”S. Korea top court upholds forced labor compensation order on Nippon Steel,” 11 December 2025

South Korea's Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a lower court decision ordering Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel Corp. to pay damages to a South Korean family over wartime forced labor.

The top court said it dismissed an appeal by Nippon Steel, finalizing the lower court ruling in August 2024 that ordered the company to compensate four family members of a South Korean victim of forced labor.

The family of the South Korean man says he was forced to work in poor conditions at a Nippon Steel plant in Kamaishi in northeastern Japan's Iwate Prefecture from December 1940 to April 1942, a period during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. ...

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The plaintiffs' lawyer told reporters that shares of PNR, a joint venture between South Korean steel company POSCO and Nippon Steel, have already been seized as part of a plan to liquidate them into cash.

The lawyer said a government-backed fund, established under former President Yoon Suk Yeol's administration as a solution to compensate South Korean plaintiffs who won wartime forced labor cases, is insufficient without the participation of Japanese corporations.

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Later in the day, Masaaki Kanai, head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, conveyed the country's position that the ruling is unacceptable to the deputy chief of mission at the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo.

Japan has said all issues stemming from its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula were settled "completely and finally" under a 1965 bilateral agreement