“There Was a Consensus that Individual Claims for Damages Were Not Resolved at the Time of the Claims Settlement Between South Korea and Japan”

There was a consensus between the representatives of South Korea and Japan who led the negotiations on the claims settlement agreement between the two countries in 1965--that the agreement did not resolve the claims for damages of individuals.

On April 6, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released 2,361 volumes (over 360,000 pages) of documents, newly declassified after thirty years, most of which were from 1992.

According to the documents, Min Choong-sik, the Cheongwadae senior secretary for political affairs when the two countries signed the claims agreement in 1965, said, “The negotiation representatives at the time implicitly held the same understanding that the agreement was a solution between the governments and that it did not resolve individual rights,” when he spoke at an international forum held in Japan on August 3, 1991. He also said, “From what I know, Etsusaburo Shiina, the Japanese foreign minister at the time, shared the same view.” Min further said, “Since international law is now changing, I think we are at a stage where we must consider what action is just,” and suggested that Japan might not have fulfilled its responsibility with the claims settlement agreement.

Such recognition is different from the Japanese government’s current position, which insists that the problem of forced mobilization was fully resolved with the claims settlement.

The foreign ministry also released a dossier of diplomatic affairs of 1992, when the world witnessed rapid changes as senior officials of North Korea and the United States met for the first time and South Korea and China established diplomatic relations.

In 1992, South Korea and the U.S. requested North Korea for mutual inspections of the two Koreas, which they had agreed to in the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But North Korea was reluctant. In April 1992, when replying to a letter from Kim Yong-sun, the director of international affairs in the Workers’ Party of Korea, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Arnold Kanter wrote that the U.S. would hold regular meetings with North Korean senior officials to discuss policies when an international inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a mutual inspection according to the inter-Korean agreement were successfully conducted. However, North Korea called for an inspection of U.S. military bases in South Korea, while refusing an inspection of its military facilities other than the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon. In March the following year, North Korea announced its withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which was the start of the first “North Korean nuclear crisis.”