Published on November 28, 2019.
Based on an article from Sankei Shimbun’s “Military World” found on MSN, this piece examines South Korea’s Special Law on the Reversion of Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property and the danger of retroactive legislation.
Through the court case targeting the descendant of Lee Hae-seung, a member of the Yi royal lineage, it argues that applying laws retroactively destroys the rule of law and opens the door to targeted political persecution by those in power.

November 28, 2019
It is said that Mr. Hae-seung came from a distinguished family connected to Cheoljong, the 25th king of the Joseon dynasty, and that after the Japan–Korea annexation of 1910, he received the title of marquis, the highest rank among the Korean nobility.
At the same time, he also received public bonds worth 168,000 won.
The following is an article I found on MSN a little while ago.
[Military World] The “Gate of National Ruin” Opening in South Korea: Retroactive Law Destroys the Nation.
As a result of the Japanese government’s tightening of export controls on semiconductor-related materials to South Korea, which began on the 4th, South Korea’s Deputy Prime Minister for the Economy Hong Nam-ki hinted at retaliation, saying, “If it is not withdrawn, we will certainly take appropriate measures.”
As boycotts of Japanese products spread among the public, Japan–South Korea relations continue to worsen, but in fact, a few days before that, an “anti-Japanese trial of national ruin” was held, one that would destroy not only Japan–South Korea relations but even South Korea’s future.
Toshihiko Okada.
Pro-Japanese means anti-national conduct.
The defendant in the trial was Mr. Lee Woo-young.
He is the chairman of the Grand Hilton Hotel, a long-established first-class hotel in South Korea, but in the background of the lawsuit was the existence of his ancestor, Mr. Lee Hae-seung.
According to South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo and the left-wing newspaper Hankyoreh, both electronic editions, Mr. Hae-seung came from a distinguished family connected to Cheoljong, the 25th king of the Joseon dynasty, and after the Japan–Korea annexation of 1910, he received the title of marquis, the highest rank among the Korean nobility.
At the same time, he also received public bonds worth 168,000 won.
About one century later, the South Korean government sued Mr. Woo-young, the descendant who inherited the property, demanding that he return to the state the property, land and cash, that had been obtained through pro-Japanese conduct.
In South Korea, during the Roh Moo-hyun administration, in 2005, the “Special Law on the Reversion of Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property,” also called the Pro-Japanese Property Reversion Law, was enacted and enforced.
It is a law that regards annexation by Japan as a national shame and confiscates property from those who worked as Japan’s agents and made fortunes.
Along with this, a state organ directly under the president, the “Investigation Commission on Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property,” was established to decide who would be treated as “anti-national actors” subject to the law.
Mr. Woo-young, who in 2007 was branded an anti-national actor and asked to return the property, argued that his ancestor had obtained the land because he was a Korean nobleman, and filed an administrative lawsuit, claiming there was no obligation to return it.
This legal battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, but in 2010 Mr. Woo-young’s victory was finalized.
That was because the law defined a “pro-Japanese anti-national actor” as “a person who received a title for meritorious service in the Korea–Japan annexation,” and in the trial Mr. Woo-young’s claim was accepted.
In other words, it was judged that he had received the title because he had originally been a nobleman, and that he had not done some particular service in the Japan–Korea annexation.
A forbidden move for a state governed by the rule of law.
A movement almost without precedent in the world began from here.
In response to public criticism, the South Korean National Assembly amended the law the following year, in 2011.
It deleted the phrase “a person who received a title for meritorious service in the Korea–Japan annexation” and changed it to “a person who received a title from the Japanese Empire, a derogatory term for the Great Japanese Empire, or inherited such a title.”
It was clearly a legal amendment targeting Mr. Woo-young.
Based on this new law, the government sued Mr. Woo-young in 2015.
Perhaps even the judge thought this was too much, and the government lost in the first instance.
The judgment of the first instance was also upheld in the appellate court.
However, on June 26 of this year, the Supreme Court ordered Mr. Woo-young to return one parcel of land, four square meters, and 350 million won, about 33 million yen, obtained from the sale of another plot of land.
Mr. Woo-young lost.
JoongAng Ilbo and Hankyoreh criticized the judgment as “effectively a defeat for the government,” because only one of the 138 parcels of land whose return was demanded was ordered to be returned.
However, anyone who has even a little knowledge of law should be holding his head in his hands.
“It is impossible,” they would say.
Hidden in this trial is a forbidden move that must never be overlooked.
The point is that acquisition of titles, land, and cash that had been recognized under the law before the Second World War, that is, at the time of the Japan–Korea annexation, is being treated as a crime under a law enacted afterward, and return is being ordered.
The folly of going back in time.
