Kim Gyeong-seok and the Origins of Northeast Asia’s Corporate Accountability Movement for War and Colonialism

For the past three decades, a transnational reparations movement has unfolded across Northeast Asia. Hundreds of victims—assisted by attorneys, academics, and activists—seek remedies from Japan for various atrocities committed during World War II, colonialism, and other historical injustices. They press their claims in street protests, legislative hearings, dramatic performances, and other fora. The “comfort women” are the best known of these claimants; their global redress campaign ex-tends from noisy protests outside of Japan’s embassy in Seoul, to mute statues in raucous boroughs of Berlin.

More obscure, though larger in number, were the roughly one million Koreans who performed forced labor for Japanese companies during World War II; between 1939 and 1945, the Japanese colonial administration implemented an apparatus to apprehend Koreans, especially minors, send them to Japanese factories, and force them to work in harsh conditions for little to no pay. Campaigns to review Japan’s wartime legacy and legal liability have recurred throughout postwar Japan. While most of these efforts have targeted the Japanese government, an important subset of actors has also focused on the role of Japanese corporations. And perhaps no one played a larger role in directing attention towards Japan, Inc. than Kim Gyeong-seok, a Korean forced laborer in the 1940s turned redress activist in the 1990s.

As described in this Article, Kim’s 1991 lawsuit against Nihon Kokan launched the corporate accountability piece of the reparations project, an endeavor that continues to create ripples even now. The Article briefly sketches Kim’s life, highlights his landmark lawsuit--the first case to seek redress from a Japanese corporation for its wartime conduct and a precursor to the cascade of civil litigation across Northeast Asia--and examines the regional impact of Kim Gyeong-seok’s legal activism.