Xinhua News Agency published an article Saturday to condemn some Japanese politicians who had challenged international justice by saying that the Class-A Japanese war criminals in World War II were no longer regarded as criminals.  

This year, China and the whole world are memorizing the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II (1939-45) and the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

In the winter of 1948, seven Class-A Japanese war criminals headed by Hideki Tojo were sentenced to death and hanged in Tokyo. "It is a great victory of the human justice," the article says.

The article also criticized Japanese leaders' visits of Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, including 14 Class-A war criminals.

Since the 1980s, rightist and conservative forces in Japan have tried to overthrow the verdicts by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was composed of 11 judges from 11 nations including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union.

Mei Ru'ao, the Chinese judge, wrote in his diary that the war criminals had disturbed the world, poisoned China, and buried the future prospects of their own country, and they deserved death for what they had done.

The nature of the verdicts is of international justice against Fascist evil forces, the article says.

While strictly following legal procedure, the international trial took two years and seven months, holding 818 open hearings, involving 419 attestors attending the court and 779 sending their written testimonies, with verdicts totaling 1,231 pages and taking seven days to read.

Fascist Germany and Japan are the two sources of World War II, which affected almost 40 nations, or four fifths of the world population at that time, it says, adding that the Japanese aggression has caused tens of millions of deaths and over US$1 trillion of financial losses in the Asia-Pacific region.

The article compared the different attitudes toward war crimes by Germany and Japan. In Berlin, the German capital, there stands a monument in memory of the massacred Jews, while in Japan, there is a stone to mark the seven hanged war criminals.

It quoted what the Chinese judge wrote 10 years before his death, "I'm not a revanchist, and I have no desire to write down the bloodshed debts the Japanese imperialists owed us under the name of Japanese people. But forgetting the past bitterness might bring about catastrophe."

(Xinhua News Agency May 29, 2005)