Mitsubishi Materials Apology to the American POWs

See Michael John Grist's incredible photos
of the ruins of MMC's Osarizawa Copper Mine

On Sunday, July 19, 2015, at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, Mitsubishi Materials Company (MMC) plans to offer an apology to the American POWs who slaved in four of their mines on mainland Japan during WWII.

This is significant and important.


Mitsubishi Materials Company, the successor to Mitsubishi Mining, is the first and only Japanese company among the nearly 60 that used and abused POW slave labor to offer a formal public apology to either American or Allied POWs. Nearly all these 1940s companies still exist, still are related to the same wartime company, and still operate similar facilities at the POW camp sites. To our knowledge, MMC is not planning apologies to their British, Australian, Dutch, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African POW slave laborers. It is also unknown how closely the "apology" will follow the hollow words of Abe apologies.

A good apology needs to accepted by the victims. It needs to include mechanisms for the perpetrators to learn. And it needs focus on the experience of the victims. Most important it is a process that does not end with words or an explanation that the company is a new one.

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The Mitsubishi Materials Company delegation will then travel to Wellsburg, West Virginia on the morning of Tuesday, July 21st. At the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Museum, Education & Research Center the delegation will present an apology and an unspecified donation for educational projects on the POW of Japan experience. Ed Jackfert, twice former ADBC National Commander and US Army Air Corps in the Philippines, who was a slave laborer for Mitsui, Showa Denko, Nisshin Flour Milling will attend the ceremony.

Six POW camps on Japan’s homeland were associated with the Mitsubishi Zaibatsu during the war and held 2,041 POWs (including 1,148 Americans, the others were British, Australian, Dutch, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African). One of these camps was associated with four Mitsubishi industrial sites in Nagasaki recently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Four of the camps were part of Mitsubishi Mining that is today’s Mitsubishi Materials Company. The Company still owns these mines. (Market Cap $4.8 billion)

Three of mines are now operated as museums and amusement parks by a subsidiary of MMC. None of the descriptive materials at these sites mention the history of forced and slave labor.

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At liberation in late August 1945, 1568 POWs (including 876 American POWs) were found in four POWs camps operated by Mitsubishi Mining Co. There were records of 30 POWs deaths (including 27 Americans).

Newspapers report that the apology will be a formal “shazai,” which even the government of Japan has never used. But we do not know what the actual document will say.

The Chairman of Mitsubishi Corporation Yorihiko Kojima and a Mitsubishi Materials board member, Foreign Policy Expert Yukio Okamoto are both on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “Commission on a Framework for the 21st Century” generally referred to as his "history committee". It appears that these men were thoughtful and brave, considering the political restrictions they currently work under, to put forward Mitsubishi Materials to offer this apology to the American POWs.

Mr. Okamoto will be at the apology ceremony in LA. He will be joined by former POWs Mr. James Murphy, a survivor of Mitsubishi’s Osarizawa Copper Mine and Dr. Lester Tenney, a survivor of Mitsui’s Miike Mine. Both men fought on Bataan against Imperial Japan's invasion and survived the Bataan Death March and a Hell ship to Japan.

Also there will be Ms. Kinue Tokudome who has tirelessly devoted the last 15 years to seeking Japan's acknowledgement and apology for the POW tragedy. She negotiated with representatives of Mitsubishi Material's corporate social responsibility staff for this moment. Ms. Tokudome's friend, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is the host of the event.

Also attending is a daughter of a POW held at Mukden Ms. Jan Thompson who is president of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, the national organization representing the American POWs of Japan, their families, their descendants, and scholars. A professional filmmaker who has completed two documentaries on the POW experience with Imperial Japan, Tragedy of Bataan and Never the Same, she will be filming the event.

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So far, there is no mention of memorials, inclusion in the company histories, correction of websites, or descriptions at the Mitsubishi Materials-owned theme parks at the now-defunct mines or at the new UNESCO World Heritage sites in Japan that used POW slave labor.


Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the best-seller UNBROKEN, 1936 Olympian and POW Louie Zamperini’s biography, issued this statement regarding the historic actions taken by Mitsubishi Materials:

I wish to extend my thanks to Mitsubishi Materials for offering an apology to the prisoners of war who, during World War II, were forced to labor for their company. I hope this gesture brings some measure of healing to the POWs who suffered so terribly, and I hope Mitsubishi’s gesture will inspire other Japanese companies to reach out to those who were subjected to similar treatment. For the former POWs, I wish you only peace.

Below is a list of Mitsubishi Zaibatsu POW camps with nationality breakdowns of their Western slave laborers. POWs were sent to Japan starting in early 1942 to make up for war production labor shortages. The first American POWs were from Guam and Wake Island.

It should be further noted, that most of the "Hell ships" that transported the POWs to Japan were built and operated by the Mitsubishi Zaibatsu.

Mitsubishi-related POW Camps on Mainland Japan at a glance:

Sendai 3's Amusement Park

Sendai 3-B Hosokura
Lead/Zinc Mining
Mitsubishi Mining Co.
Today’s Mitsubishi Materials

TOTAL (at liberation): 284 POWs; 235 Americans; 47 British; 2 Dutch.

Camp Information

Amusement Park

Sendai Camp 6-B Hanawa (Osarizawa)

Copper Mining
Mitsubishi Mining Co.
Today’s Mitsubishi Materials

TOTAL (at liberation): 546 POWs; 495 Americans; 50 British; 1 Australian.

