UNESCO and Japan’s Rewriting of History

At UNESCO, Japan lays bare the difficulties of achieving shared values within the Quad.

By Mindy L. Kotler

Originally published in The Diplomat, July 23, 2021
This version is slightly revised for clarity

On July 22nd, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, comprising the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, faced its first test. Unexpectedly, it came at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The focus was on Japan, not China, and the result reveals how fragile the idea of shared, universal values is for this multilateral coalition. As things stand, Japan is a willful outlier.

At the World Heritage Committee’s 44th virtual session, there was a review of several previously designated Japanese World Industrial Heritage sites that were the scene of war crimes in World War II. Americans, Australians, and Indians were among the thousands of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) brought to Japan during the war. They became slave laborers in various private mines, chemical factories, and steel mills, and on docks critical to support Imperial Japan’s war effort.

These very mines, foundries, and wharves were selected by Japan to represent its “Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.” The Japanese, however, left out any mention of this forced labor and abuse, which was the substance of the hundreds of war crimes trials throughout the postwar Pacific.

UNESCO approved the designations in 2015 but conditioned the designations on a promise to provide a “full history” of these sites. Yet, six years later, Japan has not fulfilled this promise. Japan’s forced colonial workers from Korea are given slight mention, although Japan refuses to admit they were unwilling or unhappy. The POWs, which included soldiers, civilians, and mariners from Ireland, Egypt, Norway, Argentina, Jamaica, Portugal, Italy, and Arabia are unmentioned in any official publications, whether at the particular sites or at the Tokyo Industrial Heritage Information Center, which was opened in March 2020.

On July 12, 2021, a UNESCO draft decision noted that Japan still had to improve its interpretive strategy. The reprimand of Japan’s unwillingness to tell the “full history” of these properties was approved July 22. The Committee believes measures are still necessary to “allow an understanding of a large number of Koreans and others” who were forced or slave laborers. 

Unfortunately, UNESCO identifies POWs only as “others. This euphemism affirms Japan’s effort to censor its war crimes and rewrite the history of World War II. UNESCO members Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Norway, and the Netherlands need to insist that “others” means their veterans.

To satisfy UNESCO’s directive to include “others,” it is implied that Japan must acknowledge that five of the UNESCO industrial heritage sites — Hagi, Kamaishi, Miike, Nagasaki, and Yawata — held 26 POW camps during the war and provided more than 13,000 POW slave laborers from over 16 countries to Japan’s industrial giants, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Nippon Steel.

The Miike Coal Mine (Fukuoka #17) warrants particular attention. The mine, owned by the Mitsui conglomerate, was Japan’s largest. Nearly 2,000 Allied POWs suffered capricious brutality and starvation in deadly and primitive conditions. Hundreds died. American POWs were so desperate for a respite from the coal pits that they traded their meager rice bowls for someone to break their arms or legs.

Kamaishi’s industrial area (Sendai #4B and Sendai #5B) is also illustrative of missing war history. The site was the first to be bombed by U.S. Navy warships off Japan’s unguarded coastline. The iron works at this site, still owned by Nippon Steel, were among Japan’s largest. On July 14, 1945, more than 40 American, Dutch, New Zealand, and British POWs as well as hundreds of Japanese were killed in the bombardment.

Nippon Steel’s Yawata’s steel works (Fukuoka #3) was Japan’s most important armament manufacturer. The workforce was primarily composed of POWs who endured intense manual labor shoveling iron ore and tending the furnaces. Yawata was the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Cloud cover from aerial bombing on August 8, 1945, shifted the mission to Nagasaki, close to the Miike Coal Mine.

Japan’s unstated history of Allied slave labor at its UNESCO sites is part of a larger trend of the government’s rewriting history. The narratives presented at Japan’s industrial heritage sites also diminish the use of Korean forced labor and Chinese slave labor. This all dovetails with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s quest to retell Japan’s story in an uncritical, more glorious manner. So important was the UNESCO heritage designation to the former Abe administration that one cabinet adviser had the sole job of shepherding the application through UNESCO.

Highlighting the effort to annul history was last August’s 75th anniversary memorial address for the end of World War II. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, unlike his predecessors, did not mention, “learning from history” or having “remorse.” Instead, he said “we will never forget that the peace and prosperity we enjoy today was built atop the precious sacrifices of the war dead.”

This ahistorical take on Japan’s disastrous war is not a reassurance to UNESCO that Japan will correct the histories of its industrial heritage sites. Nor does it comfort the Quad allies that their shared history will not be recognized and reflected upon. Upholding historical facts is a value of democracy now being undermined by Japan as rapidly as in authoritarian China or Hungary. Japan’s defiance of UNESCO’s recommendations to explain the “full history” of its cultural properties shows how fragile the Quad’s so-called unifying principles are.

Mindy L. Kotler is director and founder of Asia Policy Point, a Washington think tank focused on Northeast Asia. She is also an adviser to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society that represents the American POWs of Japan and their families.

Japan still struggles to escape its wartime past - of Slave Labor

South Korean court revives disputes that should have been settled long ago

By William Pesek, Nikkei Asian Review, November 1, 2018

Memories may fade, but history does not die away so easily, especially when competing versions of the past are at stake.

So, it is hardly a surprise that Japan's controversial Second World War record has once more been thrust into the limelight.

In the latest development, on Oct. 30, the South Korean Supreme Court ordered Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, two Japanese manufacturing companies active in the war, to pay $88,000 each to four Koreans as compensation for unpaid work between 1941 and 1943.

Far from trying to defuse the situation, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe immediately rejected the ruling, called it "impossible under international law."

When a quiet response might have reaped results -- and won time for reflection -- Abe pledged to hang tough, saying Tokyo "will handle this situation with firmness."

Japan argues that a 1965 Tokyo-Seoul treaty covers all manner of past sins. It normalized bilateral relations tainted by 35 years of colonial rule in Korea from 1910 to 1945. From Tokyo's standpoint, all issues concerning wartime labor were resolved 53 years ago and it is time Asia moved on.

Fair or not, that narrative is not traveling or aging well. If a court ruling involving four people (three of whom are dead) makes Abe and other Japanese nationalists squirm, imagine what lies in store if more Korean claimants pile in. Or if Chinese victims of Japanese rule again make their voices heard with Beijing egging them on.

Nor, unfortunately for Tokyo, is concern about Japan's wartime past limited to Northeast Asia. In the U.S., for example, Korean-Americans, are becoming quite skilled at hitting a particularly sensitive target: wartime "comfort women." Last month, Osaka ended its sister city relationship with San Francisco over a monument to wartime sex slaves -- a description not accepted by Japan.

With Tokyo still unable to reconcile its historical narrative with those of countries that it once occupied, the arguments will continue to cast an awkward shadow over present-day Japan, and Abe's efforts to reassert Japan's international influence.

