Seoul, March 10. South Korea’s government will continue to ‘listen to the victims’ of Japanese colonialism after the compensation plan it presented to them this week was rejected by some and criticized by much of the public , a senior executive explained today. .in seoul.
“Not even a week has passed since we presented this proposal. We haven’t even taken the first step (in its implementation) and we have to look ahead and go step by step and we let’s hope that public opinion will eventually change its mind,” the government official told the media.
On Monday, Seoul presented a plan – during which it held repeated consultations with Tokyo – to compensate 15 South Koreans who were forced to work without pay for two Japanese companies during World War II.
The program is based on a compensation fund financed by South Korean companies which benefited from a donation, included in a 1965 bilateral relations treaty, of 300 million dollars and another 500 in soft loans. granted by Japan in compensation for the people they suffered under the yoke of its colonial domination on the peninsula (1910-1965).
In 2018, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that these contributions – the vast majority of which the South Korean government invested in the private sector and in infrastructure projects – failed to compensate the 15 plaintiff victims and demanded the expropriation of the assets of the two Japanese companies. implied. .
The decision was rejected by the companies and by Tokyo, which considers that the 1965 agreement settled the matter and, in order to avoid a further deterioration of the bilateral relationship, the executive of President Yoon Suk-yeol, presented the controversial plan after months of bilateral consultations.
“We are aware of the criticism from the people and the media and we will continue to listen to the victims to continue moving forward (towards the resolution of the dispute),” the aforementioned official insisted today.
According to polls, about 60% of South Koreans reject the presented plan and consider that it does not constitute the forgiveness and reparation that victims demand from Japanese companies and authorities.
The senior official admitted that the words of Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, when he spoke about Tokyo’s positive reception of the proposal, did not include a clear apology, but included a commitment to continue to defend previous statements by Japanese governments in the past that did include explicit apologies. .
In turn, the South Korean government representative said he could not guarantee that at the long-awaited summit – the first in 12 years – that President Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will hold next week, apologies will be expressed by the Japanese head of government. ECE
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