Tokyo dismisses payment claims

Japan's top court on Friday rejected compensation claims by Chinese forced to work as laborers or "comfort women" during World War II in separate rulings, saying, "Chinese individuals have no right to demand war reparations" under the 1972 Japan-China joint statement.

The verdicts, however, were strongly opposed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which said the "arbitrary interpretation" of the 1972 document was "illegal and invalid".

In the ruling on a lawsuit on Japan's wartime forced labor, Ryoji Nakagawa, presiding justice at the Supreme Court's second petty bench, said: "Chinese people have lost their rights to judicially claim war compensation from Japan, Japanese people or its companies" under the 1972 Japan-China Joint Statement.

"The Chinese government's announcement of renouncing its demand for war compensation from Japan was a political decision for the sake of friendship between the two peoples," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said in a statement.

"We have urged the Japanese government to seriously deal with the concerns from the Chinese side and properly handle the issue," Liu said.

Chinese lawyer Kang Jian, who has been helping the plaintiffs since 1995, said the government's renouncement of its demand for State compensation didn't mean that individuals had to give up their demands.

He said: "The ruling is absolutely unacceptable, because it dismisses inflictors' legal responsibility in an extremely improper way."

Nakagawa acknowledged in the verdict the "extremely large mental and physical suffering" of the victims of forced labor and called for "concerned people to make efforts to provide relief to the victims".

Source: China Daily