This essay examines the South Korean Supreme Court ruling on claims by former workers from the Korean Peninsula, the legal meaning of the 1965 Japan-Korea Claims Agreement, the radicalization of politics and the judiciary under the Moon Jae-in administration, and the role of Japanese intellectuals and supporters who have helped sustain South Korea’s arguments. It argues that the same structure seen in the comfort women issue is visible here as well, and calls for a fair examination of the flow of research funding and political support.

2019-04-11
The same structure seen in the comfort women issue can also be discerned in this case.
There are also cases in which large-scale support has been poured into them from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the name of research funding.
A fair examination of such facts is also necessary.

This is a chapter I published on 2018-11-06 under the title: There Are Also Cases in Which Large-Scale Support Has Been Poured into Them from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the Name of Research Funding.
The following is from an essay by Yoshiko Sakurai that appeared on the front page of yesterday’s Sankei Shimbun.

On October 30, the Supreme Court of South Korea ordered Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, formerly Nippon Steel, to pay 400 million won, about 40 million yen, in damages to four former wartime labor plaintiffs.
Article 2 of the 1965 Japan-Korea Claims and Economic Cooperation Agreement confirms that the issue of claims between the two countries and “their nationals, including legal persons,” was “settled completely and finally.”
It states that all claims issues, whether those of individuals or corporations, including compensation, had already been resolved.
At the time, the Japanese government, taking every possible precaution, also exchanged minutes between Japan and South Korea.
Within them are eight explanatory items concerning claims.
They include unpaid wages and compensation for wartime laborers, making it doubly and triply clear that the matter was settled.
It was therefore natural that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, without a moment’s delay after the ruling, stated that it was “a judgment that cannot exist in light of international law.”
The Prime Minister also did not use the expression “wartime laborers” for the four men, but referred to them as “workers from the former Korean Peninsula.”
This was an important point, sharply exposing the dubiousness of the Moon Jae-in administration, which turns black into white by verbal manipulation.

The many abnormal developments advancing under the Moon administration are unimaginable in a normal state governed by the rule of law.
This series of events shows that South Korea is in the very midst of a socialist revolution.
Revolutionary forces destroy all the order that came before them.
They tear up treaties, contracts, and common sense as if they were scraps of paper.
That is exactly what the Moon administration is doing.
They seek to impose unjust rulings on Japan and extort enormous sums of money, but they are also forcing upon the great majority of South Koreans a revolution they do not desire, dragging all of South Korea into a pro-North Korean socialist revolution led by radical forces.
This issue of the “former workers from the Korean Peninsula” should be understood within such a larger picture, and no compromise whatsoever is necessary with the revolution-minded Moon administration.
If a socialist revolution is completed on the Korean Peninsula, Japan’s security and diplomacy will face extraordinary difficulties, and Japan must take measures to strengthen its independent capabilities as quickly as possible.
At least 273 companies that may be sued from South Korea should deepen their basic understanding of the Moon administration and prepare for the policies that, in the near future, the Moon government as a revolutionary force may put forward.

Moon’s campaign pledge of “clearing out accumulated evils” should be understood as “sweeping away the pro-Japan mainstream,” and he should be regarded as aiming to build a state centered on Kim Il-sung thought.
Moon, who served as Chief Presidential Secretary in the Roh Moo-hyun administration, which followed North Korea through and through, says that the person he respects is Shin Young-bok.
Shin was a secret member of the Unified Revolutionary Party, an underground revolutionary organization in South Korea created under Kim Il-sung’s orders.
Even during his visit to Europe in October, Moon called for the lifting of economic sanctions on North Korea and earned the derisive laughter of French President Macron.
Even so, Moon continues to plunge into North Korea at a speed outside all normal bounds.
On November 1, he prohibited military aircraft flights in airspace up to 80 kilometers wide on both sides of the 38th parallel, effectively disarming South Korea’s skies.
Many North Korean missiles are deployed along the 38th parallel, and only when South Korean Air Force patrol aircraft detect signs of missile launches or military movements can the defense of Seoul be possible.
Yet he halted all the patrol flights necessary for that.
Because North Korea has no air defense capability, this measure only benefits North Korea.
The Moon administration is pressing forward with a revolutionary betrayal of the South Korean people, as if handing the Republic of Korea over to North Korea.
This Supreme Court ruling, too, is the result of a judicial revolution planned and successfully carried out by the Moon administration.

That the four plaintiffs were not conscripted laborers was established from the South Korean Supreme Court judgment itself by Tsutomu Nishioka, a researcher at the Japan Institute for National Fundamentals and a specialist on Korean affairs.
But the South Korean Supreme Court does not care about such things at all.
The current Chief Justice is the left-wing legal figure Kim Myeong-su, who was dramatically elevated by Moon in September of last year.
Kim had done no more than serve as chief judge of the Chuncheon District Court, the smallest local court in South Korea.
During this one year, he successively replaced Supreme Court justices whose six-year terms had ended with fellow left-wing personnel like himself.
The highest organ of South Korea’s judiciary has been hijacked by revolutionary forces, and the Moon administration has become a regime whose values are completely different from ours, like that of the Chinese Communist Party.
That is precisely why, as Prime Minister Abe and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga emphasized, the first priority is to remain resolute and yield nothing.
The Japanese government must fully support all related Japanese companies, not allow a single one of them to pay even a penny, and not permit any company to break ranks.

At a time when a severe policy toward the Moon administration is necessary, what must also be pointed out is the existence of Japanese people who support these South Korean moves.
In 2010, the one-hundredth year since the Japan-Korea Annexation, Japanese and South Korean intellectuals announced in Tokyo and Seoul a “Japan-Korea Intellectuals’ Joint Statement on 100 Years Since the ‘Annexation of Korea,’” and more than one thousand people signed on both sides.
Along with Haruki Wada, professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, there were many others, including a former deputy editorial writer of the Asahi Shimbun.
They were also people who had been researching the theory that the annexation of Korea was invalid.
In May 2012, the South Korean Supreme Court ruled that “individual claims have not disappeared,” and the logical framework provided by the aforementioned Japanese intellectuals supports the South Korean Supreme Court’s claims.
Japanese people approach the South Korean side and induce them to file lawsuits, and in some cases they even provide materials and funds to support anti-Japan movements.
The same structure seen in the comfort women issue can also be discerned in this case.
There are also cases in which large-scale support has been poured into them from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the name of research funding.
A fair examination of such facts is also necessary.
On that basis, we must, with regard to the comfort women and wartime labor issues, set forth the correct historical facts….
To be continued.

At this moment, among those one thousand people above all, I despise Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami from the bottom of my heart, to the same depth as the beauty of Japan’s seas and the height of its mountains.
For they, literally, are traitors to the nation and enemies of the state.