South Korea will officially start an investigation next week to seize the assets of its citizens who received financial rewards through pro-Japanese activities in the early 20th century, officials said Sunday.
A joint government body, comprising 104 officials from the justice and finance ministries, police and tax office, will target about 400 of their descendants to confiscate their assets acquired during the Japanese occupation, they said. The body started preliminary investigations in April.
The move, from Friday, is a follow-up to a special law legislated in December to confiscate the assets of the collaborators who endorsed Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
It marks the first time in 57 years that South Korea will take such action against Korean citizens who actively cooperated with the occupation, a legacy of Japanese colonization on the peninsula from 1910 to 1945. A similar move was foiled in 1949 due to strong protests from the collaborators.
In South Korea, public pressure has been mounting for assets acquired by collaborators during the Japanese occupation to be returned to state coffers.
Under the law, the officials will be empowered to ask foreign governments, most likely those of Japan, China and Russia, to cooperate in the seizure of the assets, according to the officials.
Some of the descendents of collaborators, such as of Lee Wan-yong, who helped spearhead Japan's colonization in his capacity as a government minister akin to today's prime minister, have won two court rulings to exercise their rights over the properties.
Meanwhile, a presidential committee will finish drawing up a list of Koreans who collaborated with Japanese colonialists in the early 20th century by October.
The list will then be submitted to the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae and the National Assembly in November, according to the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism.
The first installment of the planned list will focus on Koreans who endorsed Japanese colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1904 to 1919.
There are as yet few statistics about how much wealth the Japan collaborators had built.
Baek Dong-hyun, a research fellow at the Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities in Seoul, has suggested that Korean aristocrats received 6.05 million yen at that time, or 360 billion won (US$360 million) in today's currency, from the Japanese government in reward for their cooperation with Japan's moves to usurp Korea's sovereignty in the early 1900s.
Seoul, Aug. 13 (Yonhap News)
S. Korea to seize assets of colonial-era Japan collaborators |
