The latest front line in the trade dispute between Japan and South Korea is a toxic one. “If you sniff it, you die,” said one tech expert of the hydrogen fluoride used for cleaning and etching the tiny silicon wafers used in computer chips.
The material is at the centre of an escalating stand-off over compensation for wartime forced labour that has seen Japan impose increasing export controls on its neighbour. Tokyo insists that all claims of forced labour during Japan’s colonial rule over Korea were settled in a 1965 treaty, but last year South Korean courts ruled that the treaty did not apply to individual cases, returning the highly sensitive issue back to the fore.
This month Tokyo, which has a dominant global market position in the electronics manufacturing industry, moved to restrict exports of hydrogen fluoride, as well as fluorinated polyamide and photoresists — which are among the scores of materials and components critical to South Korean electronics manufacturing.