Jae Won Jeong

The following is excerpts from Wall Street Journal's October 27, 1999 article on Jae Won Jeong's lawsuit concerning his Slave Labor experience at Onoda Cement (currently Taihelyo Cement):

Jae Won Jeong was 23 years old, a college student studying economics, when he defied the orders of the Japanese Empire. It was 1944 and, with the fortunes of war beginning to turn against Japan, the government started drafting Korean nationals studying at Japanese universities. When Mr. Jeong refused, he was sent for nearly two years to toil in an alleged slave-labor camp run by Onoda Cement Co., then based in Onoda, Japan.

...He recounts in rapid Korean the details of his forced labor: long days of breaking rocks with sledgehammers with little food. Then there were days of being kicked by Japanese soldiers, and then days when he was ordered to lick their boots. Once an aspiring banker, Mr. Jeong says the cruelty he endured and witnessed sucked the life out of him. He never finished college and became a high-school teacher in Seoul. "I lost 60% to 70% of myself,” he says. “The only thing I dreamed of was to live a decent human life with dignity."

Asked why he didn’t press for reparation right after the war, Mr. Jeong says: "So many people died, so many people disappeared. ... If [one] survived, it was everything one could think about." He said "I was a personal witness to what kind of cruelty was done against humankind and human beings..."

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(Last Updated: January 15, 2004.)