FFocusSHOKO ODA AND GRACE HUANGBLOOMBERG

Mid-August is a traditional time for many Japanese to leave the densely populated cities and travel to see family in rural areas. Many fear that in the absence of firmer government advice, those travelers may be bringing an unseen passenger — the coronavirus.

The Bon holiday period is synonymous with summer holidays, cleaning family graves and reuniting with friends and family. But with national and local officials giving conflicting signals over the risk of travel as the period approaches, the holiday threatens to boost the spread of the pandemic, as cases continue to rise across the country.

A day before many were due to travel, Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike made a belated call

for residents to refrain from going to their hometowns or otherwise traveling.

“This is a special summer. I want residents to avoid trips, going to their hometowns, going out at night or traveling far away,” Koike said at a news conference Thursday. “If the situation worsens, I will have no choice but to declare a state of emergency in Tokyo.”

The advice conflicts with that of the national government, which has pointedly refrained from calling for curbs on traveling home for the holidays, even after virus cases hit daily records in many parts of the coun-try. Osaka reported a record 255 infections on Friday.

“We are not asking for a blanket call on travel restrictions, nor are we giving a spe-cific direction on whether people can or should not travel during the o-Bon period,” said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on Tuesday.

Asked Thursday if people should make up their own mind on whether to return to their hometowns during the holiday period, Suga responded, “Basically, yes.”

With cases flaring in population centers nationwide, the government’s lack of direc-tion against travel has been met with criti-

cism. Some regions little touched by the virus have called on people not to return, fearing the specter of infected but possibly asymp-tomatic young people leaving cities and transmitting the disease to elderly relatives.

Confusing the matter further is the gov-ernment’s insistence on pushing ahead with a domestic travel campaign to spur the tourism industry. But experts say that not all travel is equal, and traveling to see family raises the danger of infection.

“At o-Bon, people are going out with friends, having drinking parties or coming in close contact with their family,” said Haruka Sakamoto, a public health researcher at the University of Tokyo. “Usually, their relatives are of an older generation, such as parents or grandparents in their 80s or 90s. I think o-Bon is a much higher risk than the Go To Travel campaign.”

In Tokyo, infections within households have become one of the primary causes of rising cases. Such transmission accounted for 10 percent of cases found in Tokyo on Tuesday, Koike said, with 40 percent of the cases found in the elderly traced to their own households.

SATOSHI SUGIYAMASTAFF WRITER

Nippon Steel Corp. on Friday filed an appeal against the seizure of its assets in South Korea that were earmarked for liquidation to compensate wartime laborers, in a move sure to put the two nations on a diplomatic collision course yet again.

The Daegu District Court’s Pohang branch’s decision on seizing the assets owned by the Japanese steel-maker, includ-ing around 81,000 shares it had acquired through its joint venture with the Korean firm Posco, went into effect Tuesday. The court decision would have been finalized, with the process moving on to the next step where the assets would be sold, if the Japa-nese firm hadn’t filed an appeal within a week from Tuesday.

The court confirmed it would hear the complaint and will decide on whether to accept the appeal or not.

The assets were seized last year following a decision by the South Korean Supreme Court in 2018 ordering the Japanese steel-maker, then Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp., to provide compensation of about ¥40 million to four Koreans who had

said they were forced to work against their will for the firm’s precursor, Japan Iron & Steel Co., during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

The latest ruling represents a further step toward liquidating the company assets for cash compensation, although because of the complexity of the process it is unlikely to proceed swiftly even after the decision.

Still, Tokyo regards the liquidation as sub-verting a 1965 economic cooperation pact that was supposed to have resolved all com-pensation issues arising from the nation’s 1910-45 colonial rule.

The Japanese government fears the judi-cial action will further inflame shaky bilat-eral relations and could set a dangerous precedent, possibly reigniting compensation issues from World War II with other countries.

Japan is reportedly considering counter-measures, including tightening visa restric-tions for diplomats.

“We need to manage the situation well to avoid us taking action, but based on what’s going on, there’s a possibility that we may have no choice,” Finance Minister Taro Aso said Tuesday.

In a news conference in the morning that same day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga criticized the ruling from 2018 and the subsequent legal procedure as being against international law, and said Japan would con-sider “a variety of options” to protect Japa-nese companies.

“If the assets are liquidated, that’ll be a grievous matter that we must avoid,” Suga said. “We’ve conveyed this point to South Korea repeatedly and will continue to urge South Korea to resolve the issue swiftly.”

A group of conservative Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers visited the Prime Minister’s Office this week to urge the government to impose sanctions on South Korea if it went ahead with the liquidation. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Akihiro Nishimura told the lawmakers the government would take “specific actions without hesitation.”

