Japan has held a memorial ceremony near the Sado Island Gold Mines despite a last-minute boycott of the event by South Korea that highlighted tensions between the neighbors over the brutal wartime use

The South Korean government plans to hold a separate on-site memorial ceremony for Koreans forced to work at the gold mines on Sado island during Japan's colonial rule, following a last-minute decision to boycott Japan’s memorial event on Sunday.

Ties between Seoul and Tokyo have long been complicated by grievances related to Japan’s brutal rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, when hundreds of thousands of Koreans were mobilized as forced laborers for Japanese companies, or sex slaves ...