Angry Kin Shine Light on Japan’s Shadow Soldiers

Lee Young-chan was 7 when his father left their home in a tarp-covered truck heading off to war. It was the end of 1943.

Lee was too young to grasp how his father’s fate was tied to World War II and Japan’s 35-year colonization of Korea. All he knew was that his father, then 29 and the owner of a bus company, was being drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army.

“I remember my grandmother and mother crying and calling out my father’s name as they watched him leave,” he said. He never saw his father again.

Though more than half a century has passed since Japan’s surrender, Lee is still seeking closure--in Japan’s courts.

Several years ago, Lee learned a memorial tablet bearing his father’s name was among those interred at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where the souls of 2.5 million soldiers who died for Japan--including convicted war criminals--are revered.

To many Asians the shrine is a symbol of Japan’s war-era militarist machine, and a visit there by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in August generated widespread anger throughout the region.

“My father didn’t fight in the war voluntarily,” Lee said from his home in Washington, Pa. “It may be natural for Japanese to be deified at Yasukuni. But I don’t want that, and I’m sure my father wouldn’t, either.”

During the war, Japan conscripted millions of people from Japanese-held Asian countries for forced labor and military service. Hundreds of thousands of women were used as sex slaves for Japanese troops.

Tokyo’s official position is that the past is the past--reparations have been made, apologies offered. But Japan’s postwar treatment of former colonial subjects has left lingering wounds.

Historians estimate that more than 350,000 Korean soldiers and office staff served in the war as Japanese nationals, a status they held because Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. By the end of the war, around 150,000 Koreans had been killed or were missing in action.

Those who survived lost their eligibility for pensions when Korea won independence upon Japan’s surrender. Some victims and veterans received small, one-time payments from private foundations set up by Japan, but many have never been compensated.

Japanese war veterans, meanwhile, received pensions, while families of veterans who lost their lives in the war got even bigger sums.

Lee said the wages his father earned for his military service totaled less than $13. And the Japanese government didn’t even notify his family about the pay or send it, he said.

“The Japanese government says that he was a Japanese national who died fighting for the country,” Lee said. “By that reasoning, shouldn’t he be given the same treatment as Japanese vets?”

In June, Lee joined more than 250 South Koreans, including former Imperial Army soldiers, in filing a lawsuit demanding that Japan apologize and pay compensation and unpaid wages totaling $20.8 million. The suit also wants the memorial tablets of their kin removed from the Yasukuni shrine.

It is one of dozens of war-related cases still being waged in Japan’s courts. Precedent isn’t encouraging.

Earlier this year, Japan’s highest court rejected a demand by two South Koreans for disability pensions for injuries they suffered while fighting for the Japanese army. The court ruled they had no right to the payment because war pensions were limited to Japanese.

Koreans and Taiwanese who fought or served as sex slaves for the Japanese military also have had suits dismissed or rejected.

The demand for the memorial tablets’ removal from Yasukuni is a new issue before the courts, however.

The government has no statistics on how many tablets interred at Yasukuni are for non-Japanese, and shrine officials refuse to release such figures. Tetsuya Takashi, a professor at Tokyo University, said a Parliament Library survey indicated more than 20,600 Koreans and 27,600 Taiwanese are worshiped there under the Japanese names forced on them.

The Justice Ministry declined to comment on the lawsuit. A Yasukuni spokesman also declined, saying the government, not the shrine, is on trial.

Emotions remain high.

Lee Hee-ja, the daughter of a Korean who was drafted into the Japanese military in 1944, presented a list of grievances to Yasukuni officials just after Koizumi’s visit. She had to enter and leave through a side gate to avoid a clash with Japanese ultranationalists shouting insults.

“To the nationalists I say, ‘Give me back my father!’ ” she said through a translator after the meeting. “It’s unbearable to have my father’s spirit there.”