Pyongyang, August 15 (KCNA)   

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The Korean Committee on Measures for the Sexual Slavery for Japanese Army and Drafting Victims issued the following statement on Sunday on the lapse of 76 years since the defeat of the Japanese imperialists who had inflicted misfortune and pain upon hundreds of millions of people of Korea and other Asian countries:

Traces of plunder and massacre committed by the Japanese imperialists have faded away and the generation of the victims has been replaced for over half a century, but still running deep in the memory of people are the pains which are conveyed generation after generation, unforgotten and unhealed.

More than 8.4 million innocent Korean people were forced into animal-like slavery at the war theaters, labor sites and "comfort stations" of the Japanese imperialists and over one million were mercilessly killed under the Japanese imperialists' massacre and plunder.

Still kept buried everywhere in Asia where the feet of the Japanese imperialist aggression forces reached and even under the sea, to say nothing of in Japan, are remains of the Korean people who met grievous deaths. With nothing can their grievance be relieved.

Problem is that Japan, imposer of irrevocable horrendous damage, has done nothing to redress its crimes against our people up to now since its defeat.

Far from making apology and repentance of the crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese imperialists, Japan has adopted mean hostile policy toward the DPRK, has extended sanctions against it year after year and exposed the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan and Korean nationals in Japan to unreasonable political suppression and discrimination and resorted to the brazen-faced acts of embellishing and justifying the past crimes.

Just a few months ago, the Japanese government at a Cabinet ministers' meeting said it is inappropriate to describe mobilization of workers to Japan proper from the Korean peninsula during the Second World War as forced drafting, and at the 47th UN Human Rights Council it termed the forced recruiting of "comfort women" by the Imperial Japanese Army a cooked-up story.

This clearly proves that Japan carries no guilty conscience for its past history of aggression, and instead it has become all the more reckless to return to its position in the past when it professed the "leader of Asia".

It is a legal responsibility and moral obligation bounden to Japan to properly repent of and fully settle the aggression and unethical crimes against our country and people and other people in Asia.

We will certainly take stock of how much human, material and mental damage Japan had caused to the Korean people after occupying Korea for over 40-year occupation of Korea in the last century and how viciously it antagonized the DPRK and persecuted Koreans in Japan for scores of years after its defeat and make it pay for its crimes.

The Japanese authorities must understand the firm will of including all our victims and their bereaved families and our people.