[T]he Supreme Court ruled…that postwar agreements effectively deny Chinese individuals the right to demand reparations from Japan for the severe suffering they endured during the war…In ruling on a lawsuit on Japan's wartime forced labor, Ryoji Nakagawa, presiding justice at the top court's second petty bench, said, "Chinese people have lost their rights to judicially claim war compensation from Japan…" under the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique. In the lawsuit on forced labor, the top court's denial of individual compensation rights led to the scrapping of a July 2004 Hiroshima High Court ruling ordering Nishimatsu Construction to pay 27.5 million yen to the plaintiffs…