Lee demands Japan compensate war-time victims

By Kim Se-jeong

President Lee Myung-bak urged Japan, Monday, to compensate war-time sex slaves and forced laborers who were mobilized during its 36-year occupation of the peninsula.

“Japan is obliged to compensate the victims on humanitarian grounds. Simply put, Korea-Japan relations are of a victim and an offender,” Lee was quoted as saying during an interview with several Korean and foreign media outlets at Cheong Wa Dae.

“I brought up a few proposals as to what Japan could do for the comfort women when I met Prime Minister Noda last December, but nothing went ahead. I think it was because of domestic politics in Japan. Putting the legal part of the story aside, the Japanese government should at least do something on humanitarian grounds.”

Lee’s statement came after a ruling by the Supreme Court in May held Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Nippon Steel Corp. accountable for forced labor during the occupation, and ordered them to compensate the victims.

This overturned a lower court that absolved the two companies.

Lee’s point-blank comments took many by surprise, as he is believed to be one of few leaders who have been soft on Japan. The President spent his childhood in Japan and speaks Japanese fluently.

No initial reaction from Tokyo was available.

Korea-Japan relations have never grown out of the issues of comfort women and forced labor. Rallies by victims, their street protests in Japan and Korea, civic groups’ advocacy for compensation, documentaries on their tormented experiences and petitions have laced the bilateral relations for decades.

With no accurate figure available, scholars estimated that more than 1 million were conscripted as soldiers or mobilized as forced laborers during and before the war.

In 1965 when Seoul and Tokyo agreed to reopen diplomatic ties, Japan offered $500 million as compensation, which has become the basis for Japan’s rejection for compensation claims filed by individual victims.

The court ruling is the most recent development in this no-resolution-in-sight story, and stems from a legal battle initiated by six Koreans whose families had worked for Japanese companies during World War II. They demanded compensation for unpaid salaries and mental and physical ordeals imposed on them by their employers.

The court ordered the Japanese firms must pay the plaintiffs unpaid wages and compensation emotional suffering. “It was illegal to force them to work,” Judge Kim Neung-hwan said.

They filed the same suit in 1995 in Japan, but lost it with a ruling that the statue of limitations on their cases had expired.