Abe may technically be correct to argue that the 1965 treaty was final, but the law often does not have the last word in these painful historical disputes. Public pressure forced German companies to pay compensation to wartime forced laborers in the 1990s, long after the German government signed similar government-to-government agreements.

Moreover, Japan will be under particular international scrutiny over the next two years as it stages two global events important for its soft power -- the 2019 Rugby World Cup and 2020 Summer Olympics.

If Abe's team handles the Seoul court setback badly, it could create a fresh opening for international debate over World War II questions Tokyo would prefer see closed.

Bashing the neighbors for domestic gain is a tried-and-true North Asian strategy. It could reemerge given how both South Korean president Moon and Chinese leader Xi Jinping find themselves in precarious situations at home.

Moon faces a slowing economy and growing anger over his preoccupation with North Korean detente. While an important endeavor, Moon was elected in May 2017 to rein in the excesses of family-owned conglomerates and pivot to a "trickle-up" economic model. Moon's neglect of major reforms is depressing support for his administration. What better way than rally enthusiasm than bashing Japan?

Moon's left-leaning government earlier upended the 2015 comfort women deal Abe forged with his predecessor Park Geun-hye. Moon claimed a vast majority of Koreans "cannot emotionally accept" a deal many felt lacked sincerity -- or teeth, given the paltry 1 billion yen ($8.8 million) provided for a victims' fund.

We will see how Moon's party plays the issue going forward. One potential flashpoint: next year's 100th anniversary of the so-called March First Movement. Moon has set up a task force to plan the commemoration of a historic uprising against Japan's annexation.

But it is high time Japan raised its diplomatic game. For starters, Tokyo should accept the Korean Supreme Court ruling rather than lashing out as if an international body can intervene and overturn the judgment. Japan needs to realize, as Germany has long done, that below the legal element, these controversies have huge emotional and political depths.

My point here is not to compare Imperial Japan's leaders with Adolf Hitler's Nazis. But the historic tensions are getting in the way of the future. Something has been terribly lost in translation. Japan's government feels it clearly and adequately atoned for the 1930s and 1940s. Yet the outside world has never quite warmed to that position.

The problem, says Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan, is Tokyo's "been there, done that" approach.

Abe hardly seems ideal for finding new ways to reconciliation. His obsession with a "beautiful Japan" has long been freighted with nationalism -- from more patriotic school curricula to revising the pacifist postwar constitution so Tokyo can field a conventional military.

But this hawkish leader rightly seeks to open Japan. He has signed free-trade deals, eased curbs on immigration, highlighted the need for more women in the workforce and, yes, worked to mend fences with neighbors. The urgency for such steps is increasing with President Donald Trump's trade war.

To "escape the shackles of the past," Kingston says, Tokyo "needs to be humble about history. The future depends on managing the shared past."

For Japan, this must start at home. Tokyo's principal museum recording the Second World War is located at the Yasukuni Shrine where millions of dead soldiers are enshrined, including convicted war criminals headed by Gen. Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister. The museum's view is nationalist, to put it mildly, with only limited references to Japanese atrocities. It is time to prepare a more balanced public record.

One unavoidable discussion: reparations, which Tokyo has long dreaded. It has preferred to keep its head down, lavish overseas development assistance around Asia and hope things blow over.

The Seoul ruling is a reminder that they are not going away. Some 70 Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, face unpalatable judgments in 15 similar cases.

As the strongest Japanese leader in decades, Abe has the power to act boldly. No one really expects him to follow Willy Brandt and fall to his knees in remorse as did the German statesman in Warsaw in 1970.

But moving beyond Japan's wartime legacy requires serious action. Otherwise, Abe will struggle to burnish his stature as a world leader -- and Tokyo will be hit by new damaging court rulings.

William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and author of "Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan's Lost Decades." He was given the 2018 prize for excellence in opinion writing by the Society of Publishers in Asia, for his work for the Nikkei Asian Review.

Daughters and Widows of POWs in Japan

Steele (L) Pruitt (R)

In October 2017, by invitation of the Japanese government, two widows and four daughters of former POWs of Japan visited the sites of their loved one's enslavement. They visited a now closed Ube Industries coal mine, the location of Japan's "show" camp, and Dowa Industries' copper mine in Sendai. Below are brief profile of the POWs and the women who returned to Japan.

Ben Steele, who became a well-known artist in Montana, was the focus of, Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and its Aftermath. His widow and the widow Charles Pruitt visited the Ube Industries coal mine in Yamaguchi Prefecture where their husbands were slave laborers.

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BENJAMIN CHARLES STEELE

Shirley Emerson Steele, 92, is the widow of Benjamin Charles Steele. They met while he was teaching at the high school in New London, Ohio and were married August 31, 1952. Active in the Billings First United Methodist Church, Mrs. Steele taught English at the local high school before devoting herself to raising their adopted son Sean. She is accompanied by her step-daughter Rosemarie Steele, 70, who recently retired after 32 years as Wheatland Country, Montana elected treasurer. She is active in the local Kiwanis Club and was one of the club’s first five women members. She is Mr. Steele’s older daughter from his first marriage.

Benjamin Charles Steele was born November 17, 1917 in the small Montana town of Roundup and grew up riding horses, roping cattle, and occasionally delivering supplies to the well-known western artist Will James. On September 9, 1940, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps at Fort Missoula, Montana. After basic training at March Field, California, he received instruction at Kirkland Field, Albuquerque, New Mexico to be an aircraft dispatcher and was assigned to the 7th Materiel Squadron, 19th Bombardment Group. He arrived in the Philippines aboard the USAT Willard A. Holbrook on October 23, 1941.

He was at Clark Field about 40 miles northwest of Metro Manila on December 8th when Imperial Japan began its invasion of the Philippines by bombing this air field and others. After the near total destruction of the American Far East Air Force by December 10th, Steele and 200 members of the 19th Bomb group were withdrawn to the Bataan Peninsula with men from the 27th Bomb Group to form the 2nd Provisional Infantry Regiment. They had had no training, and many did not even know how to load their WWI Springfield rifles. U.S. and Filipino forces on Bataan were surrendered on April 9, 1942. Steele, at Cabcaben Field near the tip of the Bataan Peninsula, began the Bataan Death March at one of its longest points. For six days he and 75,000 other sick, starving, and exhausted men made their way 65 miles north up to the train junction of San Fernando. From there, they were packed into unventilated boxcars for a 24-mile trip to Capas. The next three miles were by foot to Camp O'Donnell, an unfinished training camp for the Philippine Army. Trying to avoid the constant death at the Camp, Steele joined a group of 300 men selected for the Tayabas Road Detail. The work that was so brutal, and the conditions so harsh tha fewer than half the men survived. Near mortally sick from beri beri, dysentery, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and malaria, Steele was sent to Bilibid Prison on August 15th where he stayed for18 months. Although expected to die, he clung to life and kept his sanity by covertly sketching Montana scenes—cowboys, horses and barns—and the human degradation and cruelty surrounding him. He did so at great risk, as he could have been shot if his sketches were discovered. When able, he was sent to Cabanatuan to do be an agricultural slave labor.

