Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific would have ground to a halt long before 1945 without the labor of millions of foreign workers, most of them mobilized against their will. For example, production of coal (then Japan's primary energy source) depended in large part on coerced labor from Korea, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Throughout Japan's wartime empire, at least fifteen million Asians were put to work, often under brutally exploitative conditions, constructing roads, bridges, and air fields; digging minerals; and building boats, among many other projects. Untold thousands died because of harsh treatment, inadequate food and medical care, and poor planning. Many surviving workers, some of whom were left permanently disabled, are still waiting today for the wages they were promised. Such a large, destructive enterprise naturally had consequences that outlived the war. Coercive labor mobilization tore families and communities apart and sharpened class resentments, contributing to revolutionary upheavals after August 1945 in Korea and Indonesia, for example. In Japan itself, where mobilization took place on a relatively small scale and with comparatively little coercion, it left a complex, contradictory legacy, invigorating the labor movement in some ways and strengthening the hand of capital in others. Unlike the situation in Germany, where corporations have recently agreed to compensate wartime forced workers, both the state and corporations in Japan have refused to consider compensation for the foreign workers who kept Japan's war machine running from 1939 to 1945.