhead door was opened, and the burned man became mud, put a shovel into a straw bag, and pulled out.
On June 12, 1943, a gas explosion occurred in the second pit of the Jixi Didao Coal Mine, killing 145 miners. In 1943, a plague broke out in the Mashan Coal Mine in Jixi, killing more than 1,700 miners in the mine. In 1943, the BenxiHu coal mine exploded, killing more than 1,000 Chinese workers. Between 1943 and September 1944, 1,700 laborers died during the construction of the Muhing Waterway (the reconstruction of the Mulen River channel flowing into Lake Xingkai).
Around 1944, 6,000 laborers died in the Hingan Ridge fortification project under the direct administration of the Japanese Kwantung Army. According to the survey of the Mining History Museum, during the Japanese and puppet rule, as many as 30,000 miners died in the Jixi Didao Coal Mine. There are three "mass graves" in the Dashiqiao Magnesium Mine, and only one of them has buried 17,000 corpses.
It is precisely because of the mass death of laborers that there are "mass graves" where the bones of Chinese workers are buried in various places where the servants are more concentrated. In a "mass grave" found in the Liaoyuan coal mine, a three-row ditch of less than 300 square meters buried 179 bones. A deep knife cut mark was also found on the skull of a corpse, the right leg bone was cut by the knife, the left leg bone and ribs had knife marks, and the two legs of the corpse bone were hugged together by three copper wires. This shows that some of the laborers who died died of disease, some died of accidents, and some died of the butcher knives of the Japanese army.
However, all this is only the tragic state of the past that we can still glimpse so far. Those massacres that could not be witnessed, and I don't know how cruel they were! When the Japanese army built the military project, it was afraid of exposing the secret, and after the completion of the project, it inhumanely slaughtered the Chinese laborers. The crimes of Japanese imperialism in the northeast against Chinese laborers are too numerous to mention.