Nippon Steel issued a statement following Tuesday’s court decision, saying the issue of wartime labor was already resolved and the company would “respond appropriately” based on diplomatic negotiations between the two countries.

The 2018 South Korean Supreme Court decision on wartime labor has been cited

as underlying the recent deterioration in relations between the two Asian neighbors, a worrisome factor for the United States, which sees positive ties between the two regional allies as critical to countering China, Russia and North Korea.

Although Tokyo has denied accusations of a political motive, the trade ministry tough-ened export control regulations on certain chemicals that were critical for South Korea’s manufacturing industry last summer.

In return, Seoul threatened to pull the plug on the General Security of Military Informa-tion Agreement (GSOMIA), a military-intel-ligence sharing pact with Tokyo that is key for tracking North Korean missile activities. South Korea backed away from the threat at the last minute, but the pact could still be scrapped if either party decides not to renew it by Aug. 24.

It would be difficult for South Korea to nullify the pact now, or at least before Japan launches countermeasures, said Yuki Asaba, a professor of Korean studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

“I don’t believe South Korea would jetti-son the pact at this time, but it’s natural that it would do something equivalent to (Japa-nese countermeasures) economically and it would bring up GSOMIA if it wants to do something in the area of national security cooperation and drag the United States into this,” he said.

The compensation issue dredges up history the two nations have been unable to fully rec-oncile 75 years after the end of World War II.

Tokyo has insisted that the 1965 pact, which included provision for restoring dip-lomatic relations after the war, addressed compensation issues including those related to wartime laborers. Through the pact, Tokyo extended massive “economic coop-eration” funds to the South Korean govern-ment, and Seoul was in return obliged to pay any compensation money to individual war-time laborers using the funds.

But South Korean President Moon Jae-in has asserted the pact did not cover for-mer wartime laborers’ individual rights to demand “consolation money” for their suf-fering under colonial rule. Many of them say they were forced to work in harsh conditions for Japan and have demanded direct com-pensation from the Japanese government separately.

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COVID-19 updatesFor news and reference information about the COVID-19 pandemic, see our special dedicated web page: jtimes.jp/covid19

Nippon Steel appeals S. Korea asset seizureCourt confirms it will hear Japanese firm’s complaint against ruling on forced labor

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Trump moves to ban WeChat, TikTokBLOOMBERG, REUTERS

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders prohibiting U.S. resi-dents from doing business with the Chinese-owned TikTok and WeChat apps beginning 45 days from now, citing the national secu-rity risk of leaving Americans’ personal data exposed.

The bans mark a significant escalation by Trump in his confrontation with Beijing as the U.S. seeks to curb China’s power in global technology. With the U.S. election less than 90 days away, Trump is making his chal-lenge of China a central theme of his cam-paign, where he trails Democrat Joe Biden in the polls.

“This is yet another watershed moment in the U.S.-China technology cold war here where the U.S. government is targeting these two very popular Chinese apps and basically saying they have national security prob-lems,” said Paul Triolo, Head of Global Tech-nology policy at Eurasia Group. “It shows the depth of the U.S. concern.”

Meanwhile, China has warned Japan that banning TikTok would have a “large

impact” on bilateral relations, broadcaster TBS reported Friday, citing unnamed Japa-nese government sources.

A group of lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has decided to push for steps to restrict the app over concerns peo-ple’s data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, local media reported.

The Foreign Ministry was not immediately available to comment. The government has not said it is considering banning the app.

The move by Trump coincides with his push for the sale of TikTok, the popular video app owned by ByteDance Ltd., to an American company, and it comes a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged U.S. businesses to remove the two Chinese apps from their stores. It threatens penalties on any U.S. resident or company that conducts transactions with TikTok, WeChat or their owners after the orders take effect.

“To protect our Nation, I took action to address the threat posed by one mobile application, TikTok. Further action is needed to address a similar threat posed by another mobile application, WeChat,” Trump said in the order against WeChat, released minutes after the TikTok measure.

Earlier this week, Trump threatened to shut down TikTok if its owners didn’t sell the busi-ness to a U.S. company by Sept. 15. Microsoft Corp. has been in talks about a possible pur-chase of TikTok, an app that’s been down-loaded more than 2 billion times globally and

Bans on TikTok and WeChat mark a significant escalation by U.S. President Donald Trump in his confrontation with Beijing. AP

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Lee Chun-sik (center) speaks to reporters in Seoul in October 2018 after South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that Nippon Steel should compensate four South Koreans including Lee for forced labor. KYODO

Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike holds up a sign asking people to refrain from going back to their hometown or travel during the Bon holiday while giving a news conference at the metropolitan government building Thursday. KYODO

Bon travelers get conflicting adviceKoike’s calls to scrap hometown trips clash with state’s approach

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