Japan Should Pay for Its Crime-Woven Past

Japan, an island country, has betrayed its impudence again.

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 labour 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 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 took more than 8.4 million Korean young and middle-aged men to battlefields and labour sites through abduction and haul-off, and massacred them during its 40-odd-year-long occupation of Korea. Still today, this atrocity is enraging the public.

The sites of slave labour where Koreans suffered all kinds of backbreaking toil 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 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 reveals 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 a bid 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 its 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 never 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.