Top court: No war redress for Chinese

In a precedent-setting first pronouncement, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that postwar agreements effectively deny Chinese individuals the right to demand reparations from Japan for the severe suffering they endured during the war.

A supporter for Chinese who were forced to engage in slave labor in Japan during the war holds up a sign Friday reading "unjust ruling" outside the Supreme Court, which decided that individual Chinese have no right to demand war reparations from Japan. KYODO PHOTO

The decision apparently dooms a raft of ongoing wartime damages suits, filed mainly by Chinese and South Koreans, that will view the ruling as a precedent.

In ruling on a lawsuit on Japan's wartime forced labor, Ryoji Nakagawa, presiding justice at the top court's second petty bench, said, "Chinese people have lost their rights to judicially claim war compensation from Japan, Japanese people or its companies" under the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique.

In the communique that normalized Tokyo-Beijing ties, China declared it "renounces its demand for war reparations from Japan." The declaration, however, did not specifically refer to individual rights to claim.

The top court ruled the communique was "substantially a peace treaty and is a framework like the San Francisco Peace Treaty" signed between Japan and the Allied powers in 1951 that waived all Allied reparation claims -- including the right of individuals to seek compensation.

But Nakagawa acknowledged the "extremely large mental and physical suffering" of the victims of the forced labor. The justice also said the court's decision does not rule out a "voluntary response to individual claims" and called for "concerned people to make efforts to provide relief to the victims."

Later Friday, the Supreme Court also cited the same 1972 communique in rejecting the right of two Chinese women to claim compensation from Japan for being forced into sexual slavery during the war.

A relative of a deceased Chinese forced laborer tries to hold back tears at a news conference in Tokyo after the Supreme Court's unfavorable ruling Friday. KYODO PHOTO

The top court upheld a Tokyo High Court ruling against the reparations claim. But it rejected the high court ruling that the women's individual claim rights lapsed under a 1952 peace treaty between Japan and the Nationalist government -- which Japan regarded as the legitimate Chinese government even after it fled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949.

The top court supported the argument of the former "comfort women" that the 1952 treaty between Tokyo and Taiwan does not apply to those from the mainland because the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China was ruling most of China when the treaty was signed.

Chiharu Saiguchi, presiding justice at the first petty bench who handed down the ruling on the sex slavery case, acknowledged that Japanese soldiers captured the plaintiffs and repeatedly raped them.

Saiguchi ruled that the two women were abducted by Japanese soldiers from Shanxi Province in 1942, when they were 13 and 15 years old, and soldiers repeatedly raped them for several months. The plaintiffs, one of whom died in 1999 and her suit was taken over by relatives, had sought a combined 46 million yen in redress from Japan.

The top court judgments come at a time when discussions over wartime redress are taking place not only between Japan and other parts of Asia, including China, but also in the United States, where Congress is debating a resolution seeking an apology from Japan for coercing foreign women into wartime sexual servitude for the Japanese military.

The top court took on the two lawsuits after two high courts delivered different judgments.

In the lawsuit on forced labor, the top court's denial of individual compensation rights led to the scrapping of a July 2004 Hiroshima High Court ruling ordering Nishimatsu Construction Co. to pay 27.5 million yen to the plaintiffs, as they demanded.

The plaintiffs, comprising two former laborers and relatives of three deceased workers, said they were forced to work under harsh conditions at a hydroelectric plant building site in Hiroshima Prefecture during World War II.

The high court ruled that the statute of limitations cannot be applied in the Nishimatsu case since to do so would not be in the interests of justice, thus scrapping an earlier district court ruling.

Nishimatsu appealed the high court judgment, leading the top court to rule on whether China abandoned individual rights under agreements such as the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, in which Beijing declared that "it renounces its war reparation from Japan."

Nishimatsu argued that China gave up individual rights to seek war compensation under the communique.

The plaintiffs said the communique makes no reference to individual rights.

The former forced laborers called Friday's ruling irresponsible.

"It is just that the top court wants to escape from its responsibility," Shao Yicheng, 81, one of the five plaintiffs, told a news conference.

Lu Zhigang, 59, another plaintiff whose father was a forced laborer, said, "My heart is full of anger." Referring to another plaintiff, 78-year-old Song Jiyao, who became blind in an accident while being forced to work under severe conditions, Lu said: "How can the top court hand down such a ruling facing Mr. Song? This was supposed to be a trial that we can win, because we had personal and material evidence."

Shuichi Adachi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said, "The court must have thought that it has to do something for the plaintiffs' suffering (but left it up to the targeted parties to take proper action). The court gave up its judicial role."

Victims of Japan's wartime aggression, including former forced laborers and sex slaves, have so far filed around 60 lawsuits with Japanese courts, seeking compensation and apologies from the government and companies involved in slave labor.

Illegal acts of the former Imperial Japanese Army have been acknowledged in most of the cases, and plaintiffs, mainly from China and South Korea, have won six suits at the district court level and two at the high court level, including the Nishimatsu case.

But many of the lawsuits have been dismissed due to such reasons as the expiration of the 20-year period for the plaintiffs to demand compensation. In some cases, the plaintiffs and companies reached settlements.