Last month, on October 23, the Nishimatsu Construction Company reached an agreement in the Tokyo Summary Court to set up a trust fund for Chinese who had been forced into labor in Japan during World War II. According to the Asahi Shimbun, the trust fund—worth ¥250 million—will compensate 360 Chinese citizens who were compelled to work at a hydroelectric power plant in Hiroshima Prefecture. Under the terms of the summary settlement, Nishimatsu acknowledged that these Chinese workers were forcibly brought to Japan and apologized for their suffering.This outcome was both overdue and unexpected, particularly since Japan's Supreme Court in 2007 rejected the original lawsuit that five Chinese plaintiffs brought against the construction company in 1998. Nishimatsu officials maintain that they want to set a new precedent for "social responsibility" in the wake of the corporation's recent scandal involving political donations. The timing of Nishimatsu's decision coincides with the rise of the new Hatoyama administration, which has promised to improve Japan's relations with China and other Asian neighbors.
Former forced laborers and their bereaved families have pursued litigation against the Japanese government and the corporations that employed them, not only in Japan but also in the United States. The Hayden Bill, which passed the California State Senate in July 1999, opened the door for Chinese and Korean victims to sue Japanese corporations and demand compensation for their hard labor in inhumane working conditions. Although the U.S. Supreme Court thus far has rejected such cases, the unresolved issue of Asian forced labor redress has now been introduced into the U.S. legal system, indicating that the United States has become involved in Japan’s historical disputes.
In fact, the United States was intimately involved in the issue of Asian forced laborers during the Allied Occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952. U.S. Occupation forces initially attempted to retain Korean coal miners until Japanese repatriates replaced them, but riots in Hokkaido and elsewhere forced authorities to abandon this policy in November 1945. Responding to strong Korean demands, in May 1946 a military government team in Hokkaido gathered over ¥3 million worth of wages, bonuses, and death benefits owed to Korean miners. This amount was but a small fraction of the more than ¥215 million that corporations throughout Japan deposited into an account at the Bank of Japan by 1948. Occupation authorities made several unsuccessful attempts to persuade unwilling Japanese officials to pay back the financial assets owed to Koreans, while U.S. policy gradually changed to oppose reparations demands against Japan. Article 14(b) of the American-drafted San Francisco Peace Treaty signed in September 1951 waived all reparations claims, and the unpaid wage deposits of forced laborers remained a well-kept secret of the Japanese government.
When former forced laborers from South Korea and China began appearing in Japanese courts in the 1990s, their lawsuits helped to clarify the historical record of wartime abuse and postwar cover-up. Lawyers, journalists, and researchers supporting the redress movement dug up hidden official documents, such as the voluminous reports by the Foreign Ministry on Chinese forced labor and by the Welfare Ministry on the unpaid financial deposits of Korean laborers, both compiled in 1946. Although the Japanese government refuses to make such ministry reports public, the Tokyo High Court in 2005 confirmed that the state continues to hold the ¥215 million deposits, which have never been disbursed. While Japanese records remain largely closed, declassified American records can help to answer important questions, including how closely the United States was involved in the process of postwar Japan’s forgetting and neglecting Asian victims of forced labor.
An Asahi Shimbun editorial on October 24, 2009 admonished the Japanese state to take action in the wake of Nishimatsu settlement, since other corporations facing litigation have vowed not to pay reparations unless the government becomes involved. The new Hatoyama administration should first make an unambiguous apology, the editorial contends, then propose a new framework whereby the government and corporations can establish a joint trust fund to compensate former forced laborers and bereaved families. The United States can support this reconciliation process by revisiting the unresolved issue of forced labor—which also included Allied POWs—and reinterpreting the San Francisco Peace Treaty to enable these victims to file legal claims in American and international courts. Proactive U.S. involvement at the government level should also be matched by an enhanced effort toward nongovernmental cooperation between researchers in the United States and Northeast Asia. Shorenstein APARC has been contributing to this effort through its Divided Memories and Reconciliation research project, now in its third year. The Center will also host a colloquium series titled “The American Role in Northeast Asian Reconciliation” during the 2010 winter quarter.
