Japan Should Pay for Its Crime-Woven Past: KCNA Commentary

Pyongyang, November 13 (KCNA)  -- Japan, an island country,  has again betrayed its impudence.

As known, the Supreme  Court of south Korea recently  gave a decision that a relevant Japanese business should indemnify the Korean victims  of the conscript labor forced by the Japanese imperialists.

However,  Japan  termed  it  "absurd  judgment"  and   "challenge  to  the  international community."

It  even cries  out  for taking  a tough  countermeasure  and presenting  the  case to  the International Court of Justice.

It is just  going so preposterously that  its conduct cannot be  described with even such expressions as "impudence" and "shamelessness."

The international community is greatly astonished by it. Japan has no reason to protest against that judgment.

Japan,  which  declared  conscription  and requisition  as  its  national  policy,  forcibly brought more  than 8.4 million  Korean young  and middle-aged men  to battlefields  and labor sites through abduction  and haul-off, and massacred them  during its 40 odd-year- long occupation of Korea. This atrocity is still enraging the public.

The sites of slave labor where Koreans were toiling away still exist in Japan.

And the course of  drafting, and cruel exploitation, oppression and  killings of Koreans have already been proven by documents of the then Japanese army.

So, Japan  is obliged to  make a  sound apology and  national reparation to  the Korean people for its  crime-woven past when it inflicted  the loss of manpower  and mental and physical damage upon them.

This  is  also  its   legal  and  moral  responsibility  and  duty   before  the  international community.

[1]

Nevertheless, Japan is  even denying the  court judgment on reparation  imposed on an individual company, and on the contrary,  it is behaving just like a guilty party filing the suit first. Such conduct is reminiscent of gangsters and hooligans.

It sheds light on its intent not to admit, reflect on and atone for its past wrongdoings.

It is  the ulterior design  of Japan no  longer to be  shackled by  the issue of  the past in order to turn itself into a "country capable  of going to war" by shaking off the yoke of a war criminal state.

That is why the Abe group is  recently pushing ahead with the project of constitutional revision and the scenario for building a military giant.

Not content with denying the  crime-woven past, it works hard to  repeat it. Herein lies the political and moral vulgarity and impudence peculiar to Japan.

Japan can never evade the responsibility for atoning for its past and it should not avoid the atonement for its past.

It is  the will of  the Korean  nation to  make it pay  dearly for the  past heinous  crimes

without fail even generation after generation