Seoul, South Korea – The leaders of South Korea and Japan will maintain a summit later this week in Tokyo as they try and restore a relationship strained by previous wounds from Japan’s brutal occupation of the peninsula within the first half of the twentieth century.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will meet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kushida Thursday on the primary day of President Yoon’s two-day go to to Japan. It would be the first official go to to Japan by a South Korean president since 2011.
The go to comes days after Yoon’s authorities introduced a plan to lift native civilian funds to compensate Koreans who gained damages from Japanese corporations that enslaved them throughout Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Hundreds of 1000’s of Koreans had been mobilized as compelled laborers for Japanese corporations, or intercourse slaves at Tokyo’s military-run brothels throughout World War II.
Seoul to Compensate Japan Wartime Forced Labor Victims
The two international locations relations deteriorated additional after South Korea’s Supreme Court in 2018 ordered two Japanese corporations – Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – to compensate former Korean compelled laborers or their relations.
Tokyo has insisted that each one reparations had been settled by the 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the 2 international locations and supplied tens of millions of {dollars} in financial help to South Korea.
The compensation plan displays Yoon’s willpower to fix frayed ties with Japan and solidify trilateral Seoul-Tokyo-Washington safety cooperation to higher address North Korea’s nuclear threats.
But it sparked a right away backlash from former compelled laborers and their supporters, who’re demanding direct compensation from the Japanese corporations.
Some info for this report got here from The Associated Press and Reuters.