Decades-long Japanese colonialism in Korea was the harshest and the most brutal rule unprecedented in history.

In the wake of fabricating the Ulsa five-point treaty, Japan established the residency-general in Seoul on February 1 1906 to enforce fascist colonial rule. At the time the resident-general was the supreme ruler in Korea who had legislative, judicial and executive power and full command of armed forces.

To bolster up the residency-general Japan dispatched troops, military police and police massively to Korea and divested the Korean feudal government of all of its de facto authority.

It forbade the Koreans free access to the Korean royal palace by a royal edict and entrusted the Japanese police with the security of the palace and emperor to prohibit the Koreans from meeting him without Japanese approval.

During their rule by the residency-general, the Japanese imperialists inflicted untold disaster and sufferings on the locals.

They brutally repressed and killed Korean patriots as they regarded them as an obstacle to their colonial rule. They conducted extensive "punitive" operations against the volunteer army and shot to death those who were related to the volunteers without condition.

They worked hard to make Korea their source of raw materials and commodity market. On the pretext of promoting public welfare they cooked up a mining act in 1906, a fisheries accord and an oriental development company in 1908 and a bank in 1909 to plunder Korea's natural resources and arrest its economic development.

They made vicious attempts to weaken the Koreans' patriotism and national identity. They issued elementary and private schools acts respectively in 1906 and 1908 to impose colonial slave education and shut down private schools inclined to anti-Japanese sentiment.

On the excuse of protecting cultural assets the first resident-general Ito Hirobumi set up a museum in Japan and shipped there lots of Korea's cultural properties under various pretexts.

The Japanese committed innumerable crimes against the Koreans in the past.

During their colonial rule they killed more than a million Koreans, forcibly drafted some 8.4 million for war and slave labour abroad and reduced 200 000 Korean women to sexual slaves of their army.

History knew no such atrocious and brutal aggressors as the Japanese who raided the royal palace of the other country, massacred and plundered its people, forced them to change their names in Japanese style and took away lots of women as playthings of their troops in a bid to exterminate the nation.

This notwithstanding, the Japanese reactionaries, instead of making an apology and reparations for the past wrongs done against the Korean nation, are now making an absurd attempt to realize the old dream of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere by availing themselves of the US aggressive moves against the DPRK, while glossing over the history of colonialism and sharpening the sword for re-invasion.

The Korean people are adamant about their determination to settle accounts wi.th Japan and make it pay a thousand-fold.