It was a deliberate and premeditated massacre of Koreans committed with the approval of the Japanese government and in line with a scenario of its military authorities from A to Z.

On August 22, 1945 the Japanese imperialists let Korean draftees go aboard transport ship Ukishima-maru which anchored at Ominato Port in Aomori Prefecture with a false promise to send them back home.

The Japanese imperialists made the ship with at least 3,700 Koreans aboard sail toward the south near the coastal areas, not to Pusan Port of Korea from the outset.

On August 24 they detonated explosive installed in the ship near Maizuru Port, sinking it and sending the majority of Koreans to the bottom of the sea.

After the incident, the captain of the ship and Japanese reactionaries claimed that the ship was sunk by a mine. But this turned out to be a sheer lie.

A former crewman of the ship in his testimony said that the ship was left with a small quantity of fuel at the time of its departure and it had no plan to sail to Pusan Port.

Moreover, the route to Maizuru Port was safe as mines had been cleared. There were more than 500 ships, each with a displacement of 1,000 tons in the port at that time, sailing in and out. So no one could believe that the above-said ship ran into a mine.

So Pong A and Kwon Sang Gil, Koreans in Japan who narrowly survived the disaster made the following testimonies: When the ship was sinking, a man called Paek who was an MP of the Japanese navy came out to the deck and jumped into the sea after shouting "Japs detonated explosive to sink the ship." And three soldiers of the Japanese Navy yelled "Catch that guy and kill him" while chasing him.

This goes to clearly prove that the Ukishima-maru explosion incident was a product of the plot deliberately hatched by the Japanese imperialists to massacre Koreans in a bid to recover from their defeat in the war and hide the crimes they committed by forcing the Korean draftees to work like a beast of burden.

The Japanese militarists are devils unprecedented in the world history and the sworn enemy of the Korean people.

This incident is a tip of iceberg of all crimes committed by Japan against the Korean people in the past.

The Japanese imperialists killed more than one million innocent Koreans and walked away at least 8.4 million young and middle-aged people, forcing them to do slave labor during their colonial fascist rule over Korea for more than 40 years.

The Japanese militarists took 200,000 Korean women to battle fields as sexual slaves for the aggression army, ruthlessly violating their chastity. They vandalized and plundered many cultural treasures of the Korean nation.

But Japan is still denying all its hideous crimes committed against the Korean people in the past, insisting that the Ukishima-maru incident was an "accidental sinking of the ship due to a mine". It is a shameless artifice peculiar to Japan to evade the heavy responsibility for the past crimes and follow in the footsteps of aggressors.

Japan should not evade the blame for the past crimes but make a thoroughgoing probe into the truth about them and open them to public, strictly punish those responsible for them and make an apology and reparation for the crimes.

This is the only way for Japan to shake off the ill-fame of a war criminal state and an inhuman state and advance toward a bright future.