Pyongyang, August 23 (KCNA) -- More than 50 Dietmen and the governor of Tokyo Metropolis Ishihara and other ultra-right politicians of Japan belonging to the "Association of Dietmen for Visiting 'Yasukuni Shrine'" flocked to the shrine on August 15.

Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday observes this in a bylined commentary:

This betrays the ultra-right conservative politicians' ulterior intention to militarize the Japanese society, prompted by the aggressive idea and will of the Japanese war criminals.

This is not the first time that they paid a group visit to the shrine, it noted, and continued:

They did so every year when observing the day of defeat of Japanese imperialism. By doing so, they seek to put the visit to the shrine on a regular and popular basis and make it a state function in a bid to lay an ideological foundation of militarism and imbue broad strata of Japanese people with a militarist outlook on history and the consciousness of aggression.

What merits a serious attention is that Japanese Finance Minister Noda at a recent press conference asserted the top war criminals whose mortuary tablets are kept in the shrine are not war criminals.

His reckless remarks are intolerable as they are ridiculous piffles intended to totally evade the legal responsibility for the war of aggression Japan fought in the past and go without redressing its crimes.

His reckless utterances are an insult to the justice and human consciousness and the anti-history behavior to stem the trend of the times.

They are, at the same time, a double criminal act of rubbing salt into the wounds of the Asians including Koreans who suffered unspeakable misfortunes and disasters at the hands of the Japanese imperialists.

Japan should face up to the world mind-set and stop at once its criminal moves to distort its crime-woven history and let it repeat itself.