Originally published on April 30, 2019, this chapter reintroduces and revalues Choi Seok-young’s December 20, 2018 essay, “The ‘Wartime Labor’ Legal Team and the Japanese Communist Party,” presenting it as an essential piece that all Japanese citizens, and people around the world, should reread.
By sharply contrasting the genuine scholarship found in opinion magazines such as Hanada, WiLL, Seiron, and Voice with the fabricated reporting, masochistic historical narratives, and anti-Japan commentary long promoted by The Asahi Shimbun and NHK, it highlights the human and ideological networks linking the wartime labor litigation to the law firm Hemaru, the Korean Council, VAWW-NET Japan, and the Japanese Communist Party.
Above all, it argues that the true core lies not merely in the lawsuit itself, but in the long-standing structure of cooperation between the lawyers who effectively drove it and Japan’s domestic left, and insists that anyone seeking the truth must return to real journalism.

2019-04-30
In exact contrast to being forced to read, to the point of disgust, the essays of pseudo-moralists such as Kenzaburo Oe.
One is able to read real journalism and real papers by real scholars that reveal the truth of things.

This is the chapter I published on 2018-12-20 under the title, The essay by nonfiction writer Choi Seok-young, entitled “The ‘Wartime Labor’ Legal Team and the Japanese Communist Party,” is surely one that all Japanese citizens must read.
This chapter too is one that all Japanese citizens and people throughout the world must reread.

As I have mentioned many times, the monthly magazines Hanada and WiLL released today are essential reading for all Japanese citizens.
Even if one regularly subscribes to these two magazines together with Seiron and Voice, the total still comes to far less than the monthly subscription fee of The Asahi Shimbun.

In exact contrast to the genuine essays filling the magazines mentioned at the beginning.
And to the countless reports that have debased Japan, not only at a kindergarten-like level, as even Asahi’s own hired scholars have criticized, but also through a masochistic view of history and coverage that makes one mistake them for agents of China and the Korean Peninsula.
The case in which Katsuichi Honda’s reporting on the Nanjing Massacre.
A thing of which he himself admitted that he visited places arranged by the Chinese government and wrote exactly what had been handed to him in materials by that same Chinese government.
Was reported to the world as fact.
The comfort women reporting of Takashi Uemura and others, and the fabricated coral reef report, with Uemura having married the daughter of a woman who was among South Korea’s strongest North Korea sympathizers.
Very likely something that arose during Asahi Shimbun’s customary in-house study abroad at Yonsei University.
The utterly unbelievable fake news, such as reporter Masakazu Honda’s fabricated reporting when NHK gleefully broadcast the so-called “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal,” perhaps the greatest laughingstock in history, hosted by Yayori Matsui, Takashi Uemura’s mother-in-law, North Korean spies, and Alexis Dudden.
In exact contrast to being forced to read to the point of disgust the essays of pseudo-moralists such as Kenzaburo Oe.
One is able to read what reveals the truth of things.
That is to say, real journalism and real papers by real scholars.

Everything in today’s issue of Hanada is essential reading.
But in particular, the essay by nonfiction writer Choi Seok-young entitled “The ‘Wartime Labor’ Legal Team and the Japanese Communist Party” is surely one that all Japanese citizens must read.

The forces that “led” the lawsuit.

In 2001, the “International Conference for Reconsidering the Annexation of Korea,” attended by specialists from Japan, Korea, Europe, and the United States, was held three times, in Hawaii, Tokyo, and Boston.
At the third conference, notable scholars participated, including Professor Lee Tae-jin of Seoul National University, Professor Lee Geun-gwan of Seoul Human University from South Korea, Professor Kang Seong-eun of Korea University as a representative of Zainichi Koreans, Professor Sasakawa Norikatsu of International Christian University and Professor Umino Fukuju of Meiji University from Japan, and from Europe and the United States Professor John W. Dower of MIT and Professor James Crawford of Cambridge.
North Korean scholars also participated in the first conference in Hawaii, but due to the effects of the September 11 attacks they did not participate in the third conference in Boston.
This conference was actively promoted by South Korea in order to produce, internationally, the conclusion that “the annexation of Korea was unlawful and illegal,” and to advertise that conclusion to the world.
Its aim was to make this an opportunity to gain international recognition for the illegality of the annexation, but that calculation failed.
Not only Japan, but also specialists from Europe and the United States did not agree with South Korea’s claim that the annexation of Korea was illegal and that the annexation treaty was invalid.
Before the conference, the South Korean media had held high expectations and devoted large amounts of space to it, but faced with the unexpected result, they ultimately introduced only brief articles in a toned-down manner.
Contrary to its original purpose, this conference ended up demonstrating the great gap in perception between South Korea and the outside world.

