Crimes Committed by Japan to Obliterate Korean Nation

Pyongyang, August 17 (KCNA) -- The Korean people retrieved the standard time of the country, once deprived by the Japanese imperialists, on August 15 to significantly greet the 70th anniversary of national liberation.
    While hearing the first bell tolling the Korean standard time, named Pyongyang time, all Koreans were filled with great joy as well as surging hatred toward the Japanese imperialists.
    In this regard, Prof. and Dr. Ri Yong Hwan, a candidate academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in the DPRK, told KCNA:
    In the past the Japanese imperialists deprived Korea even of its standard time as part of their policy of exterminating the Korean nation.
    During their 40-odd-year-long colonial rule over Korea, they had adopted it as their state policy to obliterate the spirit of the Korean nation and its history, culture and all other traditions of 5 000 years.
    Japan forced Koreans to change their full names into Japanese style while changing the names of the country and its seas and geographical districts.
    In Korea the Japanese aggressors burned out many volumes of historical books and robbed of many cultural treasures, digging out by stealth more than 200 royal mausoleums and 11 000 ancient tombs.
    And they took away 8.4 million young and middle-aged people as cannon fodders or slave laborers and reduced 200 000 women into sex slaves for their army, slaughtering more than one million people.
    The Japanese imperialists employed all means and methods to obliterate the Korean nation in the past.
    Japan has persisted in the hostile policy toward the DPRK since their defeat in the war.
    The Korean nation will surely force them to pay dearly for their indelible crimes. -0