As widely known to the world, the Japanese imperialists who had seized the sovereignty of Korea by force of arms took 8.4-odd million young and middle-aged Korean people to battlefields for aggression as bullet shield and to slave labor sites in the wake of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, the statement said, and continued:

The Korean people dragged to Tokyo, victims of forcible drafting and forced labor, became subject to harsh slave labor in the sites unfit for human living, munitions factories and construction sites.

The Korean people who were suffering from hard work, maltreatment, hunger and disease met wholesale death during the indiscriminate bombing by the U.S. armed forces on March 10, 1945.

Asserting that the Korean people opposed to maltreatment and contempt and dangerous slave labor might run away by taking the advantage of confusion caused by air raid, the heinous Japanese imperialists locked them in "pen houses".

As a result, more than 10000 Korean victims of forcible drafting were mercilessly killed and tens of thousands of Koreans wounded.

This is entirely attributable to the Japanese imperialists' military occupation of Korea and forcible drafting of Koreans. Therefore we can never forget the thrice-cursed crimes against humanity, no matter how much water may flow under the bridge and no matter how many generations may be replaced by another.

Nevertheless, although it has been over 75 years since Japan was defeated, the Japanese government is resorting to sleight of hand to play down and cover up the damage inflicted on the Korean victims while trumpeting only about the damage to Japanese nationals, far from identifying the Korean victims of forcible drafting and finding and repatriating their remains.

Besides, the Japanese government handled, at will, the remains of the victims who wanted so much to be buried in their native land after death, even without informing their families, and is now resorting to a mean way to bar the bereaved families from visiting the remains.

The Japanese rightist forces are making a vicious attempt to remove the memorials to the Korean victims of forcible drafting built across Japan, the evidence of history.

Lurking behind the move of the Japanese authorities and right-wingers is an intention to do away with the evidence of the crime, so as to hush up the crime of forcible drafting of Koreans and the issue of the remains of the victims, and to beautify the history of their invasion and furthermore to dodge the responsibility for making reparation for the past crime against humanity.

We can not repress mounting anger at the Japanese authorities and right-wingers who are distorting and covering up the truth of history without minimum guilty conscience about having forced our nation to suffer untold misfortune, pain and miserable and unjust death, and rubbing salt into the wound of the victims and their families. We strongly condemn them.

The Japanese government will have to desist from shameless attempt at sweeping the past chock-full of crimes under the rug, make a thoroughgoing apology and reparation to all the Korean victims of forcible drafting and their families and take practical measures to find out all the remains of the Korean nationals and bury them in accordance with the wishes of the bereaved families.