ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, public consciousness of the Asia-Pacific War received a new stimulus from a series of group lawsuits against Japan demanding individual compensation for injuries suffered due to the war. An early move towards prospective litigation was the formation in 1972, in Japan and South Korea, of Korean Forced Draft Investigation Groups to gather data on the large number of Koreans drafted for labor in Japan, totaling about 990,000. Increasing economic tensions with the United States and the latter’s frequent ‘Japan-bashing’ marked the end of Cold War symbiosis, and a natural corollary, for those who were historically minded, was to attack the United States (US) view of the war as enshrined in the Tokyo trials. Ideologically oriented elements deplored the manner in which principle had been subordinated to politics and economics in the Cold War alliance with the US.