Camp Information

Mitsubishi History

Amusement Park

Tokyo 1-D Yokohama formerly Tokyo 2-B

Ship yard labor and ship construction
"The Yokohama-Mitsubishi Shipyards"
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries

Approximately 272 American POWs. *Most Americans were sent to Main Camp (Omori) and Mitsushima after camp closed on May 13, 1945. No official roster located.

Camp Information

Osaka 19-B became 4-B Ikuno
Silver/Copper Mining
Mitsubishi Mining Co.
Today’s Mitsubishi Materials

TOTAL (at liberation): 440 POWs; 44 Americans; 387 British; 8 Australians; 1 Dutch; 2 Canadians; 2 New Zealanders.

Camp Information

Mitsubishi History

Amusement Park

Osaka 21-B became 6-B Akenobe

Copper Mining
Mitsubishi Mining Co.
Today’s Mitsubishi Materials

TOTAL (at liberation): 298 POWs; 102 Americans; 168 British; 28 Australians.

Camp Information

Fukuoka 14-B Nagasaki

Iron foundry labor
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
Today’s Nagasaki Shipyard & Machinery Works Saiwaimachi Plant

TOTAL (at liberation): 201 POWs; No Americans; 157 Dutch; 24 Australians; 20 British.

Camp Information

Mitsubishi History

Camp Location 

UNESCO World Heritage

American POWs speak truth to Japan and the Speaker of the US House of Representatives

Statement for the Record

to the

Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee and House Veterans' Affairs Committee Joint Hearing

 To Receive Legislative Presentations of 

Veterans Service Organizations

 

By

 

Ms. Jan Thompson

 

President, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society

[Daughter of PhM2 Robert E. Thompson USN, USS Canopus, 

Corregidor, Bilibid & Mukden, POW# 2011]

18 March 2015

American Prisoners of War of Japan

Honoring the Memory of World War II 

Veterans of the Pacific

Chairmen Isakson and Miller, Ranking Members Blumenthal and Brown, Members of the Senate and House Veterans Affairs Committees, thank you for allowing us to present the unique concerns of veterans of World War II’s Pacific Theater to Congress. The American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society (ADBC-MS) represents surviving POWs of Japan, their families, and descendants. Our goal is to preserve their history and communicate the enduring spirit of the American POW experience in the Pacific to future generations.

We applaud the efforts of all the veterans’ service organizations to fight for adequate medical care and disability benefits. Moreover, the incidence and intensity of post-traumatic stress for American POWs of Japan is believed to be the greatest of any World War II veteran and possibly of any American war. These veterans had to survive the sordid POW camps, unimaginable and capricious torture, “hell ships” to Japan or its colonies, and years of brutal imprisonment and slave labor.  Upon returning from the Pacific War, they found a government reluctant to recognize and treat the mental and physical effects that were consequences of the deprivations suffered while POWs of Japan.

At the time, PTSD was not yet a medical category and VA doctors limited the POWs’ access to disability benefits by dismissing the after-effects of years of abuse, disease, and malnutrition. That should not happen to any veteran, and thus, we strongly support the legislative goals of our fellow veterans service organizations to ensure medical and mental health care, as well as to expedite disability claims, to provide rehabilitation, and to establish job-training programs for all American veterans. The American POWs of Japan and their families know intimately the difficulty of re-incorporation into civil society with little support.

Our task today, however, is to address another issue of respect and acceptance of returning service men and women. This is to ensure that they are not forgotten. For the American POWs of Japan this means that their unique history and the lessons of their experience with Imperial Japan is preserved. This is an urgent task. In the United States this history is being forgotten, and in Japan it is being revised.

Remembrance, Reconciliation, and Preservation

The ADBC-MS was dismayed in 2012 when none of the 70^th anniversaries of historic battles during the beginning of World War II were officially recognized.  Astonishingly, December 7, 1941, “a date that will live in infamy,” has not been recognized with a Congressional resolution for many years. This year, the 70^th Anniversaries of the daring “Great Raid” that liberated Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines and of the Battle for Manila that freed thousands of American civilian internees and POWs were not acknowledged.

We hope that future Congresses will remember the events that started American involvement in World War II with resolutions memorializing the simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines Islands. And we hope that future Congresses will honor those POWs who were massacred by Imperial Japanese forces as American forces advanced to liberate territories once lost. These include the 98 Americans on Wake Island who were bound and machine-gunned to death on October 7, 1943 and the 139 on Palawan Island who were drenched in gasoline and set afire.

The former POWs of Japan leave many legacies and lessons. Among the most important is how they coped with the postwar traumas of inhumane imprisonment. They fought two battles. One was for recognition of their “battle fatigue” and the other for justice and remembrance. The former is now championed by all veterans’ service organizations. We ask Congress for support and to help our veterans in their unique quest for justice and remembrance.

In an interview published 23 January 2014 in The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second largest newspaper, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy said:

I want to take a moment to talk about history and reconciliation. This fall, there was an event that previously might have been thought unimaginable. A group of Americans who suffered as Japanese prisoners of war during the Second World War returned here at the invitation of the Japanese government. Participating took enormous amounts of courage for all those involved….It is not easy, but citizens in all countries should encourage and support leaders who reach across history to build a peaceful future. It took courage on the part of the participants to come back to Japan and learn how Japan has changed.

