War Criminal Demands Compensation From Japanese Government

Last week, an article about Lee Hak Rae, a Korean who had been convicted of war crimes for his brutal treatment of allied prisoners as a camp guard during World War II, appeared in the Japan Times. Lee is currently fighting to win compensation from the Japanese government:

The government excluded Korean war criminals and their families from most of the financial support Japanese war criminals and their families were entitled to, due to their nationality.

When Japan signed the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty, restoring its sovereignty, Koreans were stripped of the Japanese citizenship they had been forced to adopt during Japan’s colonial rule.

“Japan forced Koreans to participate in the war (as Japanese) but then refused to pay us compensation because (we were suddenly no longer Japanese citizens). That’s irrational,” said Lee, who now runs a taxi company in Tokyo. “The government’s attitude is unforgivable.”

[...]

Lee had to obey Japanese officers eager to build the railway as quickly as possible, and supply them with enough POWs for the construction. But most of the POWs were in a weakened state, many extremely sick, and thus not up to the task, putting the Korean guards in a dilemma, Lee said.

“We didn’t know anything about human rights or the Geneva Conventions” stipulating the humane treatment of POWs, he claimed. “We didn’t have the power (to resist the Japanese officers).”

Geez, who would have thought that working prisoners to death would be considered wrong?

The Hankyoreh offers further details, framing Lee’s testimony as part of a debate in South Korean on whether or not Koreans who were convicted as war criminals during the war should be exonerated for their actions (83 of the 148 Koreans convicted as war criminals were officially “cleared” of their crimes by the South Korean government in 2006). The following information is revealed:

• Lee’s decision to become a prison guard was “somewhere in the gray zone between individual volition and outside pressure.” [Military conscription of Koreans didn't actually start until later in the war, but Lee figured it was going to happen soon and volunteered 2-years beforehand as a means of dodging it.]
• A vast majority of POW witnesses identified Lee as the man who was forcing sick prisoners to work. However, the tribunal’s sentence was “unjust” because they referred to Lee as the “camp commandant” when he was actually a civilian supervisor.
• Australian prosecutors were “eager to pursue those responsible for the deaths of their comrades, but in their fury were not about to lend an ear to the plight of a youth caught up in the gears of the imperial war machine.”
• At his trial, Lee lied to prosecutors about his actions out of fear. The primary defense given at the trial was that Lee was a Korean, and his actions “were merely the product of his Japanese superiors’ wishes.”
• “It was difficult to gauge just exactly how much authority was granted to the Korean youth.”

The article ends with this statement from Lee:

“If only for the sake of my fallen comrades,” he said, “I hope that our honor will be one day restored.”

I really hope there aren’t many people out there that think he should have his honor restored. Even if Lee wasn’t in a position of authority at the prison camps, he was still actively involved in forcing sick prisoners to work themselves to death. What do you think?