Memory Activism's Legacy for Business and Human Rights in Northeast Asia

In a series of decisions issued between 1999 and 2009, Japanese and Korean courts alike ruled for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in denying restitution for the forced labor of Korean plaintiffs during World War II. Then on May 24, 2012, the Supreme Court of South Korea overturned a Korean appellate court’s decision that had honored successive Japanese rulings. In remanding the case to the Busan High Court, the Korean Supreme Court directly challenged the stalemate over corporate accountability in the transitional justice process for Koreans victimized under imperial Japanese rule. At a minimum, the process has come to represent a new iteration of the successful European model for wartime corporate accountability from which it receives inspirational and tactical sustenance. A class action lawsuit filed at the Seoul District Court in April 2015 by 1,004 Korean forced labor victims and family members is being helmed by one of the U.S. law firms that helped secure a $5.2 billion compensation fund from the German state and companies culpable of wartime forced labor under the Third Reich. Under the banner of the civil-society-based Asia Victims of the Pacific War Families of the Deceased Association of Korea, the surviving victims and their supporters have targeted MHI and 71 other Japanese companies. It remains to be seen whether the lawsuit will have Seoul’s crucial backing in light of the recent political settlement of the “comfort women” issue with Tokyo—a development that was welcomed by the U.S. government, which had helped broker the German reparations.