SEOUL: South Korea announced plans on Monday to compensate victims of Japan’s forced wartime labour, aiming to end a “vicious cycle” in the Asian powers’ relations and boost ties to counter the nuclear-armed North.

Japan and the United States immediately welcomed the announcement, but victims’ groups said it fell far short of their demand for a full apology from Tokyo and direct compensation from the Japanese companies involved.

Seoul and Tokyo have ramped up security cooperation in the face of growing threats from Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, which is expanding its nuclear weapons programme in defiance of UN sanctions.

But Seoul-Tokyo ties have long been strained over Tokyo’s brutal 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, when around 780,000 Koreans were conscripted into forced labour by Japan, according to data from Seoul. This does not include the Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops.

Seoul’s plan is to take money from major South Korean companies that benefited from a 1965 reparations deal with Tokyo and use it to compensate victims and their families, Foreign Minister Park Jin said.

The hope is that Japan will “positively respond to our major decision today with Japanese companies’ voluntary contributions and a comprehensive apology”, he added. “I believe that the vicious cycle should be broken for the sake of national interest,” Park added.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2023