As background to the Ambassador’s words, in 2009 the Government of Japan, through its then-Ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro FUJISAKI, and again in 2010 through its then-Foreign Minister Katsuya OKADA, officially apologized to the American POWs of Japan. These Cabinet-approved apologies first established as a Cabinet Decision on February 6, 2009 were unprecedented. Never before had a Japanese Government apologized for a specific war crime nor had it done so directly to the victims. The Japanese Government further initiated the “Japan/POW Friendship Program” of trips for American former POWs to visit Japan and return to the places of their imprisonment and slave labor. Thus far, there have been five trips, one each in the fall of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

The benefits of this long-awaited act of contrition have been immeasurable for former POWs and their families.  The Program, as Ambassador Kennedy has pointed out, is a great success, but we are concerned about its future. We are concerned that Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo ABE, may revise Japan’s war apologies and end the POW/Japan Friendship Program. We are concerned that Japan has limited each trip to only seven former POWs. We currently have 26 men, all over 90-years old, eager to participate and waiting to hear when or if there will be another journey to Japan. Because of their advanced ages, many of these veterans may miss the opportunity.

We recall that in 1995 the Japanese government established the Peace, Friendship, and Exchange Initiative that included a multi-million dollar program of reconciliation and exchange with former POWs from all allied nations except the United States. From 1995 to 2009, the Japanese Government invited 904 ex-POWs from the United Kingdom, 507 from the Netherlands and 59 from Australia. The budgets allocated for those trips totaled over $16 million. To date, only 31 American former POWs have been invited and the yearly budgets have ranged only from $130,000 to $230,000. One cannot help but get the impression that some in Japan count on time and advancing years to limit the costs and impact of the program. We view this as shortsighted.

Success should encourage more action

The success of this visitation program should encourage Japan to do more. The Program should not end with the ability of the nonagenarian POWs to visit Japan or with their deaths. A POW’s captivity has multi-generational effects on families. The wives, children, and siblings of those who died suffered irreparable loss. The families of those who survived suffered from the long-term physical and mental health problems caused by the ex-POW's years of cruel captivity.  Widows, brothers, sisters, children, and other descendants have all been profoundly affected by the POW experience of their relative and they too should be eligible for future programs.

We ask Congress to encourage the Government of Japan to preserve, expand, and enhance its reconciliation program toward its American former prisoners. We want to see the trips to Japan continued and extended to include descendants and researchers. We want the visitation program drawn into a permanent program of research, documentation, reconciliation, and a people-to-people exchange that is not subject to the Japanese government’s yearly budget review. We want Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to publicize the program and its achievements. 

We want this program to include funds to create visual reminders of history through museums and monuments.  We want national memorials to the POWs who slaved and died on Japanese soil and territories as well as aboard the “hell ships.” We want to see a Japanese government-funded memorial at the Port of Moji where most of the hell ships docked and unloaded their sick and dying “cargo.”

We also want the many companies that brutally used POWs as slave labor and who now profit in the American market, to join with their government by acknowledging their use of forced labor and by offering their own acts of reconciliation. Over 60 Japanese companies, such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Hitachi, Toshiba, Kawasaki, Nippon Steel, Nippon Express, Nippon Sharyo, Ube Industries, Showa Denko, Aso Group, and Yawata Steel maintained war production by cruel exploitation of American and Allied POWs.

Prime Minister Shinzo ABE and his address to Congress

Prime Minister Shinzo ABE, who we understand may soon address a joint meeting of Congress, has a unique opportunity to acknowledge Japan’s historical responsibilities. His past statements rejecting the verdicts of Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal that serves as the foundation of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan trouble us. We want Congress to only extend the invitation to Prime Minister Abe to speak at the podium of Roosevelt and Churchill if they are assured that he will acknowledge that Japan’s defeat released the country from the venom of fascism and the inhuman goals of a criminal regime.

By doing so, the Japanese prime minister’s speech to Congress can be a historic one of reconciliation of which the first step is acknowledgement. Tied to this, we feel, should be that he extends and enhances the POW visitation program as we have outlined. He can engender trust with his American allies by honoring their country’s veterans. Here he can signal to Japan’s other wartime victims that meaningful reconciliation, as Ambassador Kennedy pointed out, is possible. The POW/Japan Friendship Program is one that confronts the past while preserving the dignities of both Americans and Japanese.

It is our hope in addressing this hearing that we can encourage Congress to work with the Obama Administration and the State Department to persuade Japan to hold to its promises and responsibilities. Japan needs to be encouraged to do more.  And it is our hope that members of Congress will encourage the many Japanese corporations that operate in their districts to acknowledge the history of the American POWs who slaved for them.

The American POWs of Japan and their families have paid a high price for the freedoms we cherish. What they ask in return for their sacrifices and service is for their government, even after 70 years, is to keep its moral obligation to them. They do not want their history ignored or exploited. They do not ask for further compensation. What they want most is to have their government stand by them to ensure they will be remembered, that our allies respect them, and their American history preserved.

Thank you for this opportunity to address your committees.

Ms. Jan Thompson
President
American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor Memorial Society

[Ms. Thompson is a documentary filmmaker. Her recent work is Never the Same: the POW Experience]

Olympian, Airman, POW, Inspiration

On July 3rd, Louis Zamperini died. He had faced death many times as a young man. And defied the "odds" many more. As a POW of Japan he was beaten, starved, degraded, experimented upon, and dehumanized. It was with God's grace that he survived to be 97.

