Reply #229: NHK's Finest Hour: Japan's Official Record of Chinese Forced Labor

[DainBramaged]

The contemporary reparations movement for Chinese forced labor (CFL), with roots in Japanese society stretching back to the late 1940s, has unfolded fitfully since it reemerged two decades ago. In 1989, survivors of Kajima Corp.'s notorious Hanaoka construction site, where 418 out of 986 workers died and a late-war uprising and massacre took place, demanded a public apology, compensation and establishment of a memorial museum. Kajima did apologize in 1990 but then dug in its corporate heels; the "community relief fund" finally set up in 2000 lacked any admission of wrongdoing. Yet the 14 CFL lawsuits filed nationwide have been notably successful, at least by Japan's inhospitable judicial standards, with four major victories for plaintiffs so far.



The Tokyo District Court in July 2001 ordered the state to compensate the family of Liu Lianren, who escaped from a Hokkaido mine in 1945 and hid in the mountains until 1958. The Fukuoka District Court ordered Mitsui Corp. to pay compensation in April 2002, while the Hiroshima High Court ordered Nishimatsu Corp. to do likewise in July 2004. Those three cases are now before the Japan Supreme Court. The Niigata District Court found both the state and Rinko Corp. liable for damages in March 2004.



Japanese judges at both the district and appeals court levels, in fact, routinely find that the Japanese government and private companies jointly engaged in illegal conduct by forcibly bringing plaintiffs to Japan and forcing them to work here. This has established a vital historical record, even though most claims are rejected (as at the Tokyo High Court on June 16) on the legal grounds of state immunity and a 20-year time limit for filing lawsuits. Judges occasionally (as at the Nagano District Court last March) express their personal desires that victims be redressed through non-judicial means.



But Mitsubishi Materials Corp., successor to the mining arm of the zaibatsu that was Japan's top munitions producer, is currently embarked on a bold defense strategy based on revisionist historical arguments. In a recent lawsuit before the Fukuoka District Court involving a coal mine where one out of every four workers died, Mitsubishi lawyers denied all charges of forced labor, questioned whether Japan ever "invaded" China, and warned that a "mistaken burden of the soul" would result from court findings that forced labor occurred.



Mitsubishi attorneys have told the Miyazaki District Court, in reference to a copper mine where the 31 percent death toll was double the national average, "Conditions at our worksite were in no way any worse than those in China at the time."<10> At the Nagasaki District Court, Mitsubishi has claimed that the operations of the North China Labor Association, the collaborationist Beijing agency that will be discussed below, were not influenced by the Japanese military occupation.

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/3691