South Korean Court Orders Japanese Firm Nachi-Fujikoshi to Pay Forced Laborers

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/world/asia/nachi-fujikoshi-south-korea-ruling.html

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SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean court on Thursday ordered a Japanese company to compensate dozens of Koreans who were forced to work in its factory during Japanese colonial rule of Korea, which ended with Japan’s defeat in World War II.

The Japanese company, the Nachi-Fujikoshi Corporation, must pay $75,800 to $94,800 to each of the 13 former workers who are still alive and to the families of 18 who have died, the Seoul Central District Court said on Thursday.

In court rulings last year, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corporation were ordered to pay similar amounts to compensate South Korean plaintiffs.

Mitsubishi Heavy and Nippon Steel have filed appeals, and Nachi-Fujikoshi said it would do the same.

Allegations of forced labor during the 35 years of Japanese colonial rule are just one of a number of issues that have recently intensified tensions between South Korea and Japan.

Historians in South Korea estimate that at least 1.2 million Koreans were forced to work for Japan’s war efforts in Japan, China and elsewhere. Roughly 300 Japanese companies still in operation are believed to have used such workers, according to South Korean officials.

South Korean plaintiffs seeking compensation first sued in Japan. But courts there sided with the companies and the Japanese government, saying the 1965 treaty normalizing diplomatic ties between Japan and South Korea had closed the issue.

The plaintiffs then took their cases to South Korean courts. At first, local judges in South Korea honored the rulings by the Japanese courts. But the Supreme Court overturned their rulings in May 2012 and sent the cases back to the lower courts for trial, saying the Japanese rulings went against the Constitution of South Korea and international legal norms.

If the South Korean Supreme Court upholds the lower court rulings and the Japanese companies refuse to pay compensation, the plaintiffs could ask the courts to seize the companies’ assets in South Korea, a step that would almost certainly strain relations further.

Nachi-Fujikoshi was accused of using 1,000 Korean girls ages 12 to 18 as forced laborers at a factory in Toyama Prefecture, Japan.

The victims worked 10 to 12 hours a day except Sundays, toiling “under strict surveillance and in deplorable working conditions,” the court said in its ruling on Thursday. “They were neither fed properly nor paid wages.”

“Deceiving young girls into volunteering” for the wartime effort, or forcibly recruiting them, amounted to “a crime against humanity directly linked to Japan’s illegal colonial occupation and its war of aggression,” the court ruled.

After they returned home, many of the South Korean laborers could not marry or suffered spousal abuse because they were often mistaken for so-called comfort women — Korean and other Asian women who were forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War II — the court said.

“We were so hungry that we had to eat weeds, and there were so many air raids at night we had to sleep with our shoes on,” Kim Jeong-gyu, an 83-year-old plaintiff, said outside the courtroom after the verdict on Thursday. “Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, must apologize and offer us compensation.”