Seoul: The Supreme Court has finalized a ruling that mandates a Japanese construction company, Kumagai Gumi, to pay 100 million won (approximately US$69,500) in compensation to the family of a South Korean victim of Tokyo's wartime forced labor.

According to Yonhap News Agency, the compensation suit was filed by the victim's family in April 2019. They claimed that the victim, a 22-year-old South Korean man with the surname Park, was forcibly conscripted to work at Kumagai Gumi's Fukushima office in October 1944. Park continued to labor there until his untimely death in February of the following year. He was among numerous Koreans coerced into forced labor during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a previous appellate court decision that ordered Kumagai Gumi to compensate the victim's family. This decision overturned an earlier district court ruling, which had denied the claim based on the statute of limitations having expired. The appeals court, however, determined that the base year for calculating the statute of limitations should be 2018. This was the year when the top court confirmed the right of forced labor victims to seek damages, thereby allowing the family to pursue their claim.