PanARMENIAN.Net – A South Korean court ruled Tuesday, August 8 that Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries should pay compensation to former wartime slave workers, AFP reveals.

The district court in the southern city of Gwangju ruled that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries should pay 120 million won ($106,700) in compensation to Kim Young-Ok, 85, and 3.25 million won to a relative of late victim Choe Jeong-Rye, activists and reports said.

Mitsubishi said it would appeal.

It is the second such ruling in four years.

The Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910-45, when Koreans were banned from using their own language in schools and forced to adopt Japanese names.

Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were forcibly recruited as frontline troops, slave workers and wartime sex slaves known as comfort women.

Issues of history still divide the neighbours, which are both US allies, and complicate their relationship even as they both face threats from nuclear-armed North Korea.

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