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N. Korean magazine highlights Japan's wartime atrocities

A monthly magazine published by North Korea has highlighted the wartime atrocities committed by Japan during its colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula as Pyongyang gears up for a military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the North's ruling party.

The August edition of the English-language "Pictorial Korea" magazine, recently obtained by Yonhap News Agency, carried a special article and some harrowing photos showing the bodies of Korean people who were "slaughtered mercilessly by Japanese imperialists."

According to historians, more than 200,000 women, mostly Koreans, were coerced into sexual servitude at front-line Japanese brothels during World War II when the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Those sex slaves were euphemistically called "comfort women."

The North Korean magazine criticized the Japanese Imperial Army for committing "the biggest anti-humane crime, aimed at obliterating the Korean nation."

"They arrested, imprisoned and killed innocent Koreans at random, and kidnapped and forcibly took 8.4 million young and middle-aged Koreans to the battlefields and backbreaking workplaces at mines, coal mines, construction sites of military establishments, killing over a million," the article read.

"200,000 Korean women were reduced to 'comfort women,' sexual slaves of the Japanese soldiers, most of them being buried in alien lands," it said.

"It is hard to see in any period and anywhere in the world such horrible crimes committed by the Japanese imperialists," it said.

"They are the heinous crimes never to be erased nor covered even after lapse of time and replacement of the generations," it said.

The article also accused Japan of what it calls a "violent crackdown" on the de facto North Korean embassy in Tokyo.

North Korea and Japan, which have no diplomatic ties, have been at odds over the property of the General Association of Korean Residents in Tokyo, known as Chongryon, which represents North Korean interests in Japan. The Chongryon property has been put up for auction after being seized over unpaid rent.

"The present Japanese authorities, far from making a sincere apology and reparation for this, are stoking up national chauvinism against the DPRK (North Korea) and Chongryon, and running amok with anti-DPRK machinations and violent crackdown on Chongryon in inhumane and immoral ways," it said.

North Korea is preparing to stage a huge military parade on Oct. 10 to mark the founding anniversary of the Workers' Party. (Yonhap)