Yet South Korea firmly maintained this “illegality theory,” applied it to the present Nippon Steel lawsuit, and engraved it into the judgment.
“Illegal colonial rule.”
That is the premise of this trial.
The fact that a claim which failed to gain consent from abroad was made the premise of the ruling can be seen less as an independent South Korean judgment than as an attitude of going its own way without caring about foreign opinion.
From the outset, there was no intention whatsoever of entrusting the matter to the International Court of Justice or listening to the views of the international community.

The plaintiffs’ backgrounds as people who had worked at Nippon Steel, interpretations of the ruling, the position of the South Korean government, and South Korean public opinion have already drawn attention in Japan and have been covered in various ways.
Accordingly, in this article I would like to turn my eyes to another core part of this series of events.
Namely, the law firm representing the plaintiffs that has in effect “led” the lawsuit, the organizations to which they belong, and the pipelines extending from there.

The law firm “Hemaru.”

The party that has persistently carried on the litigation on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Nippon Steel lawsuit is the Seoul-based law firm “Hemaru.”
Hemaru is a mid-sized law firm established in 1992 mainly by liberal lawyers such as Cheon Jeong-bae.
Chon Jong-bae.
And Lim Jong-in.
Im Jong-in.
It currently has a little over twenty lawyers, but among them are several people with noteworthy backgrounds.

Probably the most famous person among the lawyers from Hemaru is former President Roh Moo-hyun.
Before becoming president, Roh, who had been active in the Busan area together with Moon Jae-in and others as a “human rights lawyer,” ran in the 1992 National Assembly election but lost.
From 1993 to 1998, during his period in political limbo, he worked as a lawyer at Hemaru.

He came to be connected with Hemaru after suffering the bitter taste of electoral defeat and falling into discouragement, when fellow lawyer and supporter Cheon Jeong-bae encouraged him to join the firm.
Cheon Jeong-bae was later selected as Minister of Justice under the Roh Moo-hyun administration.

Hemaru is a law firm that has the image of being strong in “international litigation,” handling compensation suits against Japanese companies and the like, but when one observes this group anew, pipelines with Japan that had not previously been visible begin to appear.

The first person to note is Jang Wan-ik, who as Hemaru’s representative lawyer effectively led the wartime labor lawsuits.
He joined Hemaru in 1993, and from around 1994 came to be known as the lawyer handling work for the Korean Council, a civic group in South Korea supporting comfort women.
In 2000, he was involved in the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries case, and in 2005 in wartime labor lawsuits involving Nippon Steel and Nachi-Fujikoshi, along with other Japan-related litigation.

However, the occasion on which his name became known in Japan was probably the “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal,” held in Tokyo in 2000 and hosted by the Japan Network on “Violence Against Women in War.”
VAWW-NET Japan.
At this tribunal, he served in the role of prosecutor for the South Korean side.

This tribunal was a kind of mock court, that is, a “courtroom event,” in which civic groups, human rights lawyers, and scholars from South Korea, North Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere formed a prosecution team and rendered a verdict on whether Japan had been guilty or not guilty in the Pacific War.

The representative lawyer and Kanto-rengo.

If one says it was natural, it was natural that he took part in this mock tribunal.
That is because the event was hosted by Yayori Matsui, formerly of The Asahi Shimbun, and by Yoon Chung-ok of South Korea, who had been the former head of the Korean Council.
It was rather “natural” that a lawyer for the Korean Council would participate in an event hosted by the head of the Korean Council.

In that tribunal, the solidarity forces from various countries found the Emperor and the State of Japan guilty of “crimes against humanity in relation to rape and the system of sexual slavery.”
Legally, it was a “mock trial” with no effect whatever, but at the very least it was a trial that succeeded in strongly imprinting upon South Korea the image that “Japan equals war criminal.”

Jang Wan-ik participated as a prosecutor in this sort of leftist “festival,” but now, in order to devote himself to activities as head of the “Special Committee for the Investigation of Social Disasters,” to which he was appointed by the Moon Jae-in administration, he has left the practical work of the Nippon Steel lawsuit, which he had previously led, to junior lawyers at Hemaru and has stepped away from the front stage of the litigation.

However, the fact that Hemaru’s representative lawyer had already been connected to the Japanese domestic left for about twenty years is an important point when interpreting the present lawsuit.

To be continued.