On July 4, 1944, he was loaded aboard the freighter Sekiho Maru (Canadian Inventor), which came to be known as the Mati Mati Maru (Wait Wait Ship). On September 1, after many breakdowns, a typhoon, and a stop in Formosa, the surviving prisoners, their beards long, hair matted, and skin covered with ulcers and open sores, stumbled down the gangway at Moji, Japan. He was taken to Hiroshima # 6B - Omine (Sanyo) in Yamaguchi Prefecture (Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s home prefecture) 75 miles from Hiroshima. He worked in a dangerous mine as a slave laborer for Ube Kosan's Sanyo Muen Kogyo Sho (Ube Industries' Sanyo Smokeless Coal Works, today’s Ube Industries Ltd., the great grandson of Akira Tawarada the first president (1942) of the consolidated Ube Industries, Yoshimasa Hayashi, is currently Japan’s Education Minister). Steele believed he felt the atomic blast at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In mid-September 1945, he was evacuated to the hospital ship USS Consolation, taken to Okinawa and then flown to San Francisco by the 19th Bombardment Group C54 and assigned to Fort George Wright Hospital in Spokane, Washington, where he remained until he was discharged July 10, 1946. Steele painted scenes from his capture as he went through his long recovery, including trying to regain the 80 pounds he lost. “I had lots of problems to work through,” he said, “and the doctors thought the art was a good idea.”

After the war, Steele earned a diploma from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950, a B.S. in Education from Kent State University, and a M.A. in Art from Denver University. While teaching high school art in Ohio, he married his second wife, Shirley on August 31, 1952. He retired in 1982 from Eastern Montana State College (today’s Montana State University Billings) as head of the Art Department. He had many one-man shows of his art and his illustrations appear in over 20 books and several documentaries. His WWII POW collection is at the University of Montana and his sketchbooks are at the MacArthur Memorial Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the focus of Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2010) and the subject of a 2016 documentary by Jan Thompson, Survival Through Art.

He said he learned to forgive his Japanese captors because of his relationship with Harry Koyama, a Japanese-American art student. “He’s been a part of my life since I met him in college in the 1960s,” Koyama, a modern, western artist with a gallery in Billings, said about Steele. “That’s even more of a humbling experience to know that I had not just an effect, but a positive effect on his life.”

Steele passed away September 25, 2016. Hundreds attended his memorial service in the Montana Pavilion at MetraPark. He is buried in Sunset Memorial Gardens, Billings, Montana. On August 24th, 2017, the Ben Steele Middle School opened in Billings.

Philippines POW#: 本-1546
Japan POW#: 359

Congressman: Greg Gianforte (R-MT), https://gianforte.house.gov/


CHARLES L. PRUITT

Doris Jean Pruitt, 88, is the widow of the late Charles Pruitt. Judith Ann Pruitt, 70, is their oldest of three children. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts and worked in property management in Boston for over 20 years and then for the Closet Factory in design/sales for 15 years. She is an active member of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society and serves on their board. Currently, she is the organization’s Treasurer and Convention Chair.

Charles L. Pruitt, one of nine children, was born in Sweetwater, Tennessee on November 6, 1920. He joined the U.S. Navy on September 6, 1940 and received his recruit training in Norfolk, Virginia. His first duty was as a Yeoman aboard the USS Lexington (CV-2). In April 1941, he was transferred to the 16th Naval District at Cavite, Philippines where he was a carpenter’s mate assigned to the Naval Ammunition Depot, Cavite Navy Yard to train as a mine technician. The Navy Yard was bombed and destroyed on December 10, 1941 shortly after Imperial Japan’s invasion. In the immediate aftermath, he helped operate a crane on Sunset Beach, three miles from Cavite, unloading munitions and assisting in the mining of Subic Bay that is about 65 miles northwest of Cavite and Manila.

Like most of the U.S. Navy on the Philippines, he became an infantryman. This makeshift “Navy Infantry” consisted of 150 ground crewmen from Patrol Wing Ten, 80 sailors from the Cavite Naval Ammunition Depot, 130 sailors from USS Canopus (AS-9), 120 sailors from the base facilities at Cavite, Olongapo, and Mariveles, and 120 Marines from an antiaircraft battery. He fought in the Battle of the Points (January 22 to February 18, 1942) at Lapay-Longoskawayan repelling successfully part of a 2,000-strong landing Japanese force.

On February 23rd, most of “Navy battalion” was transferred to Corregidor, three miles from Bataan in Manila Bay. He was assigned beach defense with the 4th Marines under the command of Major Max Clark at Ramsey Ravine, one of the critical points in the defense of the fortress island. Corregidor fell May 6, 1942. The Japanese first moved their nearly 12,000 prisoners on the island to the exposed, rocky beach at the 92nd Garage. There, the POWs waited nearly three weeks (May 24th) in the tropical sun with little food, water or sanitation before they were put in small boats to Manila. After being forced to wade ashore, the POWs were marched through Manila in what has become known as the “March of Shame” to Bilibid Prison POW Camp. From there, by rail and by foot they made their way to Cabanatuan #3 prison camp. In late September 1942, Cabanatuan #3 was closed and the prisoners were relocated to Cabanatuan #1 to be organized for work details. Pruitt was sent to labor at Camp Murphy and Zablan Field. On August 27, 1944, he was among the 1,035 POWs boarded on the Mitsubishi-made “Hell ship” Noto Maru that made its way via Formosa, air raids and sub attacks to Moji, Japan (September 4th).

He was then among 50 men taken to Hiroshima # 6B - Omine (Sanyo) in Yamaguchi Prefecture (Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s home prefecture) 75 miles from Hiroshima. He worked in a dangerous mine as a slave laborer for Ube Kosan's Sanyo Muen Kogyo Sho (Ube Industries' Sanyo Smokeless Coal Work, today’s Ube Industries Ltd., the of great grandson of Akira Tawarada the first president (1942) of the consolidated Ube Industries, Yoshimasa Hayashi, is currently Japan’s Education Minister). Pruitt was one of eight men at the camp who did not wait for liberation forces to arrive at his camp. They somehow made their way down to the south end of the island of Kyushu and met up with American forces. For unknown reasons, he was registered as “liberated at Fukuoka #9 Miyata” a mine in central Kyushu. He proceeded to hitch-hike on air transports from Japan all the way to San Francisco. He briefly stayed at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital took another military transport to Olathe, Kansas where he finished his trip back home to Tennessee via a Trailways bus to Memphis. He spent the next six months at the Naval Hospital in Millington, Tennessee.

