hankyoreh

Mitsunobu Nakata, an organizer with a group supporting trials by former conscripted workers for Nippon Steel, speaks to the Hankyoreh on July 17, 2024. (Kim So-youn/Hankyoreh)

The suffering of Korean victims of forced mobilization during the Japanese occupation has only multiplied since President Yoon Suk-yeol unilaterally opted to have a third party compensate them in March 2023, letting Japanese companies off the hook while a South Korean foundation funds reparations for the victims.

Victims have been divided over whether to agree to the conditions and accept third-party payment. Now Japan is shifting all of the responsibility to South Korea, saying that it is not their problem to solve.

Many members of Japanese civil society who were driven by their conscience to become vocal advocates for Korean victims of forced mobilization for decades were also hurt by the decision.

Thursday, Aug. 15, marks the 79th anniversary of South Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, but the issue of forced mobilization under Japanese occupation is an ongoing one. On July 10-11 and 17-18, the Hankyoreh visited Toyama, Kyoto and Osaka to meet and hear the stories of three Japanese civic activists who have made it their life’s work to assist Korean victims of forced mobilization for as little as 27 years and as long as 45.

“After seeing him still be so outraged after 50 years, I wondered how deep his anger and hurt must be. I knew that I had to do something, anything.”

We met Mitsunobu Nakata, a 70-year-old activist affiliated with the group supporting victims of forced labor suing Nippon Steel, in Kyoto on July 17. To this day, Nakata still vividly remembers the first time he met the late Yeo Woon-taek (1923-2013), a victim of forced mobilization, in 1997.

“Back then, Yeo said that if Nippon Steel had duly paid him his rightful wages, he would’ve been able to buy cattle. His life would’ve been different, he said. Even though he was well over 70 at the time, he had nursed that grudge for all those years,” Nakata said. 

In June 1943, Yeo, who was 20 at the time, was forcibly recruited to Nippon Steel’s Osaka branch and subjected to arduous labor, such as having to shovel scrap metal into the steel mill’s blast furnaces. As if inadequate meals and forceful, dangerous work conditions weren’t enough, Yeo was also not paid for his labor.

While he was released from the clutches of that hellish environment when Japan was defeated in August 1945, he never reached closure as Nippon Steel has still not apologized or compensated victims.

Mitsunobu Nakata (center), speaks at a press conference on Feb. 28, 2005, ahead of the filing of a lawsuit for restitution with a district court in Seoul by four Korean men forcibly mobilized and made to work for Nippon Steel. (courtesy of Nakata)

“When we won the Supreme Court case in 2018, I felt a mixture of happiness and sorrow. While the ruling was itself groundbreaking, it had taken so long for us to reach that point that three of the four victims had died waiting,” Nakata lamented. 

The journey first took off in December 1997, when Yeo and Shin Cheon-su filed a suit with Osaka District Court to demand damages and unpaid wages from Nippon Steel, but they lost the case in October 2003, when the Supreme Court of Japan ruled against them.

In 2005, two more victims, Kim Gyu-su and Lee Chun-sik, joined the midst, and the four plaintiffs filed a compensation lawsuit with the Seoul Central District Court. They eventually won the case in the Supreme Court in 2018. If you include the lawsuit they filed in Japan, it took the victims 21 years to reach this well-earned victory.

But how time has passed. Nakata, who was a civil servant working for the Kyoto municipal government in his 40s when he began working for the cause, turned 70 this year. As a member of the civil servants’ labor union with a keen interest in social issues, he did not think much when he received and accepted a request asking for his help in a lawsuit filed by Korean conscripted workers. 

“I never knew we would support each other for so long,” he said.

“As I went back and forth between Japan and South Korea, I would join Yeo and Shin for meals, and before I knew it, we had practically become family,” he went on.

The long battle fought on behalf of Korean forced mobilization victims — including efforts to track them down and offer legal support, protests against Japanese companies implicated in war crimes, and fundraising campaigns for efforts to raise public awareness — would not have been possible without the dedication of Japan’s civil society.

On Jan. 22, 2005, members of the Japanese-founded Citizens’ Group Supporting Korean Atomic Bomb Victims explain the verdict by a high court in Hiroshima while visiting the offices of the Korea Atomic Bomb Victims Association. The woman seen speaking is Junko Ichiba, the representative of the Japanese citizens association. (courtesy of Ichiba)

After giving an extended explanation of the history of the fight over forced mobilization at Nippon Steel, Nakata sighed deeply when the conversation turned to the “third-party compensation” plan, where a Korean foundation for supporting victims would pay them damages rather than the Japanese businesses themselves.

“Each situation is different, so there isn’t anything you can do about that, but it’s upsetting to see the victims who once fought together being divided,” he said.

He added, “The 2018 Supreme Court ruling includes [terms on] how to uphold and restore the human rights of the forced mobilization victims.”

“It’s hard to comprehend why the Korean government is repudiating that itself,” he said.

Nakata went on to say that “things like ‘historical denial’ are getting worse and worse in Japan.”

“Really confronting the past is something we need to do for Japan’s own sake,” he added, stressing that he was “not going to give up this battle.”

Another example of a conscientious figure in Japan is Miyuki Nakagawa, the 63-year-old secretary general of the Hokuriku Group, who has been working for over 28 years to assist forced mobilization victims.

“In 1992, I was watching the news, and I saw these women dressed in white hanbok outfits who were survivors of forcible mobilization at Fujikoshi,” she explained while speaking to the Hankyoreh in Toyama on July 10.

“The video showed them crying and shouting for a resolution to the problem. It was a tremendous shock to me,” she recalled.

