Japanese company to compensate for wartime forced labor – Kyodo

Mitsubishi Materials will apologize to forced laborers from China during WWII and compensate them economically, according to a statement released Friday by a Chinese group.

(R-L) American World War II prisoner of war James Murphy shakes hands with Hikaru Kimura, Mitsubishi Materials Corp. senior executive, and Yukio Okamoto, Mitsubishi Materials Corp outside board member in Los Angeles.

According to the proposal, the company will acknowledge its “historical responsibility”, pay 100,000 yuan (2 million yen or $16,140) to each plaintiff, the sources said. Many did not make it back to China, the Reuters report said. It will be the first time that a Japanese company has apologised to Chinese victims during WWII, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Around 39,000 Chinese people were forced to work in Japan between 1943 and 1945 as a response to the need for labor in sectors such as mining and construction.

Despite Tokyo’s official stance, Mitsubishi Materials apparently decided to offer an apology and compensation to prevent the wartime history of its precursor company from damaging its corporate image overseas and hampering its global operations.

Since the 1990s, Chinese survivors have filed a series of lawsuits against the Japanese government and corporations seeking damages for wartime wrongdoings.

However, Japan’s Supreme Court in 2007 ruled against granting wartime compensation to individuals, saying their rights to claims were relinquished after a 1972 Sino-Japanese declaration that normalised ties between the two countries.

Of the 3,765, only about 1,500 Chinese survivors of forced labor or their families have been found so far. There are now less than 20 living survivors.

The three groups represent a large majority of the victims. All but one has accepted, in principle, the settlement proposal by Mitsubishi Materials, the Chinese sources said.

Japan’s position is that all legal responsibilities over the wartime forced labor of Koreans were settled in a 1965 package deal to normalize bilateral diplomatic ties.

It also took place at a time when the Chinese government was stepping up its campaign at home and overseas to warn of Japan’s resurgent militarism, after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit in late 2013 to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are enshrined among the country’s war dead.

Last week, the company offered an apology for using captured U.S. soldiers as slave laborers. But the Japanese builder has yet to extend the same apology and compensation to Korean workers conscripted into forced labor.

The company also notified the plaintiffs that it is willing to offer a “deep and honest apology and condolences”.