Around 4,000 people have signed an online petition uploaded in February this year on Change.org by the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea. The action is intended to protest the Japanese government's attempts to distort history. (Screen capture from Change.org)

By Kim Young Deok and Yoon Sojung
Seoul | July 20, 2020

Posters showing caricatures of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as Pinocchio and the shepherd boy from Aesop's Fables have captured the attention of internet users worldwide.

Park Gitae, chairman of the non-governmental organization Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (VANK) that created the satirical pictures, said the images seek to show how Japan is not keeping its promises and continues lying.

In July 2015, Japan promised to properly inform the world of the history of forced workers on Hashima (Battleship) Island during World War II in a bid to have 23 Meiji industrial facilities listed as UNESCO World Heritage.

Yet an exhibition at the Industrial Heritage Information Centre in Tokyo, which was opened to the public last month, shows nothing of the island's dark history of forced labor.

In a July 20 interview with Korea.net at VANK headquarters in Seoul's Seongbuk-gu District, Park said, "I want to compare VANK's efforts toward correcting history to the March First Independence Movement of 1919."

Park compared the NGO's voluntary fight against Japan's history distortion to the commitment of Yu Gwan-sun (1904-20), a Korean freedom fighter and martyr who died while protesting Japanese colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

On the history distortion shown at the Tokyo center's exhibition, he said, "Japan itself made a self-harming decision to show its history distortion ambition in front of the world's 7 billion people."

VANK Chairman Park Gitae (right) talks to interns about making posters satirizing Japan's attempts at history distortion. (VANK)

In February, VANK uploaded an online petition on Change.org, an international petition website (http://maywespeak.com/unesco) with 300 million members, to urge UNESCO to monitor Japan's follow-up measures on the 23 Meiji industrial facilities that gained UNESCO World Heritage status in 2015.

"All you need to do is to type your name and email address. You can also make a donation, share the petition with others or see other petitions," he added.

About 4,000 people have signed the petition so far.

On the posters depicting the Japanese leader as Pinocchio or the shepherd boy, Park said, "This was an easier way to make people worldwide understand Japan's history distortion instead of explaining each distortion case. Otherwise, it would be too difficult to deliver the two countries' perspectives."

According to VANK, the posters uploaded on its Facebook account as of June 17 had gotten more than 60,000 likes worldwide. Park said the important thing now is to get people curious over what Japan lied about.

Mentioning its slogan, Park explained his organization's activities. "VANK is conducting an independence movement in the 21st century though we're not independence fighters. We conduct diplomacy though we're not diplomats. Though not historians, we strive to make history."

He added that VANK has conducted diplomatic activities at the civilian level.

VANK has created news slides to publicize the plight of Koreans forced to work on Japan's Hashima Island during World War II. (VANK)