Born in Gimje, Jeollabuk-do in 1936, Geumbok headed for Tinian Island (part of the South Pacific Mandate at the time) in the western Pacific Ocean in 1939 along with his parents and his younger sister. He can't remember what month it was, but he remembers staying in Japan for a month or two. Geumbok worked in the Aguiguan farm run by Nanyo Kohatsu, a company chartered by imperial Japan, since he was six. He planted cassavas in the scorching sun. He worked, but he has no memory of being paid proper wages. He was lucky if he wasn't beaten by the Japanese.

Insim, born in December 1933, was sent to Toyobo in Incheon in June 1943. The village head and the myeon secretary said, "Each area has a quota to fill." The now elderly Insim said, "I can still vividly remember my mother crying and saying that she could not send her young daughter away." Her road back home after national liberation was a tough journey. "They told me to go home, but I didn't know how. So I just sat there in the factory. I was able to leave the factory, only after my uncle came to get me," she said.

A study of children under the age of fourteen who were taken for forced labor during the Japanese occupation was released for the first time. Children who were taken to the South Pacific Mandate, Japan and throughout the Korean Peninsula had to suffer sexual assault and hunger. The youngest child taken was Yeonim, who, at the age of five, worked at the Minamiman Boshoku (South Manchuria spinning mill) in Fengtian Province, China.

Doctor Jeong Hye-gyeong of the Research Society on Forced Mobilization During the Japanese Occupation and Peace analyzed the cases of 436 children who were under the age of fourteen when forcibly mobilized by Japan and disclosed the results on July 31. The details released were some of the cases that the committee for the investigation of forced mobilization during the Korean struggle against Japan and for the support of victims who were forced to overseas locations (under the office of the prime minister) had determined as incidents of forced mobilization. The committee received 226,583 reports of forced mobilization and judged 218,639 of these cases to be forced mobilization. Dr. Jeong, who was the manager of investigation in the committee looked into the cases of children from the 1,087 cases that she was assigned to.

At the time, children were mostly sent to spinning mills. Of the cases Jeong analyzed, 296 children were sent to spinning mills in the Korean Peninsula. Their average age was thirteen and 59 of the children were under the age of ten. The youngest child to die from forced labor was Kim Sun-rang, a ten-year-old girl who worked at a spinning mill in Busan.

Japan was a founding member of the International Labour Organization (ILO), founded in 1919. The ILO conventions that Japan ratified at the time included a ban on the labor of children under the age of fourteen. This was also reflected in the Japanese factory bill, revised in 1923. However, Japan created various clauses on exceptions and resorted to expedient measures to take children from throughout the Korean Peninsula. To avoid violating the ILO convention, Japan added regulations on exceptions, which allowed the labor of children over twelve who had completed primary school and which excluded children aged twelve to fourteen already employed from the ban. In addition, Japan did not apply the factory law to colonial Joseon, based on the grounds that if the factory bill were enforced, it would hinder the industrial development of Joseon.

Dr. Jeong said, "Many tend to think that adult men were the only ones forced into labor, but in fact many women and children were taken, too." She added, "People at the time did not even register their children on the census registry if they died as children, because they were seen as unfilial. Given such a sentiment at the time, I believe there are more children victims than we could possibly imagine." Jeong is planning to compile the stories she heard after personally meeting the victims who were forcibly taken as a child along with their families and publish them into a book titled, The Children of Joseon Forced into the Asia-Pacific War.