South Korea proposes paying Japanese forced labor reparations to own citizens

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday that it will not require Japanese companies to pay for damages to forced labor survivors. South Korea and Japan have had a tense relationship for decades after Tokyo’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Japan ordered hundreds of thousands of Koreans into forced labor and sex slavery during the occupation. In 2018, a South Korean court ordered two Japanese companies to compensate 15 survivors of forced labor for their suffering, but the companies refused to pay. Only three of the survivors are still alive.

So South Korea is just letting the Japanese companies off the hook? Yes, the South Korean government proposed a plan to raise funds domestically to compensate the forced labor survivors, instead of requiring the Japanese companies to pay the damages. They still hope that the Japanese companies will voluntarily donate to the fund. The government’s proposal is aimed at improving relations with Japan, as China and North Korea grow increasingly aggressive in the Asia-Pacific region.

Dig deeper: Listen to my report on The World and Everything in It podcast about Japan and South Korea’s attempts to put the bad blood of their shared history behind them.