Voices demanding Japan's redemption of its past crimes against humanity have grown stronger on several international arenas with the 65th anniversary of the Japanese imperialists' defeat as a momentum.

It was against this backdrop that Amnesty International recently made public a statement demanding the Japanese government make reparation to victims of the sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army.

This was an indictment against the arch criminal who pushed the world into turmoil and, at the same time, a revelation of the strong desire and wish of the international community never to allow the bitter past history to repeat itself.

It is well known that the Japanese imperialists' invasion of Korea and 40-odd year long colonial military fascist rule over it were the most barbarous state-sponsored crimes unprecedented in the world history.

During their colonial rule the Japanese imperialists forcibly drafted more than 8.4 million young and middle-aged Koreans and forced them to do medieval slave labor or used them as cannon fodder at wars. They even massacred more than one million Koreans in cold blood.

The crime of sexual slavery was the most hideous crime against humanity among all the crimes the Japanese imperialists committed against the Korean people.

The Japanese imperialists reduced not only girls in their teens but even married women, 200 000 in all, to sexual playthings of the Japanese imperialist aggressors, violating their youth and chastity at battlefields. They went the lengths of making no scruple of killing them in a brutal manner in order to cover up their monstrous crimes.

The Japanese government, however, has tried hard to shirk off the responsibility for those hideous crimes beyond human imagination in a bid to hoodwink the international community.

Japan has persistently turned a deaf ear to the strong demand of the victims who have suffered from moral and physical pain for scores of years after the war due to the Japanese imperialists and the just voices of the international community calling for the probe into the truth against the past crimes and state apology and reparation.

The Japanese ultra-right conservatives unhesitatingly let loose such brigandish sophism that the Japanese imperialists' military occupation and colonial fascist rule over Korea were "legitimate" and they did "many good things in Korea". Not content with this, they deleted contents dealing with such past crimes as forcible drafting of Koreans and sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army from history books.

Japan has persistently denied its past.

The present chief executive of Japan in a statement recently issued on the occasion of the centenary of the fabrication of the "Korea-Japan Annexation Treaty" did not mention at all the issue of handling and making reparation for above-mentioned hideous crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese imperialists against the Korean people.

What merits serious attention is that the Japanese ultra-right conservatives busied themselves calling for publishing a statement in protest against the statement of the prime minister and the right-wing media joined them, crying that they can never allow the personal opinion of the prime minister.

This was nothing but hysteric outburst of the Japanese reactionaries getting hell-bent to totally deny the crime-woven history and evade the settlement of the past.

Voices demanding Japan's redemption of its past has grown stronger among Asian countries and on several international arenas in recent years. This represents their non-confidence in Japan and indictment against it as it has desperately tried to distort and conceal its past crimes and flee from the responsibility for them at any cost.

No statute of limitations is applicable to the crimes against humanity.

The further Japan delays the settlement of its past, the much more debt it will have to face.