After cooking up the illegal "Korea-Japan Annexation Treaty" in a brigandish way in August, 1910, they enforced the most barbarous and predatory colonial rule aimed at exterminating the Korean nation from October 1 that year.

The "governor-general", the field executor of Japan's colonial rule over Korea, exercised unlimited power such as administrative, legislative and juridical powers and the right to command armed forces.

Japan empowered its "governor-general" to institute and promulgate all sorts of fascist laws which call for mobilizing troops and police any time for the operations to suppress and massacre Koreans, obliterating their national tradition and cultural heritages and looting natural resources and economic potentials of Korea as it pleases.

Terauchi, the first Japanese "governor-general" in Korea, made public what he called "the ordinance on summary trial of criminals", blustering "Koreans should either obey the Japanese laws or die."

In accordance to the "ordinance", the Japanese imperialists committed such monstrous atrocities as arresting, imprisoning and killing Koreans at random under groundless pretexts.

During several decades of their harsh colonial rule over Korea, the Japanese imperialists killed a great many Koreans, forcibly took away and abducted at least 8.4 million young Koreans before hurling them to shambles of war of aggression and sites of slave labor. They also forced 200 000 Korean women into sexual slavery for their Imperial Army.

The colonial fascist rule enforced by them over Korea after the 1930s was the most undisguised and brutal political suppression by dint of bestial violence and a hideous policy for exterminating the Korean nation and perpetrating economic plunder of Korea.

With no rhetoric can Japan write off the crimes the Japanese imperialists committed by illegally occupying Korea and enforcing brigandish colonial rule over it in the past.

However, the Japanese reactionaries are persistently evading the settlement of their past crimes, distorting and embellishing the Japanese imperialists' criminal history of aggression of Korea even now.

They are working hard to justify the harsh colonial rule of the Japanese imperialists over Korea, asserting "Japan's past colonial rule over Korea brought civilization to it" and "this rule was what was desired by Koreans" and the like.

68 years have passed since the defeat of Japanese imperialism but Japan has desperately rushed headlong into the moves for veering to the Right and militarism, persistently denying its crime-woven history.

Whenever an opportunity presents itself, Japan groundlessly accuses other countries, finding fault with them. However, what it should do before anything else is to settle its past crimes.

Japan's settlement of its crime-woven past is its legal and moral obligation and its historical task the solution of which brooks no further delay.

Politicians in Japan would be well advised to make sincere efforts to redeem the crimes Japan committed before the times and history.