Korean women drafted against their will to work for Fujikoshi hold a protest outside a factory owned by the firm in Toyama, Japan, on March 9, 2010. The woman holding an umbrella on the left is Miyuki Nakagawa, the secretary-general of the Hokuriku Group, a Japanese nonprofit group that has been funding lawsuits by victims of forced labor at Nachi-Fujikoshi. (courtesy of Nakagawa)

Nakagawa, who was involved in student activism while attending university in Toyama, began working on the Fujikoshi issue in earnest in 1996.

Now known as Nachi-Fujikoshi, the Toyama-based company put 1,089 girls from the Korean Peninsula — with ages between 12 and 16 — to work under harsh labor conditions as a “volunteer corps” in the late stages of the Pacific War between 1944 and 1945.

In 1992, three of the victims filed suit for damages. After an intensive battle that included an indefinite hunger strike, the Supreme Court of Japan achieved a settlement in July 2000, which included the payment of compensation by Nachi-Fujikoshi.

In the wake of this decision, a second Hokuriku Group was formed in 2002 by attorneys and members of the religious community and general public to support victims of Fujikoshi’s forced mobilization in their legal action. This marked the beginning of a full-scale legal battle.

They filed suit in the Toyama District Court in 2003. After a lengthy legal fight, they ended up losing their case before the Supreme Court of Japan in 2011.

Between 2013 and 2014, they filed suit again in the Seoul Central District Court. In January 2024, they won an ultimate victory in the Supreme Court. The winning plaintiffs consisted of 41 people; only eight of the victims themselves remain alive.

“In 2010, I went to take part in a protest rally in front of Fujikoshi’s Tokyo office,” Nakagawa said.

“[Survivor] Kim Jeong-ju snuck into the building and holed up on the 15th floor, where she spent several hours shouting messages of resistance. Fujikoshi was in a panic,” she recalled.

“The victims really fought tooth and nail,” she added.

As someone who is closely acquainted with their anger, she described the third-party compensation idea as “infuriating.”

“The victims have been fighting a lonely battle, ignored completely by the Korean and Japanese governments. A ‘third-party compensation’ approach doesn’t solve the problem — it gets in the way of solving the problem,” she said.

With some of the victims rejecting the third-party compensation, the battle has dragged on even longer.

Nakagawa said, “When it comes to the forced mobilization issue, I’m someone who’s directly impacted.”

“In Japan, Zainichi Koreans and foreign workers still experience discrimination. I’m going to continue fighting and demanding that they take responsibility for past colonial practices, in the hopes that it might go some small way toward changing Japan as a society,” she added.

Miyuki Nakagawa, the secretary-general of the Hokuriku Group (left); and Junko Ichiba, Citizens’ Group Supporting Korean Atomic Bomb Victims. (Kim So-youn/Hankyoreh)

Junko Ichiba, the 68-year-old chairperson of the Citizens’ Group Supporting Korean Atomic Bomb Victims, has been working with Korean victims for 45 years. A native of Hiroshima Prefecture, she was a first-year pharmacy student in 1975 when she learned about the issue of Korean atomic bomb victims. It was a life-changing moment.

Ichiba learned about the issue through the efforts of Son Jin-doo, who spoke out about the aftereffects of atomic bomb exposure after he had risked his life clandestinely entering Japan. In 1979, she began working on the issue in earnest.

“In January 1979, I made my first visit to Korea to investigate the atomic bomb exposure issue,” she explained while speaking to the Hankyoreh in Osaka on July 18.

“I stayed for two weeks, and [what I saw] was shocking,” she added. Impoverished atomic victims were unable to even visit the hospital, using medicinal herbs instead to deal with the pain.

Workers at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard and machinery manufacturing plant in Hiroshima had to deal with the double victimization of being forcibly mobilized and exposed to the atomic bomb. In 1967, they launched a struggle with the formation of the Korea Atomic Bomb Victims Association, but the situation did not change much.

With the support of Japanese civil society, they filed suit in Hiroshima in 1995 to demand compensation for their forced mobilization and atomic bomb exposure. Many opposed the legal action, insisting they had no chance of winning no matter how hard they fought.

Ichiba recalled, “Park Chang-hwan, who was one of the victims, convinced us that ‘even if we lose, the trial will leave a historical record of what we endured at Mitsubishi,” and 46 people who were in a physical condition to give testimony ended up taking part.”

Bit by bit, the wall began to crumble. In 2007, the Supreme Court of Japan recognized a portion of the Korean atomic bomb victims’ compensation claims. This major achievement came 62 years after Korea’s liberation.

In the wake of subsequent legal cases, the victims now enjoy benefits on par with those of Japanese atomic bomb survivors. The forced mobilization suit was first filed in the Busan District Court in May 2000 and ended with a Supreme Court victory 18 years later in November 2018.

But the presentation of the third-party compensation approach complicated matters.

“I never imagined that Korea would come out with a plan for third-party compensation. It was terribly disappointing,” Ichiba said.

“Some of the victims have accepted the third-party compensation, so that makes it even more difficult to get an apology and compensation from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries,” she explained.

Even so, she sees the battle as one that needs to be waged. One of the things that she always bears in mind is something she heard from Jeong Chang-hee (1923–2012), who suffered exposure to the atomic bomb after being forcibly mobilized to work at Mitsubishi. Jeong, who served as secretary general of the Korea Atomic Bomb Victims’ Association, was someone who had spent his lifetime battling with Japan.

In their last meeting before his death, Ichiba asked him, “How were you able to battle your whole life?” In response, he told her, “I’ve come this far believing that something good would eventually happen.”

Ichiba said, “I feel the same way. I intend to join the Korean victims in the battle until the end.”

Jeong’s son, 67-year-old Jeong Jong-geon, visited Mitsubishi’s headquarters in Tokyo last March and declared, “I reject third-party compensation, and I will continue my father’s battle.”

By Kim So-youn, Tokyo correspondent

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