The government should pay its long-owed obligations to Koreans pressed into military service or labor as stipulated in documents it drew up before 1965, said a citizens' group pushing the state to accept responsibility for its colonial rule of the peninsula.
The group -- led by Atsuko Aoyagi, a homemaker from Miyazaki Prefecture who began supporting several lawsuits in 1990 filed by Koreans pressed into military service or forced labor -- published a book explaining the suits in Japanese and Korean last May.
The book also shows copies of documents that indicated plans to pay reparations to the Koreans with direct labor contracts with the state, but which were never put into effect. Not included among them, however, were the thousands of Korean "comfort women" Japan rounded up and forced into sexual slavery for its armed forces. They had no such contracts.