Nishimatsu Construction Co. agreed Friday with five Chinese to set up a ¥250 million trust fund to compensate not only them but 360 others who had been forced to perform hard labor during World War II, resolving their dispute at the Tokyo Summary Court.
The five — two former slave laborers and three relatives of laborers no longer living — lost a court battle in 2007 seeking ¥5.5 million in damages each. But the contractor, recently at the center of a political funds scandal, made the compensation offer voluntarily to end the dispute.
Subject to the fund's coverage are Chinese who were taken in 1944 and forced to work at a hydroelectric plant in Akiota, Hiroshima Prefecture, and who were returned to China at the end of the war in 1945.