Pyongyang, September 20 (KCNA) -- Japan faked up the "Unyo-maru" incident on September 20, 1875 and cooked up the brigandish "Kanghwa Island Treaty" with the incident as a momentum, thus providing a prelude to its armed aggression against Korea. Japan should pay for all these crimes.

Leading newspapers here Tuesday urge this in their by-lined articles.

Rodong Sinmun explains in detail how Japan fabricated the above-said incident and the illegal and invalid treaty.

It continues:

Japan made its way deep to various fields including politics, economy and culture in Korea on the strength of the treaty. In the 1900s Japan illegally put the whole of Korea under its occupation by force of arms and had since enforced an unprecedented colonial fascist rule over Korea for more than 40 years, bringing unspeakable misfortune, sufferings and disasters to the Korean people. The organized and deliberate massacres of Koreans aimed at exterminating the Korean nation, in particular, were the most monstrous crimes in any history of aggression.

In order to make up for the shortage of manpower during its colonial rule over Korea the Japanese imperialists took away and kidnapped more than 8.4 million young and middle-aged Koreans, forcing them to do slave labor and using them as cannon fodder. They forcibly took away, abducted or lured 200 000 Korean women, making them sexual slavery. They killed most of them in a cruel manner.

Japan has so far made desperate efforts to deliberately hide its hideous inhuman crimes committed against the Korean people in the past and keep them buried into oblivion. This is nothing but a base and shameless move to evade the responsibility to redress its past crimes and a blatant challenge to the human ethics and morality and justice.

Whether the DPRK-Japan relations are improved or not entirely depends on how Japan redeems its past crimes.

Minju Joson notes if Japan truly wants development and prosperity, it should honestly settle its crime-woven past and make positive effort to develop good-neighborly friendly relations with its neighboring countries