80 Years On: Apology Sought for Former Korean Class-B, C Criminals
Tokyo, Sept. 2 (Jiji Press)--Bereaved families of former Korean Class-B and C criminals who served Japan during the Pacific War, part of World War II, continue to seek apologies and compensation from Japan.
The former criminals were required to serve as Japanese in the war, but were treated as foreigners after the war and excluded from aid.
During the war, many people from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan, which were under Japan's colonial rule at the time, were all but forced to join the country's war effort. The bereaved families say that people from the Korean Peninsula who were made to join the Japanese military were "treated as Japanese when convenient and as Koreans when inconvenient."
The relatives aim to restore the honor of their loved ones, saying the matter is a human rights issue that has "fallen into the cracks of history."
After the end of World War II, Class-B and C criminals were tried by seven Allied powers, including the United States and Britain, on charges such as abusing prisoners. They included people from the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan.
According to records on war crimes trials compiled by the judicial system research division at the Japanese justice minister's secretariat in 1973, 4,403 of the 5,700 people who were accused as Class-B and C war criminals were judged guilty. Of them, 984 were sentenced to death, of whom 920 were executed.
Park Rae-hong, 69, who heads Doshinkai, a group working for former Class-B and C war criminals from the Korean Peninsula, said that the group cannot allow Japan to use the fact that the former criminals have passed away as an excuse to dismiss its calls for apology and compensation. Park said he wants many people to know about the issue of former war criminals from the Korean Peninsula.
His predecessor, Lee Hak-rae, was the last survivor among the South Korean Class-B and C war criminals before his death at the age of 96 four years ago.
Born in the southwestern part of the Korean Peninsula in 1925, during Japanese rule, Lee applied at age 17 to become a supervisor of prisoners of war, thinking that this would be better than being drafted by the Japanese military. After receiving education and training from the military, Lee began to oversee POWs from Allied nations working in Thailand on the construction of a railway to link the country and Burma, now Myanmar. A person in such a role tended to be hated most by POWs because the individual had direct contact with the prisoners.
Lee was sentenced to death after the war on charges such as forcing sick POWs to work and causing them to die. His sentence was later commuted. He lost his Japanese nationality in line with the 1952 effectuation of the San Francisco peace treaty between the Allied powers and Japan, and was kept at Sugamo Prison, located in Tokyo and under Japanese control, until 1956. After release, he faced discrimination in Japan as a South Korean and was criticized as a collaborator for Japan back home.
A total of 148 people from the Korean Peninsula were found guilty of Class-B or C war crimes, such as POW abuse, through 1952. Among them, 23 received the death penalty. According to Park, Lee voiced regrets, saying they died without being able to gain the comfort that their actions were for their country.
Japan offers pensions to former military officers and other former military workers, including those who were convicted as war criminals, as well as their bereaved families. Foreigners, however, are not eligible for the aid even if they worked for Japan during the war.
Doshinkai, founded in 1955, led a movement to demand state compensation for those left out. Nevertheless, the matter was deemed settled under the 1965 Japan-South Korea agreement on property and claims.
In the 1990s, the group filed a lawsuit to demand apologies and damages from the Japanese government, but lost the case at the Supreme Court of Japan.
Still, in a 1996 ruling, Tokyo District Court said that "it is desirable that measures equivalent to aid given to former Japanese troops and other former Japanese military workers, as well as their bereaved families, will be implemented (for foreigners who served Japan during the war.)"
Doshinkai has since sought a legislative solution. In 2008, the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan submitted to the Diet, Japan's parliament, a bill to provide special benefits to such foreigners as a rescue measure.
But the legislation was scrapped when the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the Diet, was dissolved the following year. Since then, a suprapartisan group of Japanese lawmakers for promoting friendship between Japan and South Korea has been considering submitting a similar bill. It is uncertain when this can be achieved, however.
Park said that monetary compensation is merely symbolic and that he wants Japan to apologize.
Absurdities that need to be corrected remain 80 years after the end of the war, he added.
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