ed Wartime forced laborers

Seoul must do its best to make Japanese firms compensate

One characteristic of a mean person ― natural or corporate ― is that he/she is weak to the strong and strong to the weak. This might be what most Koreans felt watching a Japanese company apologize to and compensate Western and Chinese wartime forced laborers ― but not Koreans.

Mitsubishi Materials, while noting that “legal circumstances” were different between the two cases, cited two reasons: first, the Western and, to some extent, Chinese slave workers were POWs, but Koreans were lawful conscripts in times of colonial rule. Second, the issue of compensating for Korean forced laborer was closed by the 1965 treaty normalizing diplomatic ties between Korea and Japan.

These are cheap, cunning excuses. We cannot see any differences between Chinese and Korean teenagers who were hunted in broad daylight and sent to Japanese mines and factories, where they endured backbreaking labor, constant hunger and vicious beatings at the slightest signs of disobedience, during World War II. They were just the same ill-fated and powerless victims under foreign occupation.

The Chinese government, too, gave up rights to demand compensation when it established diplomatic relationship with Japan in 1972. But that never kept individual Chinese victims from making claims for damages, physical and mental, caused by Japan’s wartime misdeeds.

With respect to the Japanese claim that Korean slave workers were colonial subjects, the Supreme Court here flatly rejected the reasoning, saying Japan’s annexation of Korea itself was illegal and unconstitutional.

As some Chinese wrote on the Internet, it was “robber’s logic,” because imperial Japan took everything away from others.

Behind the Japanese company’s double standards seem to be its corporate needs to make the most of the vast Chinese market, and the Shinzo Abe administration’s diplomatic calculation to mend fences with Beijing. It is small surprise then that many Korean bloggers were enraged at Japan’s glaring acts of discrimination, lamenting the difference in national power.

President Park Geun-hye’s diplomatic team may be right to refrain from making emotional responses. It is also true, as they say, that the government can do little, as litigation between Korean claimants and Japanese firms is under way. But Seoul can, and should, do far more than just saying, “The Japanese firm should try to heal the wounds of ‘all victims,’ not just the Chinese or Americans.”

There are no reasons whatsoever ― legally, morally and politically ― Korean forced laborers should be excluded from the Japanese apologies and compensation. And there is much the government can do if it tries hard enough, such as sounding out the possibility of a joint consultative body comprising the two governments, victims and businesses involved, or helping to bring the case to U.S. courts, as the Chinese have successfully done. The Park administration has to ask itself whether its diplomatic passivity has emboldened Tokyo to isolate Seoul.

President Park must be doubly active to solve this problem for personal reasons. Her father bungled the negotiations 55 years ago in his haste to get Japanese money and rebuild the economy, to make up for lack of legitimacy of his military rule.