Award-winning Japanese Lawyer Urges Tokyo to Admit Wrongdoings

By Park Ji-won

A series of historic rulings ordering Japanese firms to compensate Korean forced laborers during Japanese colonial rule have been made from the end of last year , a 60-year-old Japanese human rights lawyer and head of the group of Korean and Japanese lawyers who worked together to represent the victims since 1994, contributed to winning those cases.

Honoring the dedication of Adachi and his colleagues, a South Korean reporters' club in the law field gave the Korea-Japan lawyer alliance this year's prize for best people in law in January.

The club thought highly of the defense counsel's years of contributions to human rights issues such as wartime sex slavery, forced laborers, victims of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ethnic Koreans' education subsidies in Japan.

Adachi remained humble about his achievements but strongly urged Japanese society to admit the illegality of its colonial rule of Korea to overcome conflicts between Korea and Japan.

'The lawyer alliance between Japan and Korea was able to be formed. And it took 19 years to win the case of the forced labor issue in Korea I am extremely happy about it, and winning the prize.

But Japanese society continues to criticize and bash the situation, with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as their leader,' Adachi told The Korea Times in an email interview conducted after the award.

'This is based on the problem with the vague description of Japan's illegal colonization of Korea in the 1965 treaty.

Unless Japanese society recognizes the illegality of the occupation, I think the gap between the two countries will not be narrowed.'

Takagi Kenichi, Adachi's longtime colleague who has worked since 1973 for victims of the 1910-45 colonial rule such as Koreans in Sakhalin, gave an acceptance speech in Seoul.

Kenichi echoed Adachi's view. He criticized the Japanese leader and foreign minister for criticizing the South Korean court ruling on the forced labor issue, saying individuals outside of Japan should also have the right to claim compensation, which the Japanese government admitted to earlier, as there is no law preventing them from making claims from other countries.

To win the suit in Seoul took 13 years. His team partially won the case in the appellate court in 2005 and the Supreme Court in 2007 in Japan for 40 South Korean forced laborers who returned to Korea after liberation who had been victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing while working for...