2024-02-20
One bale of rice is the amount an adult man consumes in a year. By that calculation, they received three years’ worth of rice in a single month.
November 6, 2018
The following is from an article published on page 12 of today’s Sankei Shimbun under the title “South Korea, Stop Taking Japan for Granted.”
Three years ago, I spoke with Lee Dae-il, a former restaurant owner living in Tagawa, Fukuoka Prefecture, who was 64 at the time.
Lee’s uncle had worked at the Hōjō Coal Mine in the Chikuhō region before the war.
“My uncle came to Japan on the orders of the Korean village head in his hometown of Daegu, in what is now South Korea. But he said there were quite a few people from the Korean Peninsula who had come of their own free will in search of work.”
The Japanese government enacted the National Requisition Ordinance in July 1939.
People from the Korean Peninsula, whose requisition had been deferred, became subject to it in September 1944, one year before the end of the war.
Until then, recruitment had been voluntary, arranged through private businesses.
Because of the danger involved, wages for coal mining were exceptionally high.
According to Tatsuo Ueda, a former cultural properties specialist for Hōjō Town who was 91 at the time, in 1920, when one bale of rice (60 kilograms) cost 12 yen, coal miners’ average monthly pay was 37 yen and 77 sen.
One bale of rice is the amount an adult man consumes in a year.
By that calculation, they received three years’ worth of rice in a single month.
I revisited my interview notes because South Korea’s Supreme Court had, albeit as expected, taken a foolish step.
The case was a lawsuit brought by four South Koreans against Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal.
None had been requisitioned; all had responded to recruitment and come to mainland Japan of their own free will in pursuit of high earnings.
The court accepted wholesale the four plaintiffs’ arguments that they should be paid compensation for emotional distress, rather than unpaid wages.
This repudiated the 1965 Japan–South Korea Claims Agreement, which explicitly stated that the claims issue had been settled completely and finally.
It could even lead to the seizure of Japanese companies’ assets.
As for Japan’s response, merely bringing the matter before the International Court of Justice—which requires the consent of the other country involved in the dispute—and repeatedly expressing “regret” would be tantamount to doing nothing.
Economic sanctions and entry restrictions, such as reinstating visa requirements, should be considered.
Japan paid South Korea a total of $500 million in grants and loans.
It also relinquished all the infrastructure it had left on the Korean Peninsula, including roads, ports, railways, and hydroelectric power plants.
There is an estimate that the total assets amounted to approximately 17 trillion yen, with the portion in South Korea equivalent to 8 trillion yen in present-day value.
These figures were calculated from documents held by GHQ, the former Imperial Japanese Army, and the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs.
If South Korea is going to scrap the agreement, Japan should present it with a bill for 8 trillion yen.
The Japanese people’s patience is wearing thin.
South Korea, stop taking Japan for granted indefinitely.
Rui Sasaki, Deputy Chair of the Editorial Board