North Korea condemns Japanese governments attempt to white-wash history

The declaration by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Japan will renounce its 1993 apology for his country’s forcing of Chinese, Korean and other Asian women into becoming sex slaves — euphemistically called “comfort women” — of the Japanese army during World War II has provoked outrage around the world, especially in countries most affected.

Currently, the U.S. House of Representatives is debating a resolution that would call upon Japan to fully admit and apologize for its past crimes. During the debates, former Japanese sex slaves have held the floor.

The Permanent Mission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) to the United Nations said in a statement, sent to the PWW, that Japan has been thrown into an “awkward situation” by U.S. Congressional hearings where the “comfort women” have testified. “Japan,” the statement continued, “is resorting to a desperate lobbying operation to stonewall Congressional passage of the resolution.”

The DPRK statement noted that imperial Japan’s aggression “brought only untold hardships and misfortune to many countries and nations. Their harsh colonial rule over Korea for nearly half a century deprived it of a precious period of development and prosperity.”

The Imperial Japanese Army forced over 200,000 Korean women into sexual slavery, killing most of them. This is on top of the thousands of women taken from China, the Philippines and elsewhere.

“This was the most hideous crime against humanity,” said the DPRK statement.

The sex slavery system Japan set up was “unknown in history up to that point,” the statement said. Japan “forcibly drafted, lured and abducted foreign women and took them to battlefields to satisfy the carnal desire of its servicemen.”

Though there are few survivors of those atrocities, “their scars unhealed and their towering grudge unsettled despite the flow” of time, Japan’s leaders “are still trying hard to evade [their] responsibility, refusing to admit its crime-woven history even today.”

Korea condemned the politicians in Japan who are “brazen-faced enough to busy themselves with shuttle-diplomacy to cover up their despicable true colors.”

If they are honestly willing to settle past crimes, North Korea said, “there is no reason for Japan to be upset by any hearing or the adoption of any resolution.”

Japan should settle the situation for its own sake, Korea said, because “any sleight of hand played by Japan to cover up its past wrongs” would cause the nation to never “gain a responsible post in the international community.”

Japan “can win confidence only through its good conduct,” the Korean statement concluded.