Korean, Japanese civic groups to jointly act against Abe

Korean and Japanese civic groups will join forces to urge the Shinzo Abe administration to resolve the issues of wartime forced labor and bilateral tension that have escalated since the Japanese government enacted trade restrictions against Korea.

According to a coalition of 18 Korean civic groups, Tuesday, it and a coalition of civic groups from Tokyo will gather in Seoul on Aug. 15, the Liberation Day marking Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule, to hold a joint rally.

About 2,000 people are expected to participate, and they will march from Seoul Plaza to the Japanese Embassy in Korea, where they will deliver their written protest to the embassy.

The participants will include not only the surviving victims and bereaved families of forced labor during Japan's occupation of Korea, but also Korean teenagers and university students, Korean residents in Japan and Japanese civic group members.

"Thousands of Korean laborers died while working at Japanese armaments factories and in coal mines. We have to fight Abe's distortions of history and economic aggression," said an official from the Korean Confederation of Trade Union (KCTU), one of the Korean groups of the coalition.

The Korean coalition said its rally does not aim to condemn Japanese people in general, but focus on their Prime Minister Abe, saying the Korean and Japanese activists share the common goal of requesting Abe resolve the forced labor issue. It said the two sides are condemning the Japanese administration's economic retaliation, including removal of Korea from its trade "whitelist," in response to Korean court rulings that ordered Japanese companies to compensate individual surviving South Korean victims of forced labor.

"Abe's administration is trying to provoke Koreans and Japanese to regard each other with hostility while rejecting the Korean Supreme Court's verdicts last year ordering Japanese firms to compensate Korean victims for their forced labor," the Japanese coalition said in a statement, which the Korean counterpart read on its behalf during a candlelit rally in front of the former Japanese embassy site in central Seoul last Saturday.

"Abe is trying to ignore the past. People of Korea and Japan should cooperate to recover the rights of victims forced to labor and solve the issue."

Korean and Japanese religious leaders have joined hands too.

The National Council of Churches in Korea (NCCK) will hold a joint prayer service in Seoul on Sunday with 10 ministers from the National Council of Churches in Japan. The participants will voice their request to Japanese prime minister to apologize to the victims of forced labor and sex slavery.

The NCCK official said the joint prayer service will also be held in Japan soon.

On Tuesday, Korean and Japanese chapters of the Asia-Wide Campaign against the U.S.-Japanese domination and aggression of Asia (AWC) held a joint press conference in central Seoul, marking the 74th anniversary of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. They called for Japan's apology and compensation to Asian victims of Japan's war and an end to all nuclear weapons around the world.

Civic groups protest Japan's economic retaliation after holding a discussion on how to cope with it at their office on Yeouido,

southern Seoul, on July 18.