hankyoreh

Takeo Kawamura (left), a Japanese lawmaker in the Liberal Democratic Party and head of the Japan-Korea Parliamentarians’ Union, heads to his meeting with South Korean lawmaker Lee Nak-yeon of the Democratic Party at the South Korean National Assembly on Oct. 18. (Yonhap News)

I remember the first time I ever met survivors of forced labor mobilization by imperial Japan face-to-face was in late 2004. In an article published on Jan. 2, 2005, I quoted the account of Go Bok-nam, then 88, who tearfully recounted how he had been taken to Hainan Island off the coast of southern China and “worked like a dog before coming home.” Shamefully, only about 30% of his recollections were comprehensible to a young Korean in his 20s; the memories of senior citizens already in their 70s and 80s were precarious, and I was unfamiliar with the Japanese words that popped up at odd moments.

As time passed and I became wiser, I realized that my age group represented the last generation that would have the opportunity to hear accounts directly from the victims themselves. Some 240 women reported having suffered great anguish as “comfort women” to the Japanese military, but all but a dozen or so have since passed away. For the forced mobilization trial that has emerged as the central issue in the South Korea-Japan conflict, the only remaining survivors are 96-year-old Lee Chun-sik and 90-year-old Yang Geum-deok. There is no statute of limitations on pursuing historical truth, but the importance of resolving issues while the victims are still alive cannot be overstated.

South Korea-Japan relations have become severely strained due to retaliatory export measures imposed by Japan in July 2019 after a South Korean Supreme Court ruling on the forced labor mobilization issue in October 2018. In a telephone conversation with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Sept. 24, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga urged Seoul to take the “first step,” insisting that “our countries’ relations cannot be left in their current state.”

In a press interview a few days later, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official clarified that this “first step” is a firm promise from the South Korean government not to allow the liquidation of assets seized from Japanese companies in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

Meeting on Oct. 18 with Democratic Party leader Lee Nak-yeon, Japan-Korea Parliamentarians’ Union Secretary-General Takeo Kawamura reached an agreement to “marshal our collective wisdom,” but the mood in Japan remains stormy. Reports have even described some Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) figures making wild remarks about seizing assets from the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo and the Samsung branch in Japan. Their position is that because South Korea was the party that violated the 1965 Claims Settlement Agreement that was supposed to resolve the claim issue “fully and finally,” it is up to South Korea to present a solution that is acceptable to them.

But both South Korea and Japan are in the same boat in the sense that their diplomacy is constrained to some extent by domestic politics. If Tokyo keeps pushing Seoul to intervene in the Supreme Court decision when Moon has already reiterated several times that doing so is out of the question, that’s as good as saying they don’t want to solve the problem.

So I have a suggestion: as a starting point toward solving the problem, why not have the Japanese companies apologize frankly to the plaintiffs? In a piece published in the Hankyoreh in early August, attorney Im Jae-seong, who is representing the plaintiffs in the Nippon Steel trial, called on the Japanese companies to “apologize first.” “Tell this old man who is approaching 100 years of age that you truthfully have not forgotten the suffering of his younger days,” Im wrote at the time. “An apology alone does not mean that the trial process is completed. But it is clear that we can begin a new relationship after the act of apologizing.”

Right now, the only parties in South Korea who can decide to halt the liquidation procedures even temporarily are the plaintiffs.

If Japan really is worried about the future of its relationship with South Korea, then it first needs to do the humane thing for these elderly plaintiffs. Only then will there be room for diplomacy to go to work. No matter how many times I look, I don’t see anything in the Claims Settlement Agreement about it having “fully and finally” expunged the responsibility of Japanese companies to apologize.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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