Pyongyang, May 12 (KCNA) -- Last century, the Japanese imperialists were hell-bent on the moves to obliterate the Korean language, making absurd sophism that "the Japanese and the Korean are of the same ancestry" and "Japan and Korea are one community", after occupying Korea by force of arms.

They mobilized the government-general in Korea and provincial and county offices, police stations and substations and all other administrative and police organs as well as the military policemen to obliterate the Korean language. They even declared without hesitation that Japanese was a "mother tongue" compulsory for the Koreans.

The government-general in Korea established a system of making and submitting "a report on the training course on mother tongue (Japanese language)" from November 1912, and subsequently took a coercive measure to write all the official documents in Japanese.

The Japanese imperialists cooked up a lot of evil laws aimed at obliterating the Korean language and furthermore fabricated and revised the "Ordinance on Education in Korea" several times, which reflected the aggressive and brigandish demand that the important purpose of general education is to disseminate the Japanese language and the Korean language is defined as an optional subject at middle schools.

They demanded to compile textbooks in Japanese and, on the other hand, imposed such harsh sanctions on students speaking in Korean as insults, fines and expulsion from schools.

They refused to sell train tickets to those who were not speaking in Japanese and punished them with fines or used violence against them. The Japanese imperialists' moves to obliterate the Korean language, which were viciously perpetrated in all fields of family and social life, led to their evil acts to even deprive the Koreans of their surnames and names.

They recklessly oppressed the Koreans who did not change their names into the ones in Japanese and even rejected the reports of birth.

The Japanese imperialists' brigandish and vicious moves to obliterate the Korean language, unprecedented in history, were terrible mental torture forced on the Korean people. -0-