The South Korean Ministry of International Affairs Thursday unveiled a plan to create a home fund for compensating WWII pressured labor victims whereas sufferer advocates preserve that the compensation ought to come from Japan.
The Supreme Court docket of South Korea ordered two Japanese metal firms to compensate pressured labor victims in 2018. The metal firms, Nippon Metal and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, enslaved Korean individuals close to the top of WWII, throughout the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula.
MOFA official Website positioning Min-Jung proposed the creation of a basis funded by South Korean companies to distribute the compensation at a public listening to. The inspiration is to be referred to as the Seoul-based Basis for Victims of Compelled Mobilization by Imperial Japan. MOFA put forth this resolution over fears that it’s going to not be doable to compel the Japanese firms to cooperate with the Supreme Court docket’s resolution.
The proposal has obtained appreciable backlash from victims’ households and authorized representatives who really feel that Nippon Metal and Mitsubishi must pay the compensation as an alternative of South Korean companies.
Japan supplied South Korea with $300 million in financial support and $500 million in loans following a 1965 reparations treaty between the 2 nations. As such Japan doesn’t imagine that it owes excellent reparations to South Korea.
Relations between each international locations have lengthy been strained over the 1910-45 Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula. Through the colonization, Koreans have been pressured to work in Japanese factories or sexually enslaved at navy brothels.
The overseas ministers of South Korea and Japan additional discussed the difficulty over a name.
