By Chen Jia (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-08-20 06:58

A team of Japanese lawyers will continue to work with former wartime Chinese slave laborers and their families to seek compensation from the Japanese government.

They will also find ways to ask the companies for whom the Chinese slave laborers worked to pay damages, despite a rejection by the Japanese high court in June.

The door is still open to negotiate with the Japanese government and the companies, Toshiyuki Tsuchiya, one of the lawyers involved in three lawsuits for Chinese forced laborers in Japan, said last Friday during a meeting in Beijing.

"We felt it a shame that the high court rejected their appeals," Tsuchiya said at a meeting with 11 victims and nearly 30 family members of the sufferers.

Their efforts forced the Japanese high court to recognize the suffering of the forced laborers.

But the Japanese court rejected a request for compensation, citing the Joint Communiqu that China and Japan signed on September 29, 1972, that established diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and Japan.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson have said repeatedly that the Japanese high court offered "a unilateral judicial explanation of the China-Japan Joint Communiqu" and requested the Japanese government "handle the wartime forced labor issue properly".

"The Japanese government should compensate for the physical as well as the mental pain it inflicted upon us wartime Chinese slave laborers in Japan," Li Liangjie told China Daily during the meeting.

Li, 77, was working in a cabbage field when he was abducted by Japanese Imperial Army soldiers and shipped to Japan to work in a mine. He said every day of the following 18 months was a nightmare.

Like Li, at least 38,935 Chinese were forced into slave labor in Japan during World War II, according to declassified Japanese government documents.

"The Japanese government's behavior was intolerable not only for the invasion and violence of the past, but also for their irresponsible attitude now," Li told China Daily.

Dozens of wartime compensation suits have been filed against the Japanese government and companies, but almost all have been rejected by Japanese courts.

Japanese filmmaker Minagawa Manabu is traveling with the delegation of Japanese lawyers. He is making a documentary to tell the Japanese how the lawsuits failed even with adequate evidence, he said.

Chinese lawyer Kang Jian said that cooperation between lawyers in China and Japan has attracted international attention. The Japanese government should face up to this historical issue, she said.