The discrimination, prompted by Japan's inherent national chauvinism, has evoked surging wrath of all Koreans as it is getting evermore pronounced in its hostile policy toward the DPRK while persistently refusing to settle its past woven with hideous crimes.

Historically, Japan has inflicted tremendous sufferings upon the Korean nation.

During its colonial rule over Korea, it took away millions of Koreans to Japan and forced slave labor upon them.

In this regard, the Fact-Finding Group for the Probe into the Truth behind the Forcible Drafting of Koreans, organized in the early 1970s with Japan-resident Koreans, Japanese lawyers and scholars, set up its regional branches in all parts of Japan to make a survey of the crimes related to the forcible drafting of Koreans and the forced labor.

The survey testified to the fact that there were more than 14,470 Korean draftees in Akita, nearly 20,000 in Kanagawa, some 69,000 in Chiba and more than 20,000 in Osaka prefectures. These figures are no more than a tip of iceberg in proportion to the number of all Koreans drafted to work for building 549 underground structures, at 1 500 industrial establishments, military base construction sites and even in farms across Japan.

Meanwhile, the Japanese imperialists massacred Korean draftees in most sinister and vicious way.

According to a survey report, more than 60,000 draftees were killed in coal mines of Japan from 1940-1944. The Imperial Japanese Army slaughtered at least 5,000 in Kuril Islands and 500 at the construction site of Matsushiro air-raid shelter for reasons of military secrets.

At the time of the great Kanto earthquake in September 1923, the Japanese imperialists murdered some 23 000 innocent Koreans, alleging that Koreans set fire to buildings.

The incident of the explosion of "Ukishima-maru", with Koreans returning home after the country's liberation aboard, gives a glimpse of Japan's brutal atrocities against the Koreans. The incident was disclosed to be a premeditated and intentional one.

Japan can by no means flee from the responsibility for the massacres of Koreans as they are state-sponsored crimes of the blackest dye that can never be justified.

Japan should repent of its crime-woven history with a sense of its legal and moral obligations.