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Shorenstein APARC Dispatches are regular bulletins designed exclusively for our friends and supporters. Written by center faculty and scholars, Shorenstein APARC Dispatches deliver timely, succinct analysis on current events and trends in Asia, often discussing their potential implications for business.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
At the core of US-Taiwan-China relations, mistrust has long been, and remains today, the most difficult and elusive problem policy makers face. The danger is obvious given that the Taiwan Strait is the only place where the US could go to war with a nuclear armed great power. In her talk, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker will examine the nature of US commitments, the intricacies of decision-making, the intentions of critical actors and the impact of Taiwan’s democratization.
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker is Professor of History at Georgetown University and the
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service . She also holds an appointment as a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is the author of Strait Talk: US-Taiwan Relations and the China Crisis (Harvard, 2009), Uncertain Friendships: Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States (Columbia, 2006), Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949-50 (Columbia, 1983), and more than a dozen of book chapters, edited volumes and journal articles.
Philippines Conference Room
Evgeny Morozov is a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His presentation sought to challenge a number of assumptions that are often made about the relationship between the web, nation states and democracy.
Assumption: It is much harder to censor online content than traditional media; effective censorship is impossible
Subverting content online results in less evidence and can be done with less visibility than the subversion of traditional media like newspapers. The same tools that in the West allow filtering content for child pornography can also be used effectively to filter political content in China and Russia. Some states are finding other creative ways of censoring content online; for example Saudi Arabia recently enlisted the help of 200 ‘flaggers' to create a version of You Tube that does not include content deemed to be offensive to the cultural and moral standards of the country.
Assumption: The growth of the internet will inevitably result in the decline of the nation state
In fact, most states, including authoritarian ones, are investing in techniques to use online tools to increase their own legitimacy and spread their favored ideology. A number of recent examples were cited to highlight this:
The internet also gives these regimes new powers to detect potential dissent earlier by monitoring blogs and forums. Using social networking sites, regimes can also glean how individuals are connected to one another and so uncover whole activist networks.
Enough connectivity combined with the availability of the right devices = democracy.
Web enthusiasts are prone to over-simplify matters, assuming that sufficient provision of internet technology in countries like Iran and China will automatically result in overthrowing of dictators and the ushering in of democracy. This ignores the fact that access to information is not the same thing as activism; that protests can now be organized more easily does not mean they will be. There remains a huge role for traditional civil society organizations in moving such countries towards democracy. Evgeny warns that we need to be wary of projecting our own obsessions onto this debate - citing the way many jumped on the use of Twitter in Iran recently. In reality it is difficult to link the use of Twitter with the planning of protests.
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External Influences on Governance of Environmental NGOs in China.
Anticipating Opportunities: Using Intelligence to Shape the Future
"We spend $45 billion annually to reduce uncertainty, to help us combat threats to our nation, our people, and our security," said Payne Distinguished Lecturer Thomas Fingar in his third Payne lecture on October 21, devoted to anticipating the future -- "not for purposes of prediction but for purposes of shaping it." Noting that strategic intelligence treats the future neither as "inevitable or immutable," Fingar employed real-life examples from his career in national intelligence (most recently as deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council) to explore concrete ways intelligence can be used to move developments in a more favorable direction.
Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World examined the trends which will "drive, shape and constrain" individuals, governments, and nations around the world. Among prominent trends, he cited globalization, which will provide unprecedented prosperity but greater inequality; the rise of the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China; the rise of new powers such as Indonesia, Turkey, and Iran; and the coming demographic boom, which will add 1.2 billion people to the world, with less than 3 percent of that occurring in the West.
The Geopolitical Implications of Climate Change. Instructed by the Congress to provide an assessment of the impact of global climate change, given controversy about the imminence of the threat and man's role in it, the NIC studied which regions and countries would be most dramatically affected by climate change, with a focus on water, food production, and changes in weather patterns. The results remain classified, because of the potential impact on vulnerable countries.
The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. This estimate, attacked from both the right and the left, concluded with a moderate to high degree of confidence that Iran had not obtained sufficient fissile material from external sources (to make a bomb) and that its fastest route to produce a nuclear weapon would be through domestic production of enriched uranium. The NIE also judged that Iran had halted the weaponization portions of its nuclear program in 2003, but had retained the option to pursue a weapon and whether to do so was a "political decision" which could be made at any time.