In Japan as well, there are cases in which past mistaken legal judgments are corrected, such as when a person found guilty by a Supreme Court judgment in a criminal case is later acquitted in a retrial.
However, making a law retroactive, as in South Korea, that is, applying the law back to the time before its enforcement, is considered taboo in a state governed by the rule of law.
That is because the retroactive application of law is an act that leads law and society to ruin.
Let me explain with an example.
Suppose that, in line with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, smoking were completely banned in Japan.
Suppose the law were amended so that the penalty was uniformly five years’ imprisonment, and the enforcement, or start of operation, of the law was decided to be January 1, 2020.
In this case, those who smoked on or after January 1 would be found guilty after indictment and trial.
This is the correct application of law, or rather, the application of law in almost every country except South Korea.
However, if the law were made retroactive, as in South Korea, all those who smoked before the enforcement date could also be punished as criminals.
Even if they smoked thirty cigarettes the day before the enforcement date, or even if they smoked only one cigarette thirty years earlier, they would be equally guilty.
As a way of thinking often seen in South Korean society, in such a case, the reasoning would be: (1) smoking is bad, so the law has defined it as a crime; (2) there are people who have done that bad thing many times in the past; (3) unless those who took advantage of the inadequacy of the law and did bad things are punished, justice will not be served.
In this way, public opinion demanding retroactive application is formed.
But hidden here is a negative force sufficient to make a state governed by the rule of law collapse.
Targeted shooting.
If the retroactive application of law is possible, those who possess legislative power, specifically the lawmakers of the ruling party who hold a majority of seats in the National Assembly, the legislature, can send all of their political enemies and people they dislike to prison.
If the target person likes shochu, they only have to enact a shochu prohibition law.
The terror of retroactive law is that it is not enough to say, “A prohibition law has been passed, so I will stop drinking from tomorrow.”
If they want to send a person who holds anti-government demonstrations to prison, they only have to record that person participating in demonstrations on video or in photographs, solidify the evidence of participation in demonstrations, and then create a law banning demonstrations.
Whether it is a “chocolate prohibition law” or a “law banning criticism of the president,” whoever makes any absurd law wins.
Making law retroactive means nothing other than that those in power can send troublesome people to prison by “targeted shooting” at any time.
Naturally, ordinary citizens can no longer live with peace of mind for even a single second.
The principle of legality in criminal law, in technical terms, collapses, and no one knows what kind of act they must do, or not do, in order to avoid going to prison.
It is a path leading to a reign of terror like that of Stalin’s regime in the former Soviet Union or Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia.
Two lawyers.
In this South Korean trial, first, the Pro-Japanese Property Reversion Law made the law retroactive to the time of the Japan–Korea annexation, and then, in order to make Mr. Woo-young, who had still won, lose, the law was “amended.”
Moreover, on the premise of retroactivity.
The law was made retroactive not once but twice, and the state “targeted” an individual.
The distortion of contemporary South Korea lies in the fact that the person who created and enforced such a law was former President Roh Moo-hyun, a former lawyer, and that the current administration is that of President Moon Jae-in, likewise a human-rights lawyer and Roh’s right-hand man.
There is no way that lawyers, who are legal experts, would not know the danger of retroactive law, but the two leftist lawyers likely had, or have, the conviction that they were correcting a mistaken past.
In the background, one can see the intention to regard as correct the fact that Japanese government leaders were judged at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East under “crimes against peace,” which some experts point out was retroactive law, and to punish everything from the past annexation period in the same retroactive-law manner.
The comfort women issue and the wartime labor issue are typical examples.
Mr. Moon tends to go back in time at every turn, such as by highly evaluating the Korean Provisional Government, which collapsed after the Second World War, and its army, the “Korean Liberation Army,” and presenting a historical view as if they had fought a war of independence against Japan.
A mistaken past must be corrected retroactively.
The laws and international common sense of that time may be ignored.
This posture of the South Korean government is precisely what symbolizes the deterioration of modern Japan–South Korea relations.
Breaking the promise between states known as the Japan–Korea Claims Agreement and breaking the comfort women agreement are, for the Moon administration, acts of correcting a mistaken past.
Conversely, for Japan and other foreign countries besides South Korea, there is no meaning in making a new promise with an opponent who breaks the promise called an agreement and then defies criticism.
“Discuss and conclude a new agreement?
You will break that agreement anyway, won’t you?”
“You say you will keep this promise?
That too is a lie, isn’t it?”
It is only natural that the Japanese side should arrive at such an understanding.
How many months or how many years does it take before agreements and promises become “past mistakes” in South Korea?
No one can any longer know the period of validity of an “agreement” with South Korea.