On this coming Christmas Day, the triumph and inspiration of his life will be released as a movie that is based on the still-best seller Unbroken. See below for the just released "unofficial" trailer.

It is hoped that the movie will inspire today's Japanese corporations that used and abused the POWs they requested from Imperial Japan's Army Ministry to finally acknowledge how they treated POWs and to offer an apology. Zamperini, as noted in the essay honoring him below, was tormented by Japanese corporate employees as much as by soldiers.

All the companies that allowed their employees to abuse Zamperini, such as the infamous Bird, to abuse their POW slave laborers still exist: Nippon Express, ShinEtsu Chemical, and Nippon Steel and Sumikin Stainless Corp. (NSSC, formerly Nippon Stainless). Although Bird was a military POW guard, his job was to ensure discipline for the company that used the camp's slave labor. It is likely that he was, like many guards and camp employees, paid by the company. As it was, the companies had already paid the War Ministry for the "white slaves" as they were called.

Farewell to America’s ‘Unbroken’ Hero
The Weekly Standard, July 9, 2014

by Dennis P. Halpin (A former Peace Corps volunteer in Korea and a former adviser on Asian affairs to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at SAIS (Johns Hopkins) and a consultant to the Poblete Analysis Group)

America, just before its Fourth of July birthday, lost one of the greatest of the generation that guided it through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Louis Zamperini was 97, so this was not entirely surprising. Zamperini, the American who couldn’t be broken by Nazis in Berlin or sadistic guards in POW camps in Japan, had been designated to be the grand marshal of the 2015 Tournament of Roses parade. My grandfather, a World War I veteran, used to say “give me my roses while I’m alive.” Unfortunately, the Rose Parade organizing committee waited too long. (Zamperini will still be honored posthumously as grand marshal next New Year’s Day.)

“Lucky Louie,” as he called himself, was a rambunctious kid from an immigrant family, who learned to use his fists after being picked on in school for speaking the broken English he learned from his Italian father. He referred to himself in his memoirs as “a rebel with a chip on his shoulder,” sort of like one of those Hollywood “Little Rascals” for which his prewar generation was famous. After several run-ins with the Torrance, Calif., police and the local parish priest, Louie’s older brother Pete introduced him to athletic running as a means of focusing his energy. Louie began competing in track in what he referred to in his book Devil at My Heels as “the first wise decision of my life.”

The rest is history. The track record of “the Torrance Tornado” took him all the way to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and a handshake with Hitler himself. Louie did not medal—he said he was saving that for the anticipated 1940 Tokyo Olympics. (Zamperini, of course, made it to Japan, but only as a POW slave laborer.)

But Zamperini had run an astonishing 56 seconds in the final quarter mile of the 5,000 meter event in Berlin so the Fuehrer wanted to meet him. Goebbels brought Zamperini to Hitler who observed, “you’re the boy with the fast finish.” Louie said the American athletes in 1936 considered Hitler “only as a dangerous clown.”

Louie still had some of his rambunctious qualities because, on a tour of Berlin with a teammate, he decided that he wanted a swastika souvenir when they stopped in front of the Reich Chancellery to take photos. As they stood there Hitler again appeared with a contingent of armed guards and went inside. After the building’s guards had goose-stepped past, Louis made a run for the building, climbed a flag pole and grabbed a Nazi banner. The guards saw Zamperini as he attempted to make his escape, shouted “halt” and started firing. Louie wisely stopped and was handcuffed. However, upon seeing his Olympic uniform and hearing that he had wanted the swastika as a souvenir, the German commandant of the building let “Lucky Louie” keep the banner.

It was in the Pacific Theater where Louis Zamperini made his name as a war hero. Anticipating America’s entry into the war, he enlisted in the army in September 1941. He went to Officers Candidate and bombardier school in Midland, Texas. In October 1942 he was assigned as an Army Air Corps second lieutenant to Hickam Field in Honolulu with the B24 bombing unit of the Forty-second Squadron. His first raid took place on Christmas Eve, 1942, the target was Japanese-occupied Wake Island.

On May 26, 1943, in an aircraft dubbed the Green Hornet, which Zamperini noted “couldn’t fly straight,” he and his fellow crew members crash landed in the Pacific. His harrowing 47 days on the high seas, including near starvation (his weight dropped to 67 pounds), thirst, encounters with sharks, killing and eating raw sea birds, and the death at sea of a fellow crew member, are graphically recorded in Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption. That story will also be retold in a movie directed by Angelina Jolie which is to be released in December.

Zamperini and another crewmember, Second Lieutenant Russell Phillips, were captured by the Japanese and taken first to the island of Kwajalein and then to mainland Japan as POWs. His parents received a letter from President Franklin Roosevelt informing them that their son had “died in the service of his country” and that “he stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live.” His mother, however, never gave up hope that he was alive.

Louis Zamperini’s treatment as a brutalized prisoner of war continues to have relevance today because of the ongoing debate in Asia over Japan’s war crimes. Article 2 of the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War reads: “They must at all times be humanly treated and protected, particularly against acts of violence, insults and public curiosity. Measures of reprisal against them are prohibited.” The death rates of American POWs held by Nazi Germany and Japan during the Second World War provide a stark contrast. Statistics indicate that only 1,121 of 93,941 U.S. POWs died in Nazi internment camps (a rate of about 1.1 percent) while 13,851 of 36,260 POWs died while in Imperial Japanese custody (a rate of 38.2 percent.) This is evidence not only of abuse and brutality but of clear violations of the Geneva Convention by Imperial Japanese authorities.

