A great number of Korean people lost their lives as cannon fodder in the period of the Japanese imperialists' colonial rule.

Young Koreans aged from 17 to 20 were forcibly drafted under the pretext of "volunteers", "student soldiers" and "army civilian employees".

The Japanese imperialists drove many young and middle-aged Koreans to battle sites after establishing a "volunteer system" in the latter half of the 1930s. When they were distressed by the lack of troops along with the expansion of their aggressive war, they proclaimed a "conscription ordinance", order of the Ministry of Army No. 48, in October 1943.

They then set up a forcible "conscription" system in a short span of time to send many young and middle-aged Korean people to battle fields in a violent and deceptive way. They included even young boys in the list of "conscription".

They put all kinds of national contempt and indignity upon the draftees, made them slaves of their army and, furthermore, dispatched them to the most dangerous battle sites.

Under this system, hundreds of thousands of Korean people were killed in battle sites or victimized by the Japanese army's violence and brutal crimes.

Indeed, the "conscription" system was an enormous crime of wantonly trampling down human rights and freedom of Korean people and abusing them as victims of their aggressive war.