South Korean Court Orders Mitsubishi of Japan to Pay for Forced Wartime Labor

South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan on Thursday to compensate South Koreans forced to work in its factories during World War II, the second such ruling in a month that has bedeviled relations between the two key American allies in Asia.

The top court upheld a lower-court ruling that ordered Mitsubishi to pay each of five women 100 million won to 150 million won, or about $89,000 to $133,000. In a separate ruling on Thursday, the court also ordered Mitsubishi to pay 80 million won to each of six men who said they were subject to forced labor at a Mitsubishi shipyard and machine tool factory in 1944.

Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 until Japan’s 1945 surrender in World War II, and in the decades since, South Korea and Japan have been locked in highly sensitive territorial and other disputes rooted in that colonial era.