은사재단 군인원호회 조선지부의 군사원호수산소 운영(1939-1945) = Operational Realities of the Military Relief Workshops under the Imperial Benevolent Foundation Soldiers’ Aid Association, Chosen Branch(1939-1945)

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study aims to reconstruct the operational reality of the Military Relief Workshop, an affiliate organization established under the Chosen Military Relief League, which was founded with imperial grants from the Japanese Emperor during the period of the war of aggression(1937-1945). The findings of the study are as follows:
First, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Keijō Military Relief League was organized on July 30, 1937. When war casualties began to occur, a Workshop for Vocational Relief was established in August 1939 in Yakusochō, Keijō Prefecture. Initially, since the Yakusochō Workshop was located in an annex of the Western Hongwanji Temple, the facility was small and had a capacity of only 40 people. However, as the number of trainees gradually increased, enrollment grew to 75 by October 1940. Consequently, in March 1941, a dedicated workshop building with a floor area of 190 pyeong was completed at the present site of the Training Institute in Euljiro 6-ga. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, as the war situation worsened, the workshop was reorganized to include night classes, and the recruitment capacity was expanded to 198 trainees, a number that was maintained until the end of the war. The completion rate among trainees was approximately 52%.
Second, the primary funding for this project came from the imperial grants bestowed by the Japanese imperial family. Although there were plans to establish similar facilities in major local cities across Korea, financial constraints meant that only a few ― such as Keijō, Busan, Pyongyang, and Daegu ― were actually founded among the 21 intended locations.
Third, the case of the Daegu Military Relief Workshop illustrates the changes in government financial support. While expenditures for workshop operations had steadily increased after 1941, they sharply declined in 1944. This appears to have been a result of the Government-General’s policy shift during the first anniversary of conscription of Koreans, in which it expanded the Patriotic Service Associations on the Home Front in each township and sought to strengthen the Township-Level Military Relief Workshops. However, in reality, no concrete evidence has been found confirming the establishment of such township-level workshops for Korean conscripts and their bereaved families.
In conclusion, this workshop project failed to expand into a broad relief initiative for the families of Korean soldiers who suffered great losses. Instead, it remained exclusively focused on supporting the bereaved families of Japanese soldiers, including volunteers the clearly racially discriminatory nature of wartime military relief in colonial Chosen.