To the casual observer, 95-year-old Lee Hak-rae could be just another elderly person in Japan. Surrounded by pictures of his family and paintings by his great-grandchildren, Lee potters about his cluttered living room on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Lee Hak-rae, the last surviving Korean war criminal during World War II, holds a copy of photo that was taken at a POW camp run by the Japanese Imperial Army in Thailand in 1942, during an interview with Reuters at his home, in Tokyo, Japan June 25, 2020. Picture taken June 25, 2020. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
That includes war criminals and their families, government officials say. Japanese wartime leaders convicted of war crimes by an Allied tribunal are honoured at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine. “It’s unfair and doesn’t make any sense. How can I accept this unbelievable situation?” Lee said as he clutched dog-eared clippings documenting his years of campaigning for recognition and compensation.Twenty-three of them were executed and he too was sentenced to death by hanging as Kakurai Hiromura in 1947.
Cribb said it was unfair the Japan gave pensions to their war criminals but not to Koreans who were part of the Japanese army.In 1943, Lee oversaw about 500 Allied prisoners of war building what later became known as the Death Railway between Thailand and Myanmar. Austen Fyfe, an Australian POW, said Lee was notorious for his brutality and beat him repeatedly, including with a bamboo stick on the back of the head. Other prisoners said Lee would stalk their makeshift hospital and “beat up the people he thought to be well enough to work”.
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