Zamperini became aware of these violations from his first days of captivity on Kwajalein. A native islander, who worked for the Japanese, approached him in his cell because of his Olympic notoriety. This person informed him that the nine U.S. Marines who had left messages scrawled in Zamperini’s cell had been summarily executed, “decapitated with a samurai sword.” Zamperini described how his guards taunted him and his crewmate: “they jabbed us with sticks, spit on us, tossed hot tea in our faces. Sometimes they made us sing and dance—as if we could—for their amusement.” He also observed Comfort Women, the current focus of so much historic controversy, while imprisoned on Kwajalein. In his memoirs, he recorded: “on the way I passed two somber young girls, very out of place in a combat zone. They shuffled and stared at the ground.”

Later, on the prison ship transporting him to mainland Japan, guards examined Zamperini’s wallet. There they discovered a Stars and Stripes newspaper clipping regarding his Olympic background and his participation in the Wake Island raid. They were so angered that they broke his nose. He was transferred to a series of POW camps where he spent the next two years as a slave laborer. “Brutal beatings, with fist or club, were the daily rule,” he recorded.

Zamperini made a mental note of guards and officials who were especially brutal and sadistic in their treatment of the POWs. At Camp Ofuna, in the foothills near Yokohama [Kamakura], there was a medic named Kitamura, nicknamed “the Quack,” who sadistically beat POW Marine Bill Harris almost to death for concealing a map of Allied military advances. There was James Sasaki, who had attended USC with Louis Zamperini, undercover as a Japanese spy, and then returned to Japan to become the head interrogator for the prison camp system. Above all, there was Sergeant Matsuhiro Watanabe, who was assigned to Camp Omori, where Louis was transferred, and was nicknamed “the Bird.” Zamperini described him as “deranged, brutal beyond belief.” He took a personal dislike to “Lucky Louie” and tormented him both verbally and with great physical brutality.

“The Bird” disappeared near the war’s end and hid in the mountains of Japan for seven or eight years, until a general amnesty, to escape trial as a war criminal (Watanabe had been classified as a class-A war criminal, number 23 of the top 40 most wanted men, for his crimes against humanity.) When Louis returned to Japan in1998 to carry the torch for the Winter Olympics in Nagano, near the site of his final internment camp, he asked to meet with Watanabe, who had been located by journalists. Louis wanted closure and reconciliation but “the Bird,” in a final act of degradation, refused to meet with him. (Decades earlier, after hearing Reverend Billy Graham preach, Louie had met some of his other captors in Japan and had forgiven them all.)

At that last internment facility, Camp 4-B [Naoestu], near Nagano, where Louis Zamperini would return over a half century later, Louis and his fellow POWs were forced to engage in slave labor for Japanese corporations: “every day, gangs marched to the nearby steel mill, train yard and port. Although we had shoes, most of us walked the two miles to work barefoot in the March snow and ice, our feet wrapped in rags, because the Bird had a rule: whoever had dirty shoes got beaten and had to lick them clean.”

Two of the companies for which Louie and his fellow prisoners were forced to labor, Shinetsu Chemical and Nippon Stainless [NSSC], continue to exist today. A number of these corporations which used slave labor also continue to do business in the United States. As former POW Edward Jackfert pointed out in a recent article in the National Interest, Sumitomo, Kawasaki, and Mitsui, all of which used POW slave labor in their wartime factories, have sold rail cars which run on Virginia’s VRE rail line. Yet, unlike German corporations, which used slave labor, these corporations have never offered an apology to our old soldiers who are slowly fading away.

In 2000, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to a “multi-million pound compensation package” for former British prisoners of war in Japan in recognition of their “appalling” experiences—ex gratia payments from the UK government. As a result of Blair’s example, legislation was introduced in Congress which instead sought direct compensation for America’s POWs from Japanese corporations rather than from the U.S. taxpayer—the “Justice for the U.S. POWs Act of 2001”—with bipartisan sponsorship from two legislators from Louis Zamperini’s home state of California, Dana Rohrabacher and Mike Honda.

The bill was designed “to preserve certain actions in Federal court brought by members of the United States Armed Forces held as prisoners of war by Japan during World War II against Japanese nationals seeking compensation for mistreatment or failure to pay wages in connection with labor performed in Japan to the benefit of the Japanese nationals.” The legal bureau of the State Department, however, supported the Japanese government’s position that all such claims were settled by the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, so the proposed legislation got nowhere. There has thus been no formal U.S. recognition of the debt owed our POW slave laborers.

Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States, Ichiro Fujisaki, did take an important step in offering his government’s first official apology in 2009 to survivors of the Bataan Death March at their organization’s final national convention in San Antonio, Texas. Ambassador Fujisaki stated, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News, "As former prime ministers of Japan have repeatedly stated: The Japanese people should bear in mind that we must look into the past to learn from the lessons of history. We extend a heartfelt apology for our country having caused tremendous damage and suffering to many people, including prisoners of war, those who have undergone tragic experiences in the Bataan Peninsula, in Corregidor Island in the Philippines and other places.” [NB: No official  text of this speech has ever been issued. The exact apology words used in Japanese are unknown.]

Perhaps the passing of the “Unbroken” Louis Zamperini will be an occasion for Japanese corporations involved in slave labor to join in extending their apologies to the dwindling number of America’s World War II POW veterans. Is saying sorry so hard? “Lucky Louie” certainly wouldn’t think so.

