THE country held a memorial ceremony yesterday near the Sado Island Gold Mines despite a last-minute boycott of the event by South Korea that highlighted tensions between the neighbours over the issue of Korean-forced labourers at the site before and during World War II.
South Korea’s absence at yesterday’s memorial, to which Seoul government officials and Korean victims’ families were invited, is a major setback in the rapidly improving ties between the two countries, which since last year have set aside their historical disputes to prioritise US-led security cooperation.
