According to the archives released Sunday by the Seoul government, Japan had implemented a policy of having Koreans emigrate to islands in the South Pacific during the 1939-1940 period. Under the emigration policy, Japan sent 1,266 Korean emigrants to the islands currently known as part of Micronesia, including the Marshall Islands. Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and ruled it as a colony until the end of World War II in 1945. The government's unclassified documents showed that Japan helped two Japanese firms, which had run plantations in the islands, employ Korean workers as daily laborers in the plantations. Koreans were forced to go to the islands as soldiers, civilians attached to the Japanese army or "comfort women" during the Japanese colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. But this marks the first time Japan also sent Korean civilians to the islands on a scheme of agricultural emigration.