Legal Supreme Court: names of Koreans cannot be purged from Yasukuni

[thomas]

When courts hide behind technicalities.

Japan's Supreme Court ruled against a group of South Koreans who sought to have their relatives' names removed from the Yasukuni Shrine, reigniting tensions stemming from Japan's colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula. The court determined that the deceased relatives, who fought for Japan during World War II, were Japanese nationals, thus precluding the removal of their names. The plaintiffs expressed profound disappointment and disbelief.

Park said her family was only informed that her father was enshrined at Yasukuni in the 1990s. But the court ruled that as her father had been added to the shrine's register in 1959, and as such, the 20-year statute of limitations for any legal challenge expired in 1979. [...] Kim Young-hwan, a representative of South Korea's Centre for Historical Truth and Justice, said it was "unacceptable" that the 20-year statute of limitations expired more than a decade before the plaintiffs found out that their family members were being remembered at the shrine.

Among the more than 2.46 million individuals listed at the shrine are the names of around 20,000 people from the Korean peninsula and some 25,000 individuals from Taiwan. The Japanese government has said these individuals from the Korean peninsula and Taiwan, both of which were ruled by Tokyo until 1945, were considered Japanese nationals.

"Japan's position has been that until 1945, people on the Korean peninsula were Japanese citizens as they were ruled as part of the empire," he told This Week in Asia. "Yasukuni has rejected the relatives' requests and said that these men served in the Japanese military and, as Japanese, would have wanted to be enshrined as a 'god' of Yasukuni if they died."

Court ruling over Koreans enshrined in Japan’s Yasukuni reopens wartime wounds

A group of 27 South Koreans fought to have their relatives’ names removed from the highly controversial shrine in Tokyo.

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In its ruling, the Supreme Court's petty bench applied the statute of limitations under the Civil Code, which states that the right to demand compensation for an illegal act ends if that right is not exercised within 20 years of the unlawful act. The court did not rule on whether the government's provision of names constituted a violation of the separation of religion and state. In a supplementary opinion, Justice Akira Ojima stated that even if there was an act of the state that violated the separation of religion and state, the level of psychological damage was considerably lighter than that of a serious infringement affecting life or limb, and that the case in question was not one where the statute of limitations would be excluded as an exception. Justice Mamoru Miura gave the only dissenting opinion among the four justices on the bench, saying there was room to consider the case a violation of the separation of religion and state as the enshrinement had gone ahead as a national policy, and that the case should be sent back to the high court to thoroughly deliberate the issue.

Japan's top court rejects lawsuit over enshrinement of Korean man at Yasukuni Shrine - The Mainichi

TOKYO -- The Supreme Court on Jan. 17 dismissed a bereaved family's lawsuit demanding compensation in connection with a South Korean national's enshri

mainichi.jp