After his return to Sweetwater, Tennessee, he married his sister’s friend, Jean DeButy, on October 28, 1946. Their first child, Judith Ann, was born August 5, 1947. He remained in the Navy for 20 years, and retired in 1960 as a Chief Warrant Officer. Pruitt, a talented woodworker, taught cabinet-making at Tennessee schools until 1981. In retirement, he served as Commander of the Smokey Mountain Chapter of American Ex-POW organization (AXPOW). He was also the National Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor for 1994-1995. Mr. Pruitt passed away December 4, 1998 and is buried at the Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery.

Philippines POW#: 1-12247
Japan POW#: 469

Congressman: Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN 3rd)

BURKHART, THOMAS F.

Caroline Burkhart, 70, is the daughter of the late Thomas F. Burkhart. She grew up as an Army “brat” throughout the United States and now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she pursued a career in real estate. She is an experienced researcher of the American POW experience with Imperial Japan and a former vice president of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society.

Thomas F. Burkhart was born May 6, 1914 in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in July 1937 and was assigned as a medical clerk to Hamilton Field, California. In June 1941, he was discharged from the Army Air Corps and commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve. He was immediately sent to the Philippines aboard the SS President Pierce. He arrived June 24th and was assigned to Fort McKinley outside Manila, the headquarters for the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) Philippines Department. He became an officer with the Headquarters Company of the 45th Infantry, Philippine Scouts, an elite U.S. Army unit composed of American officers and Filipino enlisted men. After Imperial Japan’s December 8, 1941 invasion of the Philippines and USAFFE’s December 23rd activation of War Plan Orange-3 (WPO-3), his battalion helped defend the withdrawal of American forces on Luzon to the Bataan Peninsula. Barely a month after being promoted to 1st Lieutenant, on January 24, 1942, he earned a Silver Star for “Gallantry in Action” at the Battle of Abucay Hacienda (January 15-25, 1942) helping maintain the first battle position on Bataan.

Sick with malaria, Burkhart was in the open-air General Hospital #1 near the tip of Bataan when Major General Edward King surrendered the Bataan Peninsula to Japanese forces on April 9, 1942. At the end of the month, the patients were taken by truck up to San Fernando and there made to stand in packed boxcars for the 24-mile trip to Capas, Tarlac. As he told his family, “hell would be a refrigerator” compared with being in these poorly ventilated, rolling prisons that were like ovens under the sweltering tropical sun. As those who endured the Bataan Death March, he was forced to march the last three miles to Camp O’Donnell, a makeshift POW camp from an unfinished Philippine Army training camp. In early June, the Japanese fearing the deaths of all the prisoners from the horrific conditions of the Camp began to release their Filipino POWs and transfer the others to a new facility at Cabanatuan. It is estimated that 1,550 Americans and 22,000 Filipinos died at Camp O’Donnell, the overwhelming majority with the first eight weeks.

On November 6 1942, he was among 1,500 prisoners packed into the coal bunker of the unmarked “Hell ship” Nagato Maru. It took three tortuous weeks for the ship to make its way from the tropics to the cold of Northeast Asia. The ship stopped at Takeo, Formosa before arriving at the port of Moji on Kyushu, Japan. Burkhart nearly blind from malnutrition, was first taken to Osaka POW Camp #4-B Tanagawa. This camp provided POW slave labor for the Toshima Group (today’s Tobishima Corporation) to build a breakwater and submarine base. The camp was notable for having one of the highest death rates among the mainland POW camps. He was soon (January 15 1943), moved to the Hiroshima #1-B Zentsuji POW Camp on the island of Shikoku. Although Zentsuji, is often referred to as a “propaganda show camp,” conditions were harsh and the men were punished for any perceived offense often on a whim of the guard in charge. The enlisted men at the camp were slave stevedores for Nippon Express Co. (Nippon Tsuun) at Sakaide Rail Yards and the Port of Takamatsu. As an officer, Burkhart worked in the camp garden and tried to raise rabbits. On June 23, 1945, he and 334 officers were transferred to POW Camp 11-B Rokuroshi deep in the Japanese Alps near the industrial town of Fukui (destroyed by air raids July 1945). They were to do subsistence farming, even though they had arrived in the camp late in the growing season and no land had been cleared for cultivation. Because Rokuroshi had not been identified by the Japanese government as a POW camp, it was one of the last to be found (September 8, 1945). He was quickly evacuated to Manila on USS Tryon and then sent to San Francisco on the USS Storm King.

Burkhart remained in the Army and made a career with the Quartermaster Corps, retiring in 1957 as a Lt. Colonel in U.S. Army Reserve. Throughout his life he was plagued by health problems most likely caused by the illnesses and hardships of being a POW. For a number of years after retirement, he worked as a government contractor in the food service industry. In 1972, at 57, he passed away and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Philippines POW#: 1-03739
Japan POW#: NA
Congressman: John P. Sarbanes (D-MD 3rd)

JOHN J. MCCORTS

Mary Jane McCorts Blaine, 62, is the daughter of the late John J. McCorts. She is a life-long resident of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and works for the Pennsylvania State Employee Credit Union (PSECU). For the past 20 years, Ms. Blaine has been an active member of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society.

John J. McCorts was born May 19, 1921 in Stillions, Arkansas, the older of two boys, and named for his maternal grandfather. After his parents’ divorce, his family moved to his maternal grandmother’s farm near El Dorado, Arkansas. At some point they moved to Abilene, Texas where he graduated from high school and enlisted in the U.S. Army one year later in 1940. He was trained to be a radio operator with the Signal Corps. Likely sent to Philippines sometime between June and October 1941, his first assignment was with the 228th Signal Operations Company that was constituted on September 2, 1941. It is unclear when in January 1942 or how he moved from Ft. McKinley to Corregidor Island in Manila Bay to work on signals intelligence in the Malinta Tunnel. On May 6, 1942, when Corregidor was surrendered by Major General Jonathan Wainwright, he was taken prisoner while repairing wire near the Tunnel. His family did not know if he was dead or alive until Christmas 1942 and only then through a newspaper article in the Boulder City, Nevada newspaper.

Like most of the 12,000 men on Corregidor, he was moved to the rocky beach at the 92nd Garage, After nearly three weeks (May 24th) in the tropical sun with little food, water or sanitation, they were put in small boats to Manila. The men were then made to wade ashore before being paraded six miles down Dewey Boulevard on a “Victory March” now called the “March of Shame” before the Filipino and foreign residents to the old Spanish-built prison of Bilibid. Many of the POWs were chained together with collar shackles and suffered the Japanese soldiers urinating on them. The following day they were moved by train and foot to the squalid Cabanatuan POW Camp.

McCorts was among the 300 POWs and 2,000 Imperial Japanese Army troops boarded on Lima Maru September 20, 1942 to Takao, Formosa. The men were taken to Taiwan POW Camp #2 – Taichu for two months. On November 15, 1942, he was sent to the Port of Moji in Japan aboard the “Hell ship” Dainichi Maru. From there, he was taken north to the Mitsubishi-owned shipyard and POW camp Tokyo #1-D Yokohama at Yokohama. He was a riveter inside ships under construction. The noise and constant beatings he received to his head caused permanent damage to his hearing.

