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After illegally occupying Korea, the Japanese imperialists mustered all forces available to destroy the good manners and customs inherent to the Korean nation, regarding it essential for an unbridled colonial rule.
They put forward the policy of "converting the Koreans into loyal Japanese subjects" and promulgated many evil laws to change the Korean customs completely into Japanese.
Among them, the "regulations of punishment of offenders against the police order" cooked up in March 1912 totally banned folk games and manners and customs of the Koreans including dancing and singing. So, if anyone offended against them, he or she was arrested by police or gendarmes and punished without trial.
On the strength of these "regulations," the Japanese imperialists wantonly put down and obliterated the beautiful manners and customs of the Korean nation.
They were hell-bent on doing away with the national costumes of the Koreans.
They mobilized police to bar the Koreans from wearing the traditional white clothes, saying they were "uneconomic" and Koreans should wear "colored clothes." They ran the whole gamut of evil doings, coloring the white clothes of Koreans passing by with black ink or shooting squirt-guns filled with black ink at them.
Worse still, they tried to force Korean women to wear Japanese women's trousers instead of chima and jogori characteristic of beautiful national emotion.
The Japanese imperialists took away brass basin, tray and rice-bowl and other traditional vessels used by Koreans through generations and forced Japanese ones upon the Koreans, while trying by every conceivable means to make Koreans replace their national food with Japanese food.
They banned such time-honored traditional folk games of the Koreans as tug-of-war, ssirum (Korean wrestling) and kite flying. They tried to force the Koreans to change the traditional ways of marriage and greeting and even the manner of sitting and standing into Japanese fashion.
All these moves of the Japanese imperialists to obliterate the good manners and customs of the Koreans were vicious crimes previously unknown for destroying the soul of the Korean nation and reducing it to their slave.
Yet the Japanese reactionaries, far from making apologies and reparation for their crying crimes in the past, continue to commit such gangster-like acts as tearing chima and jogori of Korean schoolgirls in Japan.
The Korean people will always remember these criminal acts of the Japanese imperialists and certainly make them pay for all their crimes down through generations.
