Nishimatsu settles with Chinese forced laborers

Nishimatsu Construction Co. agreed Friday with five Chinese to set up a ¥250 million trust fund to compensate not only them but 360 others who had been forced to perform hard labor during World War II, resolving their dispute at the Tokyo Summary Court.

Victorious: Chinese plaintiffs and their supporters celebrate Friday at a news conference in Tokyo after settling their lawsuit with Nishimatsu Construction Co. over wartime slave labor. KYODO PHOTO

The five — two former slave laborers and three relatives of laborers no longer living — lost a court battle in 2007 seeking ¥5.5 million in damages each. But the contractor, recently at the center of a political funds scandal, made the compensation offer voluntarily to end the dispute.

Subject to the fund's coverage are Chinese who were taken in 1944 and forced to work at a hydroelectric plant in Akiota, Hiroshima Prefecture, and who were returned to China at the end of the war in 1945.

Nishimatsu is also expected to issue an apology to them.

The plaintiffs, who sued Nishimatsu in 1998, lost at the Hiroshima District Court in 2002 but won a reversal from the Hiroshima High Court in 2004. The Supreme Court dismissed their claims in 2007 but called for an effort to compensate the victims. The top court determined for the first time that the right of individual Chinese to seek war reparations from Japan was abandoned under the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, which allowed the two countries to establish diplomatic ties.

Among a spate of lawsuits filed in Japan since the 1990s by Japan's war victims, another contractor, Kajima Corp., set up a fund to compensate forced laborers near the site of the former Hanaoka copper mine in Akita Prefecture.

In the political funds scandal, Nishimatsu has sued former President Mikio Kunisawa and ex-Vice President Keiji Fujimaki, who have both been convicted, for causing losses through illegal donations using dummy entities with backdoor money illicitly brought from overseas.

The illicit funds led to the arrest earlier this year of Democratic Party of Japan Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa's key aide and prompted Ozawa to step down as DPJ president.