A Japanese steel giant sued by South Korean wartime slave workers is ready to pay compensation if it loses a long-running legal battle abroad, Japanese media reported yesterday.
Last month, the Seoul High Court ordered Nippon Steel to pay a total of 400 million won (US$360,000) to four victims as compensation for unpaid salaries and mental suffering before and during World War II.
Nippon Steel, now renamed Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal following last year’s merger with Sumitomo, has appealed against the ruling to South Korea’s top court.
However, the world’s second-largest steelmaker behind India’s ArcelorMittal has said it is ready to pay the damages if the South Korean Supreme Court upholds the previous ruling, the Sankei Shimbun reported.
“It is difficult to ignore a final decision as it can affect our business partners there,” an unnamed senior official of the Japanese company said, according to the daily.
Kyodo News also reported one of the sources as saying that if the court upholds the ruling, “We, as a global company, can’t help but accept it.”
An immediate confirmation of the reports was not available.
Last month’s decision marked the latest chapter in a 16-year legal battle launched by the four South Koreans, now aged in their 80s and 90s, who were drafted to work for the predecessor of the Japanese firm before the war.
Yeon Un-taek and three other forced laborers filed their first compensation suit in Japan in 1997, but it was dismissed by the country’s top court.
They launched a separate action in South Korea in 2005.
Japan’s brutal colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945 saw about 780,000 conscripted into forced labor, excluding women who were forced to work in wartime brothels, according to South Korean official data.
The two issues have remained major points of contention between the neighbors, who are now key trading partners.
The company has said the decision ignores a 1965 treaty that saw Seoul and Tokyo restore diplomatic relations. It included a reparations package of about US$800 million in grants and cheap loans.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion