Chinese court seizes Japan carrier over WWII reparation dispute

A Chinese maritime court in Shanghai has ordered the seizure of a ship owned by Japanese shipping firm Mitsui OSK Lines, saying the company had failed to pay compensation stemming from a wartime contractual obligation.

The ship, Baosteel Emotion, is a 226,434-deadweight-tonne ore carrier. The court on Saturday said the seizure order was compensation for the loss of two ships leased from a Chinese company before the two countries went to war in 1937.

The 320m-long ship built in 2011 was impounded on April 19 at Majishan port in Zhejiang province as part of a legal dispute that has dragged on since 1964, the Shanghai Maritime Court and Mitsui OSK said in notices on their websites. It is now docked at Majishan, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.

The dispute began in 1936, when Mitsui OSK predecessor Daido Kaiun chartered two vessels from Chung Wei Steamship, only to have them appropriated by the Japanese government, Mitsui OSK said in a statement yesterday. Both ships were later lost at sea.

Japan yesterday said the order, apparently the first time the assets of a Japanese company have been seized in a lawsuit concerning compensation for World War II, was “extremely regrettable”. “We strongly urge the Chinese government to make the proper response,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said. “It is inevitable that this will have an adverse impact on Japanese companies in China.”

But China said in response that the spat over the ship was a “regular business contract dispute”. “This case has nothing to do with compensation from the Chinese-Japanese war (World War II),” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said, adding that the government would safeguard the rights of foreign investors. AGENCIES