Japan's War on History Comes to America

On February 6, 2014, the foreign policy journal The National Interest ran on its award-wining opinion pages, an essay by ADBC former National Commander Edward Jackfert. Mr Jackfert, 92, lives in Wellsburg, West Virginia and Tampa, Florida. For many years he was in charge of the ADBC's legislative agenda and saw first hand both on the national and state level Japanese government lobbying undermine the American POWs of Japan efforts for justice. His experience, thus, motivated him to write the following:

Ed Jackfert

Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has a promise to keep. And it is a promise that tests his and any American governor’s ability to stand up for his constituents against economic blackmail. During his campaign he vowed to support having school textbooks note that the Sea of Japan is also called the East Sea. Japan has reacted to this small addendum by threatening to withhold trade and investment from the Commonwealth.

Japanese ambassador Kenichiro Sasae and a pack of lobbyists have warned Governor McAuliffe that allowing two names for the body of water between Japan and South Korea, North Korea, and Russia would endanger Japanese investment in the State. The Japanese government wants to retain a linguistic vestige of Western expansionism and Japanese colonialism. Korea was a colony of Japan through half of the twentieth century and was forced to abandon its language, geography, history and culture.

As a former prisoner of war of Japan, I am familiar with the Japanese government’s use of economic threats to defend its colonial era history and unwillingness to take responsibility for Imperial Japan’s war crimes. Tokyo used these against legislation in 2001 in West Virginia to kill a resolution calling on the Japan to offer a formal apology and compensation to former prisoners of war.

In the spring of 2001, the Rules Committee of the West Virginia House of Delegates unanimously approved House Concurrent Resolution No. 7. As this happened at the end of the legislative session (81st), the full House did not have time to consider the resolution. I was assured that it would be approved in House and Senate in the following year during the 82nd Legislature.

Japan’s Consul General in New York reacted to this delay by sending a letter to West Virginia legislators, Governor, and others stating that the “positive cooperation and strong economic ties” between Japan and West Virginia might be damaged if the resolution was approved. Japan would not buy the state’s coal and steel. His warning was successful and the result was that neither chamber of the Legislature ever reconsidered the resolution.

The Japanese government’s repeated intervention in efforts to set history straight is a painful reminder of the indignities I endured at the hands of my Japanese captors. I was a U.S. Army Air Corps mechanic, surrendered on May 6, 1942 at the fall of the Philippines. I became one of the thousands of POWs shipped to Japan in fetid holds aboard “hell ships” owned by Kawasaki's K-Line or Mitsubishi's NYK. In Japan, I was brutalized and humiliated as a slave laborer by four prominent Japanese companies during World War II. I was forced to work for Mitsui, Nippon Steel, Showa Denko, and Nisshin Flour Mills*.

There were over sixty Japanese companies that used American and Allied POWs as well as Dutch, Indian, Korean, and Chinese civilians for slave labor. Most are major corporations that still exist and likely do business in Virginia. None have acknowledged or apologized for their use and abuse of these unwilling workers.

Virginians once questioned why a French company (Keolis) that is unapologetic for the Holocaust is allowed to service their VRE rail line. They should now ask why Sumitomo, Kawasaki, and Mitsui rail cars run on the VRE. Conditions in their factory camps (yes, plural) rivaled the inhumanity in those of the Nazis.

I think the Virginia governor should stand up to Japanese threats and ask that maybe it’s time for a means test of corporate responsibility for Japanese companies that want state contracts. Too many Virginians, native born and immigrant, suffered horribly for these companies to now allow them to operate with impunity in the Commonwealth.

No governor should allow a foreign government to blackmail his state. Further, no American should allow a foreign government the opportunity to again humiliate its once subjugated peoples. In the end, Governor McAuliffe must decide what lesson that he wants Virginia’s school children to learn: that there are reasonable alternatives to geographic names or that their governor can be swayed by intimidation.

*See this link for descriptions of POW camps:
Toyko 17B (Nisshin Flour Milling), Tokyo 16B (Showa Denko), Tokyo 2B (Mitsui), and Tokyo 5D (Japan Steel Pipe, today's JFE Holdings).

Edward Jackfert, a native of Wellsburg, WV, was a POW of Japan captured on Mindanao, The Philippines. He was twice National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor

Will the POW's reconciliation tours to Japan end?

POW’s Japan reconciliation tours may end

George Summers of Riverside, California said he was captured shortly after the start of the war with Japan and spent nearly four years as a POW.

BY Mark   Muckenfuss
The Press-Enterprise, January 04, 2013

Riverside resident George Summers may be one of the last World War II prisoners of war to participate in a reconciliation tour with Japan.

Summers, 90, spent the entire war in Japanese prison camps. In October, he traveled to Japan with a group of other former POWs, visiting some of the sites where he was held captive and talking to school children and community leaders about his experiences.

The tour is meant to serve both as an apology by the Japanese government for how Summers and others were treated during the war, and as a way to educate younger generations about the culture of the time.

Four out of 10 Americans never made it out of Japan’s prison camps. The men were routinely starved and beaten at the same time they were being ordered to perform strenuous manual labor such as moving rocks, digging coal or unloading freight.

The Japanese government has apologized to those who were held as prisoners during the war and for years has sponsored reconciliation trips for former POWs. But not American POWs. Only in the past three years have groups from the United States been invited.

