Like most of the other 10 lawsuits against Japanese firms, the complaint was filed here to take advantage of a California law enacted earlier this year that extended the statute of limitations on World War II claims to 2010. The suit was filed by lawyers who have been prominently involved in Holocaust-era claims against European firms. The suit also includes the Japanese government as a potential future defendant. In coming weeks, the legal team plans to file other lawsuits on behalf of American victims, Korean sex slaves and Chinese victims of medical experimentation. Hideo Den, a liberal politician with the Social Democratic Party of Japan, predicted that Japan will no longer be able to ignore the mounting movement.
Japan is under an enormous amount of international pressure.
Indeed, across the Pacific, two international forums on war crimes are convening this week in Tokyo and Osaka featuring scholars, attorneys, activists and politicians from Japan, elsewhere in Asia, the United States and Canada. In turn, those public discussions are prompting a brewing counterattack by Japanese conservatives. Tokyo University professor Nobukatsu Fujioka is organizing an emergency assembly this week to draw distinctions between Japanese war misdeeds and the Nazi Holocaust, while protests against the forums are also planned by a group calling itself the Committee of Concerned People Against Unreasonable Attacks on Japan and the Intent to Divide Japan and the United States. The conservatives argue, like the Japanese government, that Japan settled all reparations claims in good faith after the war and that the United States and others waived all rights to future claims in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. What we fear is that . . .