[Editorial] Abe confirms Japan’s regressive attempts to gloss over historical facts

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

Speaking before the Japanese House of Representatives on Nov. 1, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded to the South Korean Supreme Court’s recent ruling on forced labor conscription by reiterating his position that the matter was “completely and finally resolved” with the 1965 Claims Settlement Agreement between South Korea and Japan.

The Japanese government also reportedly held a briefing for the company in question and other companies that are being sued by Koreans who were conscripted into forced labor during Japan’s colonial occupation, which was ordered not to comply in terms of compensation or reconciliation “because the matter has been resolved through the Claims Settlement Agreement.” It’s dismaying to see nothing has changed with Tokyo’s attempts to use an agreement signed over half a century ago as a shield against the many historical issues between South Korea and Japan.

Abe went even farther by insisting that the term “workers from the Korean Peninsula” would be used going forward in place of “conscripted laborers,” which is the term Japan has been using. This can only be seen as a transparent ploy to counter the image of illegal forced labor conjured up by the word “conscripted.”

To see this sort of regressive attempt to gloss over the facts instead of any remorse or reflection is deeply disappointing. It is not an attitude that is going to solve anything. A large body of new eyewitness accounts and research findings on the history between South Korea and Japan has built up since the Claims Settlement Agreement was signed in 1965. The situation calls for an open mind and a sincere willingness to address the changes.

The Japanese government has not always insisted that the Claims Settlement Agreement solved everything. As recently as the 1990s, it acknowledged individual rights to claim damages. In an Aug. 1991 appearance before the House of Councillors, Shunji Yanai, then the director of the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s treaty bureau, affirmed that the agreement “forfeited diplomatic protection rights and did not extinguish individual claim rights in the domestic legal sense.”

Meanwhile, the general view in the international community has placed increasing importance on human rights since the world emerged from its past ideological framework with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. If the Japanese government were paying even the slightest bit of attention to this historical trend, it would not be capable of simply playing dumb about this “already resolved” issue.

The South Korean government bears its own share of responsibility. It may have been entered into by a past administration, but we are still a party to the Claims Settlement Agreement. Seoul has also long neglected management and restitution efforts for the victims. To begin with, its current position that “everything was resolved with the 1965 agreement apart for the three areas of comfort women, atomic bomb victims, and Sakhalin Korean issues” needs to be brought more in line with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling.

There is no reason to simply reject efforts by Seoul and Tokyo to reach a diplomatic solution. But we should also bear in mind the lesson of the 2015 comfort women agreement: rushing to reach an agreement without the consent of the victims can make the situation a lot more difficult.

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