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.

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. -0