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Surely there’s more nuance to Korea’s position than this, because Japan is straightforwardly correct that corruption in Korea in the 80s is not their problem, it’s Korea’s.
Is it just me or does it seem like Saudi Arabia is going to have issues sourcing manpower for high tech manufacturing and that convincing non-Muslims to visit it is a tall order? I mean it’s 120 degrees there during the day and fun is illegal, aside from the hajj or maybe some Muslim scholars it seems like no one actually wants to visit it.
The Korean position is that:
Korea was a dictatorship at the time (lead by a notorious nipponophile and collaborator in the Japanese occupation) so the democratic populace, and especialy the victims, had no say in the 1965 Treaty, and
Japan has accepted moral responsibility for their human rights abuses so they have no grounds to deny legal responsibility for them as well, especially considering they did pay (some) compensation to (some of) their victims in the other colonies in the Treaty of San Francisco (which Korea did not sign). Instead, the original reparations were based solely on property damage claims as opposed to personal damages/human rights violation; the UN Commission on Human Rights backed Korea up on this distinction.
The catch is that in the negotiations for the 65 Treaty Japan actually did propose compensating victims but the Korean government deferred, and the agreement specifically forgoes the Korean government pursuing further claims on personal damages. In 2018 the Korean Supreme Court ruled that the Treaty didn't prevent individuals from pursuing compensation, which is how we got the successive cases this has centered around, and the last five years of tension and trade war.
It's extremely understandable that the victims are upset they were never compensated, but the fault isn't really on Japan's end, and the Wikipedia page at least for the 1965 treaty lists much of what the original reparations were spent on, and largely it does seem like it was invested into the economy. Anecdotally, an exerpt from Studwell's "How Asia Works":
The issue of direct payment is also complicated by there not actually being that many living victims around to be compensated anymore. There's only a little over 1000 left alive and the forced labor case was from only 15 plaintiffs, 12 of whom died during the years the case was in court.
I might be giving uncharitable coverage because I am not hugely sympathetic to the Korean position here; Japan has tried to meet them in what seems like good faith on this issue several times despite the treaty. In 94 Japan set up the Asian Women's Fund, which combined a mix of state funding and private donations and did issue direct compensation to some victims and in 2015 they actually did agree to an updated reparations package but it was scuttled on Korea's end. Meanwhile, the Korean government fairly transparently starts talking about comfort women to distract the population whenever they're doing a poor job at home.
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