Chungnam Advances Land Register Digitization and Hangul Conversion... "Eradicating Japanese Colonial Legacy"

[Asia Economy (Hongseong) Reporter Jeong Il-woong] Chungnam Province is promoting the Hangul and digitalization project of land registers in 9 cities and counties within the province.

On the 7th, the province announced that it will carry out the project to convert the old land registers, which were created during the Japanese colonial period and have been used as basic data for land administration for over 100 years, into Hangul and build a digital system.

The project was piloted last year in 3 cities and counties, and this year it will be expanded to include 9 additional cities and counties. The main purpose of the project is to eliminate remnants of Japanese colonial rule and strengthen cadastral administrative services centered on users.

The Hangul conversion process involves scanning the land registers as images and then converting land details, transfer history, owner information, and other data into Hangul.

This year’s project areas include Cheonan, Gongju, Boryeong, Asan, Nonsan, Gyeryong, Dangjin, Buyeo, and Cheongyang, and the province plans to convert approximately 1.23 million pages of land registers from these cities and counties into Hangul.

The land register is a representative cadastral record that allows verification of changes in land ownership and area details.

However, the old land registers, created between 1910 and 1915 by the Japanese using Japanese-style Chinese characters, still use Japanese-style notation and Chinese characters even after 75 years since liberation, making them generally difficult to identify.

Accordingly, the province is pioneering and promoting a special policy to convert the old land registers into Hangul and digitalize them, the first of its kind nationwide, since last year.

The province expects that upon completion of the project, remnants of Japanese colonial rule will be eliminated and perfect digitization of permanently preserved documents will be possible.

It is also anticipated that by representing the data in Hangul, which is easier for civil petitioners to understand, it will be possible to provide high-quality cadastral civil services, such as easily locating ancestral land.

Ko Jae-seong, head of the Land Management Division of the province, said, “We will strive to eliminate remnants of Japanese colonial rule and enhance the convenience of land-related civil services for residents,” adding, “The province will continue to develop this project so that it can serve as a model case for other local governments.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.