Japan's legacy of forced labor haunts ties with neighbors

TOKYO (AP) — For years, Yeom Chan-soon was haunted by the cracking sound of a leather belt eating into the flesh of a fellow Korean mine worker being punished for trying to escape from forced labor in Japan.

That dark chapter in Japan’s history, when hundreds of thousands of people were brought from the Korean Peninsula and other Asian nations to work in logging, in mines, on farms and in factories as forced labor, lives on as a modern legacy in the companies that came to dominate the Japanese economy after World War II.

Survivors of the camps, their families and supporters are still seeking compensation and atonement for the labor and suffering. The companies, among the biggest names in Japan Inc., such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui, say such issues were settled by a treaty decades ago.

Critics say Japan has failed to fully reckon with those wrongs that date back to the late 1890s and lasted through the colonization of the Korean peninsula, until the end of World War II in 1945. The legacy overshadows Tokyo's relations with its neighbors even today and, some say, helps to perpetuate mistreatment of minorities among its own people.

“Japanese have never seriously faced up to the realities of the devastating abuse Japan brought to neighboring nations and their people,” said Masaru Tonomura, a professor of history at the University of Tokyo.

That failure to face up to history has contributed toward defensive, nationalist-leaning thinking, Tonomura and other experts say.

The number of survivors of forced labor before and during World War II is dwindling 75 years after Japan's August 15, 1945, surrender. But their stories can be found in oral histories compiled by the late Eidai Hayashi, a researcher who spent his career unearthing facts about Japan’s wartime...