An official from a North Korean foreign ministry think tank backed up South Korea’s criticism of Japan on Sunday after Tokyo tried to remove a historical comfort women statue from Berlin, Germany.

The extensive complaint, credited to the DPRK’s Institute for Studies of Japan, follows a recent controversy in which a German civic group built a statue to memorialize Korean victims of Japan’s colonial-era sexual slavery, who are often referred to as “comfort women.”

“At issue is the fact that the dumbfounded Japanese authorities … are venting their uneasiness and anxieties in order to get the girl statue removed, uttering