Japanese steel giant ordered to compensate South Koreans forced to work under colonial rule
- Tuesday’s final ruling is likely to have an enormous impact on Japanese-South Korean ties, politically and economically
South Korea’s top court on Tuesday ordered a Japanese steel giant to pay compensation over forced wartime labour, triggering a new row between the two US allies and a denunciation by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
South Korea and Japan are both democracies faced with an increasingly assertive neighbour China and the long-running threat of nuclear-armed Pyongyang.
But their own relationship is soured by bitter disputes over history and territory stemming from Japan’s brutal 1910-45 colonial rule over the peninsula, with forced labour and wartime sexual slavery key examples.
Tuesday’s ruling marks the final South Korean chapter in a 21-year legal battle against Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal (NSSM).
The Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling that the firm pay each of four plaintiffs – only one of whom is still alive – 100 million won ($88,000) for being forced to work at its steel mills between 1941 and 1943.