At some point, he was transferred north to the Sendai #8B Kosaka POW Camp to be a slave laborer at a copper mine and smelter owned by Fujita-gumi Construction Company (today’s Dowa Holdings Co., Ltd.). There is now a museum in Kosaka reviewing the history of the local mine, which was one of Japan’s most productive as well as the origin of Dowa Holdings’ metal and mining business. The Kosaka Mine Office Museum and mine are pictured on Dowa’s website. There is no mention at the museum of the Allied POWs who slaved there.

He was liberated on September 11, 1945 and returned to the United States on October 15, 1945. He spent nearly a year at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, California and Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, California. Bewildered by freedom and the job environment, he rejoined the Army’s Signal Corps. Over the years, he traveled most of the world as part of his service and sometimes on his own, including: Russia, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Korea, France, Germany, Singapore, and Viet Nam.

His Russia posting in the late 1940s, landed him in the midst of a 1953 investigation by Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) into possible espionage and un-American activities at the U.S. Army Signal Corps facility at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. He was discharged and denied a promotion. McCarthy’s charges soon proved scurrilous and McCorts was reinstated. The experience, however, left him angry and bitter and prompted him to turn down a promotion to Master Sergeant. He remained on active duty until 1963 and retired from the Reserves in 1970. He used his GI benefits to pursue his college education at Temple University, where in 1972 he received a B.A. in Social Administration.

His first post-service job was as an electronic communications specialist with the Pennsylvania Department of Civil Defense. After graduation from Temple, he changed career paths and worked in the Pennsylvania State Department of Health and Welfare where he started as a case worker, then a field auditor, and retired as policy director.

In 1992, McCorts developed a rare cancer often found in people who had long-term, low-level exposure to copper cyanide as found in the Dowa Holdings’ mine. Although his cancer was in remission, he suffered from a series of strokes and other medical issues and passed away on February 10, 2001. He is buried in the Indiantown Gap National Cemetery, Annville, Pennsylvania.

Philippines POW#:
Japan POW#: 796

Congressman: Lou Barletta (R- PA 11th)

Congressional Testimony on slave labor used by Japanese high speed rail companies

Statement for the Record

to the 

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Subcommittee on Transportation and Public Assets

Hearing on

LAGGING BEHIND: THE STATE OF HIGH SPEED RAIL IN THE UNITED STATES

By

Ms. Jan Thompson

President, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor-Memorial Society

14 July 2016

Japanese Corporate Use of U.S. POWs as Slave Labor

Chairman Mica and Ranking Member Duckworth, I speak to you on behalf of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor-Memorial Society, the successor organization to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC), founded in 1946. We represent the surviving prisoners of war of Japan, their families, researchers and historians. Our goal is to preserve the history of the American POW experience in the Pacific and to communicate its enduring spirit and inspiration to future generations

Although I cannot address the delays in contracting and construction of High Speed Rail (HSR) in the United States, I would like to call your and the Committee’s attention to the delay by Japanese HSR companies in acknowledging and addressing their wartime use of American POWs as slave labor. The failure of these companies to do so is an affront to the Americans who must fund the purchase of Japanese HSR technologies in our country and to the memory of our World War II veterans who fought tyranny. It also ignores the Charter of Corporate Behavior set by Keidanren, Japan’s major business organization, that asks its members to conduct their business with a “strong sense of ethical values,” “respect [for] human rights and other international norms of behavior,” and “socially responsible behavior within their supply chain.”

Many of the Japanese companies that intend to bid on High-Speed Rail contracts in the United States profited from their wartime use of American and Allied POW slave labor in the most brutal of conditions. And, like France’s HSR company SNCF, the two Japanese consortia bidding for HSR contracts in the United States, JR East and JR Central are the successor companies to state-owned rail lines that transported American and Allied POWs to slavery, torture, and death.

These companies, unlike those in Germany, Austria, and France, have never made amends for – or even acknowledged – their role in the gross violations of human rights and breach of the Third Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs.

We are concerned that taxpayer dollars may go to Japanese corporations that still do not respect American veterans and are unwilling to take responsibility for violations of international law and human rights.

Among the POWs enslaved to support Japanese companies was, Chairman Mica, one of your late constituents, Sgt Sam Moody. We deeply appreciate that you have urged several Congresses to enact legislation in his name: the “Samuel B. Moody Bataan Death March Compensation Act.” We also understand that you honor Sgt Moody daily by giving visiting veterans a copy of his memoir Reprieve from Hell with a forward by you. Sgt Moody was tortured at a camp operated by one of today’s key participants in Japan’s HSR consortia—Nippon Sharyo. This company made and still makes Japan’s rail cars. It is also famous for having built the engines used on the Thai-Burma Death Railway.

Sgt Moody, who survived the Bataan Death March and a “Hell Ship” to Japan was caught stealing a cup of sugar. As punishment, he was made to stand at attention in the Nippon Sharyo camp yard. The 24-year old Massachusetts native remained there for a record-setting 53 hours. The camp reportedly held 273 men of whom 189 were American with the rest being British, Canadian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Jamaican, and Finish.

The use of POWs to support Japanese industry during the War was not an isolated event, but was by government design. Imperial Japan’s Ministry of Munitions under Nobusuke Kishi in coordination with the War Ministry headed by General Hideki Tojo created a broad government program to supply over 60 private Japanese corporations with POW labor. These companies requested, paid the government for, and effectively enslaved POWs in order to maintain wartime industrial production.

In Japan, some 32,000 Allied POWs endured abuses at the hands of the employees of these companies that were comparable to, and sometimes worse than, those inflicted upon them by the Japanese military. As a result, more than a 1,000 American POWs (over 3,500 Allied POWs) died on the main islands of Japan alone. Of those who survived, many suffered permanent physical or psychological damage.

Nearly all of the Japanese companies that want to bring High-Speed Rail to California, the Baltimore-Washington Corridor, and Texas used POW slave labor. In their corporate histories they boast over 100 years of continuous operation spanning three centuries. Most retain their original names. Many utilized labor from multiple POW camps for their mines, factories, foundries, and docks. Some of the camps were in Japan’s occupied territories. Current research finds the number of POW camps associated with Japanese companies bidding on HSR contracts as follows: Mitsui-9; Hitachi-7, Nippon Steel (Nippon Steel Sumitomo Metal)-6, Mitsubishi-5, Sumitomo-5, Kawasaki-2, Nippon Sharyo-2, and Toshiba-1.

Only one of the Mitsubishi Group’s companies, Mitsubishi Materials Corporation (MMC), and only last year, has acknowledged its involvement in POW forced labor and maltreatment. This is in stark contrast to German (Siemens) and French (SNCF) bidders for the High-Speed Rail projects, both of which have not only apologized for their war crimes during WWII but also committed themselves to supporting extensive projects of remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation.