Lester Tenney, 90, a former POW who recounted his war experiences in a book called “My Hitch in Hell,” said he found out about the trips because of a close relationship he had with Ichiro Fujisaki, the former Japanese ambassador to the United States.

Tenney said he was upset when he found out that American POWs had been excluded.

Fujisaki passed along Tenney’s complaint, and the Japanese government responded. Tenney, who lives in Carlsbad, said he was asked to arrange a tour of American POWs. The first group of 14 went in 2010. He also organized groups in 2011 and 2012.

Now, he feels like he is getting to old to continue to substantial work it takes to keep setting up the tours.
“If they ask me to do it,” Tenney said, “I may just recommend somebody else.”

Finding someone may not be easy.

“There’s not a lot of people around that would be willing to do this,” Tenney said. “It can’t be a POW, because they’re all sick and old. They’re like me.”

LESSONS FROM WAR
Summers said he hopes the program will continue. He believes it’s beneficial for the younger generations to hear first-hand about the horrors inflicted on the 27,000 American POWs by the Japanese military. He especially wants to show youngsters how terrible war can be.

After sharing his experience with a group of Japanese fifth-graders, he said, he tried to relate it to their mindset.

“I told them, ‘What would it be like if you, who are 10 years old, just eight years later had to go through this?’” he said. “I said, ‘War is the curse of mankind.’”

Summers was 18 when he enlisted in the Marine reserves in his hometown of Pasadena. Activated later that year, he was one of the first Americans captured during the war. He was part of a small contingent on Guam when the island was attacked just minutes after the first wave of Japanese planes swept into Pearl Harbor. He was on guard duty at the time.

He recalled seeing villagers from the town below scrambling up the hill toward the base as they were strafed by Japanese planes. There was no order or coordinated counterattack by the Americans, he said. When a bomb blast at a barracks wounded him in the leg, he and a fellow Marine fled into the nearby coconut groves.

They hid for two days, believing that if they surrendered, they would be killed. In desperation, Summers took off his T-shirt and waved it as a flag of surrender. Instead of facing bullets, he said, they were treated kindly.

“We were the only ones that were treated good by the Japanese,” he said. The soldier guarding them gave them rice and corned beef. “I liked that Japanese guy.” It didn’t last.

Aboard a transport ship to Japan, he said, “they were throwing us rotten rice and radishes. A lot of it had maggots in it.” Dysentery was rampant.

“We lost two or three (men) on the ship,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

Many more were lost in the camps. He spent six months in the notorious prison camp at Tanagawa, near Osaka, known for the severe malnutrition and high death rate among its POWs.

“We were supposed to get a rice ball and a pickled radish at noontime,” he said. “If you got sick they gave you nothing but liquid rice.”

Bombing by allied planes forced a move to another camp, Umida Bonshu, also in Osaka. Conditions there were far better.

“I gained some weight there because things were good,” he said.

FIGHTING STARVATION
Of the nearly four years Summers spent in captivity, nearly three were spent working at Umida Bonshu [Umeda Bunsho, near Osaka run by Nippon Express, still a thriving company] as a stevedore, unloading freighters.

But six months before the war was over, he was moved again. He found himself in Fushiki, on the west coast of Honshu. The conditions were the most dire he had faced.

“The whole time it was a matter of getting food,” he said. “We were starving to death. There was nothing to eat there but raw soy beans.”
He resorted to desperate measures.

“We had to clean out the Japanese toilets,” he said.

Among the human waste, he said, were undigested soy beans that had been swallowed whole.

“I was picking out the soy beans and washing them off. I was eating them like crazy.”

Whether his fellow prisoners were doing the same when they had latrine duty, he doesn’t know.

“Nobody talked about stuff like that at the time,” he said.

Summers said he had a hard time readjusting to civilian life after the war.

He left the service and spent seven years in the Merchant Marine, going on to work for General Telephone [GTE] and as a financial clerk for the city of Anaheim. He has lived in his Riverside home, with an orange grove next to his house, since 1972 and still works in real estate investment.

Although a curio cabinet in his home is filled with Japanese figures, and a Japanese curtain hangs in the doorway of his office, his recent trip was the first time he had visited the country since the 1950s. He believes one of the docks he saw in a harbor might have been there during the war. If so, it was the only landmark he recognized.

“It’s all new,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place. The people are so kind.”

A few of the people he met there may not have felt the same way about him.

“The only ones that haven’t apologized are the companies that we worked for. To this day, they still don’t want to compensate the POWs for the slave labor we provided. I mentioned it to them when we met with officials with Mitsubishi.

“Everybody thought I was going to start another world war over there,” he said with a laugh.

Corporate Responsibility

One of Mitsubishi's POW camps

On January 26th, the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's leading newspapers, published an essay by Ms. Kinue Tokudome, Executive Director of the US-Japan Dialogue on POWs. In it, she appeals to Japan's corporations that want to be viewed as responsible, international good corporate citizens to admit their use and abuse of POW slave labor. Ms. Tokudome has written extensively on POW slave labor in Japan and the need for corporate accountability similar to that in Germany. Below is an English translation.

My View Point
Courage to Face the History: Apology for former POWs

“Please tell us how our wartime colleagues treated you. We want to learn, too.” For the two former American POWs who visited Japan Metals & Chemicals Co. (JMC)’s Takaoka Works (Toyama prefecture) last October, Director Takashi Toriyama’s words sounded as if they were wiping away their pain that they had not been able to forget for 66 years.

