Abstract
The idea that Korean residents of Japan are either the victims of forced conscription (or the descendants of those victims) is now accepted by many as a self-evident truth. That it is, however, simply a fiction or, more accurately, a fabrication is demonstrated in this interview with Professor Chung, a second generation Korean resident in Japan. Professor Chung describes the historical facts from various perspectives. He notes that even the term “forced conscription” first appeared in 1965, 20 years after the end of the war, in A Chronicle of the Forced Conscription of Korean Residents, a book written by Park Kyongsik, professor at Korea University, an institution controlled by North Korea. The propagandistic nature of “forced conscription” has become ingrained, as if it were an authentic historical term, but this is emphatically not the case.