Ruling on wartime forced laborers paves way for more compensation suits

Lee Chun-sik talks at a press conference held at the office of Lawyers for a Democratic Society, near the Supreme Court in southern Seoul, after winning his compensation suit against Nippon Steel for forced labor during Japan's colonial rule of Korea. / Yonhap

By Lee Suh-yoon

The Supreme Court's landmark decision made Tuesday, which recognized the right of wartime forced laborers to claim damages from a Japanese firm, is expected to open the floodgates for compensation suits by other victims.

“Tuesday's ruling will help draw out new compensation lawsuits from other victims,” Kim Se-eun, the lawyer who represented the four plaintiffs against Nippon Steel, told The Korea Times, Wednesday.

“After the ruling, the court administration reached out to me to schedule court hearings for the other forced laborer cases I am representing, against Mitsubishi, Nachi-Fujikoshi, and Nippon Steel — cases that have been pending in the lower courts for a while.”

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling, ordering Nippon Steel to pay 100 million won ($87,000) to each victim. The four plaintiffs, only one of whom is still alive, went to Japan in 1943 after hearing they could train at a steel mill for two years and come back with a license that could give them a job with a Korean steel company. On arrival, they realized they would be treated as slaves, not workers.

Unlike Japan's top court, which closed the case against the victims in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1965 treaty normalizing diplomatic ties between Korea and Japan did not annul the individuals' rights to press charges for “the inhuman actions” done to them during the occupation.

“A treaty that does not even recognize the illegality of the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula cannot be used to nullify the right of victims to claim damages,” the court said.

Civic groups, including associations of wartime forced labor victims, welcomed the long-awaited ruling, saying their movement to seek justice for wartime forced laborers has “just started.”

There are currently 14 other compensation suits filed against Japanese firms by some 950 former Korean forced laborers. Twelve are pending in the lower courts while two, involving Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, are awaiting a final decision by the top court.

Despite Tuesday's ruling, however, when and how the plaintiffs will get their compensation from Nippon Steel is still unclear. At a shareholders' meeting after a similar ruling in 2012 when the Supreme Court sent the case back down to a lower court, the company said it was willing “to follow Korean law.”

Now, however, the company seems to be waiting for further directions from the Japanese government, which expressed deep discontent at the ruling, threatening to take the case to the International Court of Justice.

Around 220,000 wartime forced laborers have been reported to the Korean government, though historians estimate their actual number to be about five times higher. Out of the 220,000, only about 3,500 are alive.

Japan still denies the use of Korean forced labor by Japanese firms during World War II despite evidence, such as the 1944 Japanese police record of tens of thousands of Korean forced laborers who escaped, or were caught and brought back to mines and factories in Fukuoka, anonymously submitted by a Japanese researcher in 2016.