[A-List] JAPAN: No War Redress for Chinese

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

<http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20070428a1.html>
Saturday, April 28, 2007

Top court: No war redress for Chinese
Rights void but abuses admitted; suits to fail
Kyodo News

In a precedent-setting first pronouncement, the Supreme Court ruled
Friday that postwar agreements effectively deny Chinese individuals
the right to demand reparations from Japan for the severe suffering
they endured during the war.

The decision apparently dooms a raft of ongoing wartime damages suits,
filed mainly by Chinese and South Koreans, that will view the ruling
as a precedent.

In ruling on a lawsuit on Japan's wartime forced labor, Ryoji
Nakagawa, presiding justice at the top court's second petty bench,
said, "Chinese people have lost their rights to judicially claim war
compensation from Japan, Japanese people or its companies" under the
1972 Japan-China Joint Communique.

In the communique that normalized Tokyo-Beijing ties, China declared
it "renounces its demand for war reparations from Japan." The
declaration, however, did not specifically refer to individual rights
to claim.

The top court ruled the communique was "substantially a peace treaty
and is a framework like the San Francisco Peace Treaty" signed between
Japan and the Allied powers in 1951 that waived all Allied reparation
claims -- including the right of individuals to seek compensation.

But Nakagawa acknowledged the "extremely large mental and physical
suffering" of the victims of the forced labor. The justice also said
the court's decision does not rule out a "voluntary response to
individual claims" and called for "concerned people to make efforts to
provide relief to the victims."

Later Friday, the Supreme Court also cited the same 1972 communique in
rejecting the right of two Chinese women to claim compensation from
Japan for being forced into sexual slavery during the war.

The top court upheld a Tokyo High Court ruling against the reparations
claim. But it rejected the high court ruling that the women's
individual claim rights lapsed under a 1952 peace treaty between Japan
and the Nationalist government -- which Japan regarded as the
legitimate Chinese government even after it fled from mainland China
to Taiwan in 1949.

The top court supported the argument of the former "comfort women"
that the 1952 treaty between Tokyo and Taiwan does not apply to those
from the mainland because the Communist Party of the People's Republic
of China was ruling most of China when the treaty was signed.

Chiharu Saiguchi, presiding justice at the first petty bench who
handed down the ruling on the sex slavery case, acknowledged that
Japanese soldiers captured the plaintiffs and repeatedly raped them.

Saiguchi ruled that the two women were abducted by Japanese soldiers
from Shanxi Province in 1942, when they were 13 and 15 years old, and
soldiers repeatedly raped them for several months. The plaintiffs, one
of whom died in 1999 and her suit was taken over by relatives, had
sought a combined 46 million yen in redress from Japan.

The top court judgments come at a time when discussions over wartime
redress are taking place not only between Japan and other parts of
Asia, including China, but also in the United States, where Congress
is debating a resolution seeking an apology from Japan for coercing
foreign women into wartime sexual servitude for the Japanese military.

The top court took on the two lawsuits after two high courts delivered
different judgments.

In the lawsuit on forced labor, the top court's denial of individual
compensation rights led to the scrapping of a July 2004 Hiroshima High
Court ruling ordering Nishimatsu Construction Co. to pay 27.5 million
yen to the plaintiffs, as they demanded.

The plaintiffs, comprising two former laborers and relatives of three
deceased workers, said they were forced to work under harsh conditions
at a hydroelectric plant building site in Hiroshima Prefecture during
World War II.

The high court ruled that the statute of limitations cannot be applied
in the Nishimatsu case since to do so would not be in the interests of
justice, thus scrapping an earlier district court ruling.

Nishimatsu appealed the high court judgment, leading the top court to
rule on whether China abandoned individual rights under agreements
such as the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, in which Beijing
declared that "it renounces its war reparation from Japan."

Nishimatsu argued that China gave up individual rights to seek war
compensation under the communique.

The plaintiffs said the communique makes no reference to individual rights.

The former forced laborers called Friday's ruling irresponsible.

"It is just that the top court wants to escape from its
responsibility," Shao Yicheng, 81, one of the five plaintiffs, told a
news conference.

Lu Zhigang, 59, another plaintiff whose father was a forced laborer,
said, "My heart is full of anger." Referring to another plaintiff,
78-year-old Song Jiyao, who became blind in an accident while being
forced to work under severe conditions, Lu said: "How can the top
court hand down such a ruling facing Mr. Song? This was supposed to be
a trial that we can win, because we had personal and material
evidence."

Shuichi Adachi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said, "The court must
have thought that it has to do something for the plaintiffs' suffering
(but left it up to the targeted parties to take proper action). The
court gave up its judicial role."

Victims of Japan's wartime aggression, including former forced
laborers and sex slaves, have so far filed around 60 lawsuits with
Japanese courts, seeking compensation and apologies from the
government and companies involved in slave labor.

Illegal acts of the former Imperial Japanese Army have been
acknowledged in most of the cases, and plaintiffs, mainly from China
and South Korea, have won six suits at the district court level and
two at the high court level, including the Nishimatsu case.

But many of the lawsuits have been dismissed due to such reasons as
the expiration of the 20-year period for the plaintiffs to demand
compensation. In some cases, the plaintiffs and companies reached
settlements.
--
Yoshie