Two Japanese support groups gathered Saturday afternoon in Tokyo, urging the Japanese Supreme Court to deliver just rulings over a lawsuit related with wartime Chinese laborers.

At the start of the gathering of around 50 memebers of the two groups, they mourned for Takashi Niimi, a Japanese lawyer who fought for the rights of Chinese forced laborers in the "Hanaoka incident" and died in December, and vowed to continue their efforts to obtain justice.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to launch debates on March 16 over a lawsuit of a group of Chinese laborers against Nishimatsu Construction Co. and made final ruling afterwards, said Hiroshi Tanaka, a support group leader.

In 1944, some 360 Chinese were forced by Japan's Nishimatsu Construction Co. to work under severe conditions in a working site in Hiroshima prefecture. Among them, 29 laborers died either due to torture or on the ship back to China when Japan was defeated in 1945.

Five former laborers or bereaved families of the laborers filed a lawsuit against the company in 1998, demanding apology and damages of 5.5 million yen (46,760 U.S. dollars) for each plantiff.

In July 2004, the High Court of west Japan's Hiroshima Prefecture on Friday awarded damages in full to the five plantiffs, marking the first time a Japan high court has ordered the defendant in a series of lawsuits involving forced laborers to pay damages to the plaintiffs.

However, Nishimatsu Co. did not accept the ruling and appealed the Supreme Court for final rulings.

At the gathering, Tanaka urged the Supreme Court to made just rulings and said that the final rulings would be significant for further lawsuits related with former Chinese laborers.

Syuichi Adachi, a Japanese lawyer fighting for the rights of former Chinese laborers, said that once the final rulings are made, they would probably not be changed within 10 years.

Source: Xinhua