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Hashima Island, also known as Battleship Island, was one site where forcibly mobilized Koreans labored for 12-16 hours per day without adequate pay. Pictured are the dormitories on the island where Koreans lived. (courtesy of Lee Jae-gap)

Declassified diplomatic documents say that the Korean and Japanese delegates who negotiated the agreement that settled outstanding claims between the two countries in 1965 didn’t think the agreement also dealt with the individual right to make claims. In other words, the two countries’ position at the time of the agreement was largely in sync with the South Korean Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling that acknowledged Japanese companies’ responsibility to compensate Korean victims of forced labor.

Declassified documents from 30 years ago that were made public by Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday describe an international forum on postwar reparations in the Asia-Pacific that was held in Tokyo on Aug. 3-4, 1991. The forum was attended by Min Chung-sik, who had served as senior secretary for political affairs at the Blue House when Korea and Japan concluded their claims agreement.

The South Korean Embassy to Japan summarized Min’s remarks at the forum as follows: “There was a large difference in perception between the South Korean and Japanese governments and the public in regard to the 1965 claims agreement. It also remains doubtful whether the individual right to make claims can be settled by governments.”

Min went on: “There was also a tacit understanding between the chief negotiators at the time that the agreement meant that issues between the two governments had been resolved, but not individual rights. My understanding is that then Japanese Foreign Minister Etsusaburo Shiina held the same position.”

Min’s comments at the forum are rather different from the current view held by Korea and Japan. The Japanese government has maintained that the forced labor issue was fully resolved by the 1965 claims agreement.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on March 21 that the claims agreement “stipulated that the Korean government was accepting aid from Japan in lieu of all outstanding individual claims” while mentioning the government’s proposed solution to the forced labor issue, which involves third-party repayment.

One page of the documents that were declassified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on April 6.

The 2,361 volumes of diplomatic documents released Thursday, which run for some 360,000 pages, also recount the whirlwind changes on the Korean Peninsula after the Cold War, including contact between North Korea and the US and the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and China in 1992.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and rapid geopolitical changes in December 1991, North Korea moved to improve relations with South Korea and other countries.

The first high-level talks between North Korea and the US were held at the US delegation to the UN in New York City in January 1992, when Kim Yong-sun, international secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, met with US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Arnold Kanter. Diplomatic documents state that the Americans got the impression that North Korea regarded the presence of US Forces Korea (USFK) as “an element for stability.”

Scholars had previously argued that Kim Yong-sun acknowledged the existence of the USFK in 1992, but this is the first time such acknowledgment has been confirmed in diplomatic documents.

The diplomatic documents also describe China and Taiwan’s conflicting response to South Korea’s establishment of diplomatic relations with China on Aug. 24, 1992.

Significantly, the Chinese officially emphasized that normalizing diplomatic relations with South Korea was aimed at creating peace in the region but unofficially were clearly delighted that South Korea had ended diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

“Senior officials in the [Chinese] Communist Party have pretended to be calm and have refrained from commenting about the establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in public settings, but in private dinners and drinking parties, they’ve been overjoyed about Korea severing diplomatic relations with Taiwan,” said Hajime Fukada, a lawmaker with the Japan Socialist Party, in a meeting with the counselor of the South Korean Embassy to Tokyo on Sept. 3, 1992.

Shortly before a speech on Apr. 13, 1987, informing the Korean public that he would shelve the debate about revising the Constitution to allow direct elections, then leader Chun Doo-hwan had unsuccessfully lobbied the US to support the plan.

Chun’s Foreign Minister Choi Gwang-soo met with James Lilley, the US ambassador to South Korea, one day before Chun’s address — a Sunday, as it happened — and explained that consensus-based constitutional reform in the National Assembly “appears to be impossible because of division and conflict within the opposition party and its uncooperative stance.”

But Lilley responded that he was curious about why Chun was announcing such a decision at that time and observed that the key to the situation was democratization.

Chun then sent a personal letter to US President Ronald Reagan in May 1987 requesting his support for Chun’s “defense of the Constitution,” but Reagan refused to play along, instead pressing Chun to release political prisoners and guarantee the freedom of the press.

The declassified cache included the first diplomatic cable about the evacuation of South and North Korean diplomatic staff from Somalia in 1991, an incident made famous by the 2021 film “Escape from Mogadishu.”

The incident is described in a document titled “Simultaneous Withdrawal of South and North Korean Embassy Staff from Somalia” that was drafted by South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The document says that South Korea’s ambassador, Kang Shin-sung, met with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Yong-su, at the airport, where they had taken refuge, and proposed a joint evacuation.

“We had negotiated with the Italian government to make it possible for the North Korean diplomatic staff to be evacuated with the South Korean diplomatic staff. In line with those negotiations, diplomatic staff from both sides were flown on an Italian military aircraft to an airport in Mombasa, Kenya, along with the acting ambassador of Romania, on Jan. 12,” the document said.

By Jang Ye-ji, staff reporter; Shin Hyeong-cheol, staff reporter; Kwon Hyuk-chul, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]