By DPA,
Seoul : About 1,000 people attended a ceremony at a Seoul Park Sunday to mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
A stone marker was also unveiled at the spot where the annexation treaty was signed Aug 22, 1910. It took effect a week later and led to 35 years of Japanese rule over Korea. Atrocities committed by Japan during that period continue to often keep relations between the Koreas and Japan tense.
Ahead of the anniversary, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan offered Tokyo’s latest apology for his nation’s colonial rule of Korea. Japan felt “deep remorse” and offered its “heartfelt apology for the tremendous damage and suffering” under colonial rule, the prime minister said Aug 10.
South Korean President Lee Myung Bak “noted the sincerity of the statement this time and said what is important is how Japan will carry it out from now on”.
Many of his fellow Koreans, however, said they felt Kan’s apology was a hollow one because Japan has refused to pay compensation to Korean women whom the Japanese army forced into sexual slavery and does not include the atrocities committed by its military during World War II in school textbooks.
Participants in Sunday’s ceremony at Tapgol Park, where Korea’s resistance against Japanese rule began, were told never to forget the wrongs of decades ago, the Yonhap News Agency reported.
“Aug 29 is the day of humiliation when the Imperial Japan seized our national sovereignty 100 years ago and started suppressing our people like we were slaves,” Kim Young-il – head of the Korean Liberation Association, which represents the former independence fighters – was quoted as saying.
“We organized this rally … to remember this day 100 years ago and not to repeat the wrongs of history like that,” Kim said.
A stone marker was also unveiled by civic groups from both South Korea and Japan where Japan’s resident-general lived during the colonial era, the spot in central Seoul where the annexation treaty was signed.