JR East and JR Central manage the two Japanese HSR consortia. Both have their own histories of involvement with slave labor as both were part of the Japan’s national railway. The rails of JR East transported prisoners to 46 POW camps including the infamous Ofuna Interrogation Center where American Naval officers, such as Olympian Louis Zamperini, were routinely tortured. And the rails of JR Central transported prisoners to 12 POW camps, including the ones supplying slave laborers to Nippon Sharyo. JR Central now owns this company.

In 2009, the Government of Japan finally offered its apology and established a visitation program (modeled on a longstanding Japanese program for POWs of other allied nations) for American former prisoners of war of Imperial Japan. Since 2010, there have been seven trips to Japan for 43 former POWs, all in their late 80s or 90s, and three widows and two descendants.

On July 19, 2015, MMC became the first Japanese company to officially apologize to American POWs who were used as slave laborers to maintain war production. The historic apology was to those who were forced to work in four mines operated by Mitsubishi Mining, Inc., the predecessor company of MMC. This apology was followed by a $50,000 one-time donation to a museum in the United States.

It is time for all Japan’s private companies that plan to bid on American HSR projects to follow their government’s lead, as well as that of MMC, SNCF, and Siemens, and offer their own programs of reconciliation. That the transportation of POWs to “death-by-work” camps and widespread forced labor constitute war crimes is self-evident. Yet, the Japanese companies have been allowed to delay their responsibility to the American people and to justice.

It is our hope that the U.S. Congress will consider among the “delays” that have to be addressed in bringing HSR to the U.S. is Japanese corporate commitment to fostering respect for the life histories of those who they enslaved and abused. We would welcome an opportunity to share our thoughts on how this can be accomplished.

The ordeal of the American POWs of Japan is not just another facet of war history. Nor is it simply another saga of WWII suffering. It is a history of resilience, survival, and the human spirit, good and bad. And it has become an example of a path toward mutual understanding and justice between Japan and its former victims.

Ms. Jan Thompson
President
American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor Memorial Society
Daughter of PhM2c Robert E. Thompson USN, Bilibid, Fukuoka 3B, & Mukden, POW# 2011

Later: The Committee Staff accepted the testimony and considered it part of the record. However, it was not included in the written report nor on the hearing website. None of the testimonies for the record were.

At Last in Nagaski

Memorial Unveiling and Peace Ceremony 

Fukuoka POW Camp 2-B

Koyagi Junior High School

Koyagi-machi, Nagasaki City

Japan

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Hosted by

Committee of the Memorial Dedication for Fukuoka POW Camp 2-B

Representative Tomonaga Masao (朝長万左男)

At Fukuoka POW Camp 2-B (Koyagi Camp), 499 British, Dutch, Australian and American POWs were liberated in September 1945. A total of 73 POWs perished before liberation due to disease and abuse. The POWs were slave laborers for Kawanami Koyagi Shipbuilding Co., which was purchased by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in 1967. MHI still owns a facility at the site.

With the understanding and support from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Embassy of the Netherlands, Embassy of the United Kingdom, Embassy of Australia and Embassy of the United States in Japan, the Committee of the Memorial Dedication built this memorial, engraved on it the names of all who died, and sent their hearts out to all who were victimized by the war including returnees. See this Daily Telegraph article on the British POWs at the camp.

This is a particularly interesting camp as the POWs were affected by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and some even get medical compensation from Japan. More interesting, it held the the one Japanese-American POW who did not receive a Gold Medal for being a Japanese American in combat. Frank Fujita was with the Texas National Guard and the Lost Battalion that fought and was captured on Java in March 1942. He was not discovered as Japanese until June 1, 1944. 

The Memorial Unveiling and Peace Ceremony will be held as follows:
10:00 am - Chartered buses depart from Nagasaki Station to pick up people at hotels to take them to Koyagi-machi

10:45 am - Opening Ceremony

11:00~Noon - Ceremony
· Silent prayer

· Opening Speech by Committee Representative Tomonaga Masao

· Memorial Unveiling

· Guest Speech by representative from Ministry of Foreign Affairs

· Guest Speech by representative of survivors

· Guest Speech by Nagasaki Prefectural Governor

· Guest Speech by Mayor of Nagasaki city

· Flower tributes by

Committee Representative Tomonaga Masao
Representative from Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Representative of survivors
Nagasaki Prefectural Governor
Mayor of Nagasaki city
Representative from Embassy of the Netherlands in Japan
Representative from Embassy of the United Kingdom in Japan
Representative from Embassy of the Australia in Japan
Representative from Embassy of the United States in Japan
Representative of the bereaved family
Representative from POW Research Network Japan
Representative of the region
Student representative

12:15~12:40 p.m. Move to Hotel Yasuragi Iojima by bus

12:40~02:00 p.m. Reception (Yasuragi Iojima)
· Host Speech

· Speeches by representatives of four embassies

· Speech by representative of the bereaved family

· Speech by representative from POW Research Network Japan

· Toast

02:15~04:00 p.m. Friendly talk
04:10 p.m. Leave for Nagasaki city by bus
05:00 p.m. Dismiss at Nagasaki Station

Australian, British, Dutch and U.S. POWs: Living under the shadow of the Nagasaki Bomb

First appeared in the The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue. 32, No. 5, August 10, 2015

Australian POWs and the Nagasaki A-Bombing

by Michael Broderick, Associate Professor of Media Analysis, Murdoch University

David Palmer’s timely opinion piece in The Melbourne Age on 6 August 2015 draws attention to the little remembered history of scores of Australian and other allied POWs who were held as slave labourers in Japanese war industries in Nagasaki before and at the time of the atom bombing. Aspects of this neglected history also form a major component of my recent multi-screen, hyper-visualisation exhibition “Fading Lights: Australian POW and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945-52” (fadinglights.com.au), co-curated with Stuart Bender (Curtin University).

In 1983 Former Australian POW and author Hugh V. Clarke returned to the Fukuoka Camp No.2, a site now occupied by the Koyagi Junior High School adjacent to the former Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company. 

Palmer’s efforts to have Australian soldier and Nagasaki POW, Private Alan Chick, officially recognized by the Japanese government as hibakusha, is especially commendable given that the award and medical entitlement occurred shortly before the former serviceman died last year. However, there was another Australian POW granted this status more than thirty years before.

At the time of the Nagasaki bombing Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr (2/40 Battalion) was also in Fukuoka Camp No 14 opposite the Mitsubishi steel foundry where he labored, alongside scores of other POWs. 1 Earlier that morning he and six comrades had toiled outdoors to repair a bridge over the Mifune Canal that had been destroyed in an air raid only eight days earlier (1 August). They had been sent back to the compound at around 10am for a rest break. McGrath-Kerr recalls that he was on his bunk reading a book when everyone began to bolt towards the air raid shelters.2 He awoke five days later, lying on a stretcher and saw that everything in sight was flattened. He had amnesia, five broken ribs and various cuts and bruises on his hands and legs.

Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr of 2/40th Battalion, who was taken prisoner by the Japanese and held in Java until May 1944. Sgt McGrath-Kerr was one of several hundred Australian, British and American POWs aboard the Tamahoko Maru en route to Japan when the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the US submarine Tang on 24 June 1944. One of only 212 survivors, he was transferred to the Fukuoka No. 12 POW camp in central Nagasaki. [This camp is NOT in central Nagasaki. We believe this is a typo and that it should read Fukuoka #14-B.]

McGrath-Kerr, like Private Chick, was one of 24 Australian POWs at Camp No. 14 only 1.7 kms from the nuclear detonation. All miraculously survived. Had they been exposed outside directly in the line-of-sight of the explosion each would have likely perished. Others were not so lucky. At least four POWs were killed and around 30 seriously injured, mostly Dutch.3 A few others died as a result of their exposure in the following weeks. War-time correspondent Denis Warner in a 1995 op ed for the International Herald Tribune (reprinted in the New York Times) recalls speaking with McGrath-Kerr in a Manila hospital shortly after his transfer from Nagasaki. Warner found McGrath-Kerr “emaciated and weak”, still suffering from his broken ribs and “radiation burns on one hand”.

Another injured Australian soldier in the hospital, Sergeant Jack Johnson, also spoke with Warner. Johnson had been between two of the camp buildings when the bomb struck. Looking for fellow survivors amidst the smoke and debris he saw a pair of boots jutting out from under the rubble. It was the unconscious McGrath-Kerr. With fires igniting all round, Johnson worked hard to extract his compatriot and left him in the care of Dutch orderlies. In 1980 McGrath-Kerr returned to Japan as a guest of the City of Nagasaki where he was entitled to free medical treatment and officially recognized as an atom bomb victim (hibakusha).4

Video testimony of five Australian POWs, including Chick, is on display at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. McGrath-Kerr’s testimony can be heard on the Australian War Memorial website.5

Remarkably, Private Chick, who survived both the harsh labor at Camp No. 14 and the Nagasaki atom bombing, returned to Japan only a few months after his liberation to be part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF). In 1948 he visited his former, now destroyed POW Camp and the Mitsubishi Foundry, and posed in uniform amongst former workers. He then served in the Korean War in the early 1950s.


Private Chick (crouching) with some of his former workers at the Mitsubishi foundry in Nagasaki, photographed while on BCOF duties. [AWM P00208.003 photo: Alan Chick]

Like many of his generation, including amongst his POW peers, Chick maintained in his 1995 video testimony displayed at the Nagasaki museum that the atom bombs were necessary and entirely justifiable:

Well I’m all in favour of it, myself. As far as I’m concerned, it saved several million lives. I think that’s a very good argument in favour of it. I think, since the advent of the Bomb, we’ve had no more world wars. Like, before the Bomb, they had two world wars in twenty-five years. And now its fifty years [1995] and there’s been no world war. I consider it to have been a good thing, actually.

While not considered hibakusha, two other Australian POWs witnessed the Nagasaki explosion. On Koyagi Island, south of Nagasaki harbor, the POW camp (Fukuoka No.2) was adjacent to the Kawanami Brothers shipworks. In late-June 1945, most of the Australians were sent north of Nagasaki to work in the coal mine at Nakama, but two Australian soldiers, Bob Watkins and Joe Flynn remained due to illness.6 Both saw the “great flash […] a feeling of heat, huge noise of explosion, followed soon by a great rush of air, dust rose knee height caused by […] shock of concussion transmitted through the ground”.7

Watkins recalls looking up from ten kilometers away towards the mouth of Nagasaki harbor: “I was amazed to see this huge column of smoke and flame rising skywards forming into a distinct mushroom shape as it went”.8

These accounts and the Nagasaki POW history remain little appreciated or recognized today. Similarly, the seven-year Australian BCOF presence (chiefly in the Hiroshima Prefecture) where more than 16,000 Australian troops rotated through Japan after the war, some bringing wives and families, is under-represented in military annals, especially in this centenary year of ANZAC commemorations.

Recent developments during the course of our research into and production of the Fading Lights exhibition were fortuitous. We learned during pre-production that a Nagasaki City Councilor, Mr Toyoichi Ihara (himself a hibakusha) was spearheading efforts by the local community to recognize the former POW camp on Koyagi. Mr Ihara, along with teachers, parents and students of the Junior High School that now occupies the site of the former POW Camp grounds, plan to erect a monument to the 73 soldiers, including 6 Australians, who died at the Camp during the war.9

In April this year we sought permission to film inside the Nagasaki Mitsubishi plant, rebuilt after the atom bombing, on the location where Chick and 23 other Australian POWs survived the nuclear blast. Mr Ihara had informed us that there was a small commemorative plaque inside the plant attesting to the history of the POW workers. Unfortunately, we were denied entry to record at the factory for our exhibition.

However, a few months later in late July, news reports emerged that Mitsubishi was formally beginning the process of apologizing to POWs who were forced to work in their Nagasaki factories. 10 

A surviving American prisoner of war, 94 year-old James Murphy, flew to Japan to accept the Mitsubishi apology*, describing what he endured as “slavery in every way”. A few days later, Mitsubishi’s spokesman Okamoto Yukio announced to the media “If there is such an opportunity, we will do the same apology” to other allied POWs including British, Dutch and Australian. Okamoto publicly admitted that his company was “one of those [that] tortured POWs most, so we have to apologize”.11

*NB: Mr. Murphy did not go to Japan. He accepted the apology in Los Angeles at the Museum of Tolerance. Mr. Murphy worked in a Mitsubishi Mining copper mine that is now owned by Mitsubishi Materials. The apology was from Mitsubishi Materials and only for POWs who worked at their mines. The Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company was not part of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries until the 1960s. Mitsubishi Heavy has not yet apologized.

Nagasaki POWs: living under the shadow of the bomb
by Dr. David Palmer, visiting associate in history at the the University of Melbourne.

On August 6, 1945, 70 years ago, the world's first nuclear war began with the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It unleashed the ongoing threat of annihilation under which the world still cowers.

Twenty-four Australian prisoners of war survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Private Alan Chick, of St Helens, Tasmania, was one of them. But on that day when an American bomber dropped the last atomic bomb in the first nuclear war, it didn't matter if you were Japanese or Australian, if you were a child, a Japanese general, or an Allied POW. Everyone within range of the bomb became a victim. More than 74,000 people died out of a population of 263,000, but some miraculously survived.

