The Korean Central News Agency on Sunday slammed the Japanese government for their objections to the An Jung-gun memorial in China.

The editorial praised An, who assassinated Japanese Governor-General of Korea Ito Hirobumi in 1909, as “an ardent anti-Japanese patriotic martyr” and called Ito a “sworn enemy of the Korean people.”

The memorial recently opened in the city of Harbin, located in Heilongjiang, a province in northeast China with a population of nearly 400,000 ethnic Koreans. An’s assassination of Ito took place at the Harbin railway station, four years after Japan made Korea a protectorate, stripping it of its diplomatic