Managaha Island – The pearl of Saipan, located in the middle of a lagoon, on a small island off the central sea on the west side of Saipan. In Chamorro, Mana-gaha means pearl.
Looking north from the 500-metre-high Mt. Tapotchau, Saipan's highest point, this green castle on the glass sea is surrounded by delicate white sand beaches and gently embraced by the clear waters of the island, like a green pearl that jumps out of the sea.
"Alcatraz Island" under the cover of the blue sea
People who do not know history will definitely be attracted by this beautiful description and want to see the beauty of this "pearl". However, this "pearl" is not famous for its beauty, but more well-known for its darkness and sin.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the Meiji Restoration, mitsubishi built a platform for evil</h1>
There is an island about 19 km southwest of the port of Nagasaki in Japan. Its official name is Hashima Island, with an area of about 63,000 square meters and a circumference of 1.2 kilometers. Because it resembles a warship, it is also known as "Gunkanjima".
Before 1890, Gunkanjima was identified as containing a large amount of coal underground. However, the island is deserted, the conditions are harsh, and the backward industrial level of Japan is helpless to deal with the large number of coal mines in reserve, and the coal mining industry has been stagnant.
After the Meiji Restoration, Japan's rapid economic development, thirst for resources and wealth, inspired people's determination to overcome difficulties. Mitsubishi Corporation, which bought Hashima Island at the time, began to develop seabed coal resources here. The splendor of Hashima began with nearly a century as one of Japan's major coal mining regions.
Mitsubishi Group's steel "island ship"
The island's limited land area could not meet mitsubishi's industrial needs, so it continued to reclaim land, so that the little-known island eventually expanded to 480 meters long and 160 meters wide. It has an area of about 6.3 hectares, which is equivalent to one-seventh the size of Tiananmen Square. In addition, in order to ensure the demand for the number of production personnel, Mitsubishi Corporation at that time pioneered the establishment of a townhouse of 8-story reinforced concrete apartments on the island. This was the earliest batch of reinforced concrete buildings in Japan at that time, and it is of landmark significance in the history of Japanese architecture.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the most basic labor force, the beginning of sin</h1>
Solving the most basic problem of production sites, the Japanese began the beginning of a real evil.
After Japan annexed the Korean Peninsula in 1910, Japan began a history of forcible labor conquest of the Korean Peninsula. After invading and occupying northeast China, a large number of Chinese laborers were forcibly recruited to dig coal on Gunkanjima Island.
According to official statistics from the Mitsubishi Consortium and South Korea, a total of 722 Chinese and 1,442 South Korean laborers had been tortured to death on Gunkanjima by the end of World War II. This is only some official data, and in fact many people have died in the process of forced recruitment and transportation of labor.
Forced labor
After the laborers were brought to the island, they were simply registered for disinfection and assigned to various shifts. Two shifts a day, alternating 12 hours, with a variety of tasks, such as pushing a cart and filling the holes after the coal has been dug, are heavy physical labor and very cruel. But eating only a very small number of nests, skinny, two or three months of weight will lose about ten kilograms. In the eyes of Japanese managers, these foreign workers have no names, only the numbers on the islands.
How hard the life of a laborer is, no matter how many descriptions we may hear in peacetime, it is difficult to feel. You can only look at the bottomless mine and try to imagine what it is like to dig coal in a mine that is almost 1,000 meters deep every day, with a temperature of more than 30 degrees and a humidity of 95%.
In November 1942, a cabinet meeting was held in Japan, where Hideki Tojo was prime minister, and a cabinet resolution was passed on "Matters Related to the Migration of Chinese Laborers to the Interior of Japan", and more than a year later, the Tojo Cabinet passed a resolution to "accelerate the transfer of Chinese laborers to the mainland". Under the direction of the two documents, a large number of Chinese laborers were forcibly recruited to Japan, and the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare was assigned 135 work sites in 35 companies. The number of forced Chinese laborers recognized by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs exceeds 40,000.
At that time, there were more than 5,000 people living on this 63,000-square-meter island, and the population density reached 83,600 people per square kilometer, which was more than nine times that of Tokyo and ranked first in the world.
The dense population of Managaha Island
According to statistics, from the official mining in 1891 to the final closure in 1974, a total of 15.7 million tons of coal was excavated near Gunkanjima Island. These coal resources from Gunkanjima have contributed to some extent to the resource-poor Japan to take the lead in transforming into Asia's first industrialized country, but every piece of coal is stained with the blood and tears of East Asian laborers.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > ugly and cover up crimes</h1>
Seo Hyun-deok, a professor from South Korea's Sungseong Women's University, said he hopes to take this opportunity to let the world know about that black history. They want to tell everyone that the real name of "Gunkanjima" is actually "Hell Island".
South Korea's movie "Gunkanjima" based on true history
Managaha Island has long been considered by the Japanese to be its own cultural heritage. In July 2015, the Japanese government applied for and approved the UnInfo World Heritage Site on the grounds that the industrial facilities left behind on the island were the site of "the first successful industrial revolution in a non-Western country." Behind the "miracle" of the development of Managaha Island, the suffering of the laborers was "selective amnesia". It didn't take long for Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida to deny the idea of "forced labor," saying that the ambassador's "forced labor" did not mean "forced labor."
In addition, the Japanese government promised to set up an information center to let the world know about this history. However, two years have passed, and the Japanese side has not moved in the slightest, selectively ignoring it.
The evil behind this World Heritage Site has thus been deliberately concealed.
Not only that, but Japan's war of aggression against China was also "beautified" or even tampered with in the existing children's textbooks.
Japanese textbooks acknowledge that the September 18 Incident was the beginning of the "Fifteen Years' War", but not "aggression"; The war against China after the July 7 Incident was called the "Japan-China War."
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > pain that time cannot erase</h1>
In 2015, some historical sites, including Hashima, were listed as World Heritage Sites under the name Meiji Industrial Revolution: Steel, Shipbuilding, and Coal Mines. Today, Hashima Attracts many tourists because of its well-preserved ruins, and is a famous sightseeing spot in Nagasaki City, where people can visit parts of Hashima under the guidance of a guide.
Tourists visit Managaha Island
On the land of Managaha Island, there is the blood of many unjustly killed laborers. Today's Japan refuses to admit the crimes of that year.
The testimony of a late laborer, Xu Zhengyu, brought tears to his eyes: "We do heavy work, and every day we eat a mixture of soybean meal and brown rice with sardines, diarrhea and weakness every day." As soon as I stopped what I was doing, the overseer would drag me and beat me up until he said, 'Yes, I'll go to work.' Every day, I look in the direction of my hometown and have several times of suicide thoughts of jumping into the sea."
The Gunkanjima workers operate without any protective measures
The wheel of time slowly swept by, smoothing the wounds of the earth and crushing the "statues" that stood, but it could not erase the pain of the nation.
Lushun, Nanjing, Shanghai, 731, the crimes of the invaders are too numerous to forgive, let alone be forgotten. Keeping history in mind, our generation should be self-reliant.