Chick and his battalion had been captured by the Japanese in Timor. He was eventually put on a ship bound for Japan, but a US submarine attacked this ship, sinking it along with hundreds of POWs. Chick survived with a few others and was picked up by a Japanese fishing boat off the Kyushu coast. He was taken to Nagasaki's Fukuoka POW Camp 14 and put to work at a Mitsubishi steel foundry [NO, he worked for Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company that was not yet part of Mitsubishi]. His camp was less than two kilometres from the atomic bomb hypocentre on August 9. Knocked unconscious, he awoke to a world of complete black. When the smoke cleared he saw destruction, fires, and death everywhere. He had somehow survived again. 

To make the atomic bombings into solely a national tragedy without reference to non-Japanese who also suffered is a grave error. The bombings were an international tragedy.

By 1944, hundreds of British, Dutch, Australian and American POWs worked as slave labourers in Mitsubishi's massive shipbuilding complex in Nagasaki. Mitsubishi's workforce also included thousands of Korean labourers taken by force from their homeland, who worked under armed guard at the shipyard, its many factories around the city, and in the company's two coal mines on islands just off the coast.

This month, three of these Nagasaki sites – the shipyard (still operating) and the coal mines (closed decades ago) – were approved by UNESCO for World Heritage listing. The listing of the shipyard and mines required extensive negotiations between Japan and South Korea on the Korean forced-labour issue, and agreement on a compromise historical wording was finally reached. Mitsubishi also publicly apologised for its use of POW labour at its many mine sites, but has yet to apologise to those POWs at other sites, including the Nagasaki shipbuilding complex.

Atomic bomb victims, known in Japan as hibakusha, have been eligible for full healthcare and living expenses paid by the Japanese government, but Koreans who returned to their homeland after World War II were refused these benefits. Japanese and Korean peace activists and atomic bomb survivors started a movement decades ago to change this injustice, which has led to many successful court cases in Japan.

In the last few years, Japanese researchers at the Nagasaki Overseas Hibakusha Network, led by Nobuto Hirano, have extended their hibakusha recognition movement to Allied POWs. Like the Korean hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who also were forced labourers in Mitsubishi industries, Allied POWs were double victims: first as foreign forced labourers, and then as atomic bomb survivors. POWs were a substantial part of the labour force in Japan's war production and coal mining from late 1944 until the surrender. Within Japan there were 130 POW camps holding more than 32,000 POWs. Of these about 3500 died in those camps and a further 11,000 died en route to Japan when ships carrying them were sunk by Allied submarines and planes.


The Nagasaki blast.

There were 884 Allied POWs in the Nagasaki city region in two main POW camps: Koyagi Branch Camp (Fukuoka 2-B), on Koyagi Island in Nagasaki Harbour; and Nagasaki Mitsubishi Dockyard Branch Camp (Fukuoka 14-B) based in Saiwamachi (Urakami District). The Mitsubishi camp held 315 POWs. Of these, 113 died in the camp before the atomic bombing and seven died from the atomic bomb. Of the 195 POWs who survived at the end of the war, 152 were Dutch, 24 were Australian, and 19 were British. Alan Chick was held in Fukuoka Camp 14-B, next to Mitsubishi's steel foundry.

The researcher, Hirano, contacted me through Hideto Kimura, a Nagasaki colleague I've known for many years, to locate former Australian POWs who survived the bombing. A few years earlier, Kimura and I had seen a video interview with Alan Chick at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, taped in the 1980s. I found online documents in the Australian War Memorial Archives and National Archives of Australia detailing 24 repatriated Australian POWs who were in Nagasaki. Craig Collie, author of Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and Unknowing, had interviewed Chick in Heyfield, Victoria, which indicated where he might still be living.

I contacted the Returned and Services League in Heyfield and spoke with local RSL representative Sue Artso. She had been visiting Chick and his Japanese wife Anita (originally Hiroko) regularly in Heyfield's aged-care home. When we made the trip to Heyfield, we interviewed Chick over three days.

I completed the necessary Japanese government forms in English for him so he could get atomic bomb survivor recognition and benefits. I then submitted these to the Japanese consulate in Melbourne, which forwarded them to Tokyo for review. Within weeks, two officials from Nagasaki City delivered his benefits book directly to him – in Heyfield. Without the initiative of Nagasaki peace activists and researchers, Chick would never have received this recognition. Chick was the only Australian POW of the surviving 24 incarcerated at Fukuoka Camp 14-B to ever receive the certificate from the Japanese government. Chick died in 2014, only a year after receiving the certificate, but receiving the survivor book and benefits was a final recognition of his status as an atomic bomb survivor and a former Australian POW who was in Nagasaki.

Chick supported the atomic bombing of Nagasaki because he believed it ended the war. But many historians now argue that the bombs were not the major factor behind the surrender because Japan's industrial capacity had collapsed by mid-1945. The country had no access to raw materials, owing to Allied blockades. Finally, the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviet Red Army, the same day as the Nagasaki bombing, destroyed the fighting capacity of Japan's Kwangtung Army, ending the power of the Japanese military.

Whatever position one takes, the legacy of the atomic bombings continues – through the many diseases of survivors from radiation exposure, the genetic impact on the second generation, and the far greater danger of nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The world also needs to understand that the victims of the atomic bombings were not only Japanese. In his Nagasaki address last year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated: "We who experienced the agony of atomic bombings not once but twice have ... raised ourselves to our feet once more, rebuilding our homeland and restoring Nagasaki as a beautiful city."

To make the atomic bombings into solely a national tragedy without reference to non-Japanese who also suffered is a grave error. The bombings were an international tragedy, and the victims included Koreans and Allied POWs. Chick survived, and his survival is testament to the international character of the victims.


1. Peter McGrath-Kerr, quoted in Hugh V. Clarke, 1984, Last Stop Nagaskai! Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 96. Denis Warner. 1995. ‘These Men Lived On to Tell a Ghastly Tale’. New York Times. 9 August.

.2 Peter McGrath-Kerr, quoted in Hugh V. Clarke, 1984, Last Stop Nagaski! Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 96. Denis Warner. 1995. ‘These Men Lived On to Tell a Ghastly Tale’. New York Times. 9 August.

3. Edlington, David. 1995. “An incandescent flash of death”, The Canberra Times, 27 July, p. 11 .

4. Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai! p. 130. See also “Free medicine for POWs”, The Canberra Times, 14 August 1980, p. 7.

5.“Peter McGrath-Kerr as a sergeant 2/40th Australian Infantry Battalion and a prisoner of the Japanese, 1940-1945, interviewed by Tim Bowden”

6. Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai!, pp. 105-109.

7. Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai!, pp. 106.

8. Ibid.

9. Okada Gen, 2014, “Nagasaki residents seek to remember POWs who died in local camp”, Asahi Shimbun, 29 January

10. BBC News online, 2015 “Japan's Mitsubishi makes prisoners of war apology”

11. Associated Press, 2015, “Mitsubishi to apologise to POWs”, 22 July

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.

click to order

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.

click to order

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.

click to order

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