This month, Japan and South Korea struck a deal on the compensation of Korean labor imposed by the Japanese empire during Tokyo’s 1910–45 rule over the Korean Peninsula. The issue has been unresolved since the South Korean courts cleared descendants of those laborers to pursue damages against successor Japanese companies.
The issue inevitably got caught up in the larger, tangled debate between the two countries over the imperial period. South Korea has demanded a level of contrition from Japan that few colonial powers have ever shown to their former possessions. Japan has apologized but often danced around the harsh realities of its colonial policy, with periodic outbursts from rightist civil society that the empire was, in fact, good for Korea because it modernized it.
