Seoul, March 6. The South Korean government today presented a compensation plan for 15 people enslaved by Japanese companies during World War II, which has drawn criticism from some victims or their families for being based on a funded fund by money from South Korean and non-Japanese companies.
The proposal, announced by Foreign Minister Park Jin, aims to resolve one of the disputes that weighs the most on the relations of the two countries.
The plan aims to compensate 15 Koreans who won lawsuits in 2018 against Nippon Steel and the heavy industry division of Mitsubishi, which forcibly mobilized these people in the early 1940s, when Japan still maintained its colonial rule on the Korean peninsula. .
The plan devised by Conservative Yoon Suk-yeol’s government aims to collect “voluntary” donations from businesses.
Concretely, companies such as the Posco steelworks are expected to pay a significant part of these compensations.
Posco was one of the main beneficiaries of a $300 million aid package that Tokyo offered to Seoul to compensate victims of Japanese colonization under the agreement to establish bilateral relations signed in 1965.
The Japanese authorities maintain that all compensation in this area has been resolved on the basis of this bilateral treaty.
Documents from the time showed that Tokyo wanted to directly manage compensation for the victims, but the South Korean government, in the hands of putschist General Park Chung-hee at the time, insisted on managing this aid, which ended up by being used to finance Posco, today one of the largest South Korean companies, or for the construction of the country’s main highway.
In any case, many victims or their families have expressed their disagreement with the plan, which in principle exempts the two companies from apologizing or compensating them directly.
The two countries have held several rounds of talks on the thorny issue in recent months in line with the new impetus that the Yoon government, which came to power last year, wanted to give to the strengthening of relations, which under its predecessor, the liberal Moon Jae-in, had his worst moment in decades.
In turn, Foreign Minister Park today expressed his wish that the two countries abide by a joint declaration signed by the two countries in 1998, in which the then leaders of South Korea and Japan, Kim Dae- jung and Keizo Obuchi, urged overcoming past differences. build a relationship for the future.
In the statement, Obuchi also expressed regret and apologized for the “horrible pain and damage” caused by Japanese colonization of the peninsula between 1010 and 1945.