A Japanese company that used Chinese forced labour in its coalmines during the second world war has agreed to compensate and apologise to thousands of victims and their families.
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Representatives of other ex-laborers, however, said they weren’t convinced Mitsubishi Materials’ apology was honest, citing a desire by Japanese firms to ease widespread anti-Japan sentiment among Chinese, many of whom feel the country has yet to show true contrition for its invasion and wartime atrocities. They accepted the apologies, the company said in a statement.
“We hope that Japan takes a responsible attitude towards history and conscientiously deals with and appropriately handles this problem left over from history”, Hua said. It promised to “continue to seek a comprehensive and permanent solution with all of its former laborers and their families”.
The company also said it would build memorials at places and mines where the labourers were put to work.
One civic group said it has located more than 1,000 surviving victims and their families, of which more than 95% agreed to the settlement terms, according to the state-run China News Service.
Mitsubishi Materials said Wednesday afternoon that the settlement, its first ever involving forced laborers, will be formally announced later in the day in Tokyo and Beijing, but did not give details.
But Japan’s Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that Chinese individuals have no right to demand wartime compensation as it was renounced under a 1972 joint communique issued when Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations were normalized.
The Japanese government had previously said that all wartime compensation issues had been settled under postwar peace treaties and that lawsuits filed in Japan by Chinese and Korean victims, including forced labourers and sex slaves, had been rejected.
Ties between China and Japan have been strained by what Beijing considered to be Japan’s reluctance to atone for the country’s wartime past.
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Mitsubishi Materials a year ago made a landmark apology to U.S. prisoners of war forced to work in its mines during the war, seven decades after the conflict came to an end.
