Recently, UN human rights pundits expressed deep concern over the Japanese authorities’ move to strip the “comfort women” of their right to demand fact-finding of the sexual slavery against them and to reparation for it, and published a joint press release that strongly calls on Japan to officially apologize and fully compensate for its past wrongdoings and keep the relevant historical records in textbooks.

This is another warning of the international community that Japan can never evade the responsibility for the sexual slavery.

As is known, Japan enforced the sexual slavery in an organized and planned way with the direct engagement of its political establishments and the military.

In 1918 the Japanese authorities planned to adopt sexual slavery for the army on the pretext of a perverted military logic that it is needed to satisfy the sexual desire of the troops in order to maintain their combat efficiency.

Accordingly, in the 1920s it began to abduct foreign women on a large scale with all government organs mobilized to enforce the sexual slavery system.

Korean women took the brunt of the sexual slavery under the Japanese military occupation that had lasted in the first half of the last century.

By wielding a variety of draconian laws and regulations such as the “national mobilization law” (1938) and “women's volunteer corps service ordinance” (1944), the administrative agencies and police organs, let alone gendarmes and troops, turned out to hunt women on roadside, in the fields, at wells and elsewhere.

The abductees numbered as many as 200 000, and among them were married women below the age of 40 including pregnant and nursing ones and girls at the tender ages of 12 and 13.

Many Korean women were forcibly conscripted and taken to battlefields to serve the “imperial army” sexually, and many of them were killed eventually.

This is an unheard-of class-A crime against humanity that is hard to be imagined by human reason. Nevertheless, the Japanese reactionaries have tried their best to keep the wrongdoings shrouded in secrecy of history forever.

Before and after Japan’s defeat in August 1945, they burnt and removed all official records or documents concerning the sexual slavery.

They also deleted in the textbooks of high schools the clauses that referred to the sexual slavery and even rubbed salt into the wounds by describing the victims as “prostitutes” and “volunteers who worked to earn their living.”

However desperately they try to turn black into white to evade their responsibility for the past wrongdoings, their sinful past can never be erased or rewritten.

Japan can never absolve itself of the responsibility for the sexual slavery, and it must only pay it off.

So Kwang Myong