On February 24, 1916, Ordinance No. 7 of the Japanese Government-General of Korea was promulgated, establishing the "Provincial Sorokdo Charity Hospital" on Sorokdo Island. Yamane Masatsugu, then the Government-General's sanitation advisor, had recommended that "Korea's leprosy patients, too, should be isolated and confined," and Governor-General Terauchi Masatake accepted this recommendation, leading to Sorokdo's selection as the site for a Hansen's disease sanatorium. From then on, people with Hansen's disease from across the country were forcibly brought to this island and confined there, regardless of their own wishes.
Those confined here were not simply patients receiving treatment. They were mobilized for forced labor, and, without any legal basis, men were forced to undergo vasectomies while women were forced to undergo abortions. This policy, which stripped away by force the very right to have children in the next generation, was a systematic human rights violation hidden behind the pretext of disease control. What happened on this island marks the starting point of a history that would continue at Sorokdo for more than a century afterward, and it is the point that must be recorded first.