Mr. Harold Bergbower (91) and Mr. James Collier (88) were among the seven former American POWs invited to Japan by the Foreign Ministry. It was during the Pacific War in September of 1944, that the two men first set foot on Takaoka. One hundred and fifty American POWs were brought here from the Philippines to become forced laborers for JMC’s predecessor company, Hokkai Denka Kogyo.

Already weakened POWs were forced to perform dangerous work near open furnaces. Food and medicine were not adequate and 13 POWs died by the end of the war.

I accompanied the two former POWs who traveled a long distance to visit Takaoka. Mr. Toriyama welcomed them and started the conversation by saying, “My late father was also a Siberian internee and I felt as if you were my own father when I received the request on your visit from the Foreign Ministry.”

Ms. Debra Bergbower-Grunwald, the daughter of Mr. Bergbower, described what followed this initial exchange at a press conference in Tokyo a few days later:

I saw friendship that happened between generations, between the generation from the Japan Metals Company and these two former POWs, sitting down at a small table, drawing a diagram, and discussing what the camp history was in 1944. And those men laughing and talking and communicating. That was where the friendship was. And that peace of mind helped and is helping my father at the age of 91. I want to thank the Japanese government for helping my father with this.

During WWII, nearly 36,000 Allied POWs were held at approximately 130 POW camps throughout Japan and forced to work for more than 60 Japanese companies. About 10% of them died in Japan. However, companies like Japan Metals & Chemicals, which are willing to welcome former POWs, are the exception. Most companies that enslaved POWs have not even acknowledged their use of POWs as forced laborers.

A resolution has been introduced in US Congress requesting that the Government of Japan respect the wishes and sensibilities of the United States former prisoners of war by encouraging those Japanese companies to do the right thing. [H Res 333]

President of POWs' Descendants Group also submitted a written testimony for the hearing on California High Speed Rail held last month by the House of Representatives, asking those Japanese companies that are planning to bid for the project to respect their father’s dignity by acknowledging the history of POW forced labor and apologizing for it.

Former American POWs are not asking for compensation. The only thing they wish is to restore their dignity while they are alive and to have their history remembered by future generations. I hope that those Japanese companies that enslaved them will have the courage to face the history. There is not much time left.

God Bless Albert Brown

Albert Brown, America's oldest survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March and the oldest living American Veteran of WW II, died August 14th. The New York Times and most other major market newspapers reported his passing.

The Bataan Death March is considered one of the worst war crimes of World War II. With the April 9th surrender of the troops on Bataan in The Philippines, the Times reports:

With many already close to death, they [American and Filipino troops and civilians] were forced to trudge [65 miles]  toward a prisoner-of-war camp during a torrid time of year with little food or water. Those who stopped were killed. Japanese soldiers fractured skulls with rifle butts and cut off heads. Prisoners who tried to help fallen comrades were bludgeoned or stabbed. “One 18-year-old I knew, he fell down,” Mr. Brown said in the book [see below]. “A guard came along and put a gun to his head, pulled the trigger and walked away.” 

As horrific as the Death March was, the next three years as a slave laborer for the Mitsui Mining Company (today known as Nippon Coke & Enginieering Company which is now owned by Mitsui, Sumitomo and Nippon Steel) in Bibai, Hokkaido was worse.  The Mitsui POW camp that held Mr. Brown included 238 British, 50 Americans, 53 Dutch, 8 Australians, one Canadian, and one Estonian (as recorded 15 August 1945). There were 114 POW deaths from abuse, malnutrition, disease, and lack of medical care. The Times reports: 

The nightmare was hardly over when the survivors [of the Bataan Death March] arrived at the camp, or at the other camps in Japan to which many, including Captain Brown, were later taken. In three years in captivity Captain Brown was regularly beaten; thrown down stairs, seriously injuring his back; and struck in the neck by a rifle butt, causing a fracture. Though nearly 6 feet, he weighed 90 pounds when he was freed after the Japanese surrender. 

Captain Brown's injuries were so severe that he was not expected to survive more than a few years after liberation. To learn more about his experiences as a POW of Japan and his inspiration for survival, see a new biography about him, Forsaken Heroes of the Pacific War: One Man’s True Story (2011).

Captain Brown's congressman is Jerry F. Costello (D-IL) who participates on both the Army and Air Force Caucuses. Representative Brown has NOT yet become a co-sponsor of H. Res. 333 honoring veterans like Captain Brown who were POWs of Japan (August 17, 20011).

The use of forced labor in Japan's mines was not unusual. A Japanese-government study of the history of coal mining on Hokkaido notes that the use of prisoners was the most effective sourcing for mining labor on the sparsely-populated island.

Mitsui is Japan's oldest and largest trading company. It operates in 67 countries and is involved in many projects in the U.S. You can find information on its early history HERE. Mitusi operated the greatest number of POW camps in Japan as well as owned the most "Hellships" that transported POWs to Japan and its colonies.

Requests to obtain an apology from Mitsui for its use of and profit from POW slave labor have gone unanswered. Mitsui's corporate social responsibility charter, is founded upon its published values, which begin with the company's commitment to: Build trust with fairness and humility. If you want to ask Mitsui why it refuses to apologize for its extensive use and abuse of POW slave labor, fax its Washington, DC office, (202) 861-0437 or call (202) 861-0660 or email.