Japanese Steelmaker to Pay Slave Laborer

TOKYO —  In a landmark settlement, Japanese steel giant NKK Corp. agreed Tuesday to pay $33,900 in compensation to a 72-year-old Korean who was suspended upside down and severely beaten by company employees while working as a slave laborer in Japan during World War II.

This is the first time that a Japanese firm will pay compensation to a surviving slave laborer, according to Japanese media reports. In 1997, Nippon Steel Corp. paid about $16,000 each to the families of 11 forced laborers who died before their lawsuit was settled. Neither NKK nor Nippon Steel, however, admitted legal liability or issued a direct apology, according to the reports.

Japanese attorneys who are pursuing war compensation lawsuits against Japanese companies and the Japanese government on behalf of Chinese and Korean victims of World War II said the settlement, while important, does not go nearly far enough.

“This will be influential, and [$33,900] is not a sum of money that allows them to deny responsibility,” said attorney Shogo Watanabe. But he contrasted the limited scope of the settlement--and the fact that it does not include a formal apology by NKK--with the behavior of a range of German companies that have announced they will compensate the workers who were enslaved to run the Nazi war machine.

“This is only one company paying for one victim,” Watanabe said. Instead, he said, Japanese firms and the government should cooperate in order to clarify the historical facts and responsibility of the firms and compensate victims, as is being done in Germany.

Most of the lawsuits that have been filed here by Korean and Chinese victims of Japanese war misdeeds, including slave laborers and families who claim that their relatives were used as human guinea pigs in Japanese chemical and biological warfare experiments, have been dismissed by Japanese courts on the grounds that the statute of limitations for civil suits has long since passed. The courts have rejected the arguments of Japanese attorneys that the statute of limitations should not apply to war crimes and other heinous human rights abuses.

A private organization set up by the Japanese government has been offering compensation to women forced into prostitution for Imperial Army troops, but many of the Korean victims have refused a settlement, believing that the private funding arrangement allows the government to sidestep its official responsibility.

Tuesday’s compromise is the result of a 1991 lawsuit filed by Kim Kyung Suk, 72, who had demanded $84,000 and an apology from NKK in the first lawsuit on wartime forced labor. In 1997, a lower court agreed that Kim had been forced to come to Japan to work in an NKK steel mill in Kawasaki from 1942 to 1944 in bad conditions.

Kim was believed to have been one of the leaders of a 1943 protest strike by the workers, and was strung from the ceiling by NKK officials and beaten with wooden and bamboo swords, the court ruling found. Kim suffered permanent injury to his right arm.

The lower court ruled that NKK had committed these acts but that it was no longer liable because the statute of limitations had run out.

NKK said it had been seeking a settlement “by sincerely accepting Japanese-Korean history, and since the lawsuit has been going on for a long time and Mr. Kim is growing so old, we decided to compromise.”

Kim said he was “glad we have reached a compromise while I’m still alive, but I don’t think the war compensation issue has been solved yet.”