| June
20, 2006
Still No Justice from Tokyo
Japan Nixes Payments
to Its Wartime Slaves
By CHRISTOPHER
REED
The
foreign minister of Japan, Taro Aso, will receive this week an appeal
to his "honor and decency" in the repayment of a small
family debt that is now more than 60 years old.
The request comes in a personal letter from an Australian registered
nurse, Marilyn Caruana, on behalf of her father, John William Hall,
now 87. He was formerly employed -- or exploited -- by Aso's father
Takakichi as an allied prisoner of war in forced labor at the family's
Kyushu coal mine in 1945.
The
debt is Hall's unpaid wages.
He
was one of 197 Australian prisoners (two died), 101 British, and
two Dutch, held at Keisen Camp 26 in Fukuoka prefecture that supplied
men to the Yoshikuma pit belonging to Aso Mining Co, now the Aso
Group. They were held in slave-like conditions, almost starved,
and made to work deep coal seams that constantly collapsed. Taro
Aso, 65, who ran the firm from 1973-79, has never apologized or
acknowledged his company's illicit employment of prisoners. The
Japanese government has never paid any compensation to any individuals.
It
was a long time ago, but it remains a contemporary issue because
of the extraordinary indifference in Tokyo. Here, an inexplicably
stubborn -- or just stupid -- government fails in a simple matter
of obligation [giri], a sentiment allegedly integral to Japanese
culture. Yet the world's second biggest economy, with a foreign
exchange reserve of $836 billion, declines to pay a few very old
men what would amount to less than $1m in total. Why? Tokyo offers
no explanation.
Nobody
knows precisely how much money is owed to the prisoners, or even
exactly who should pay whom, but on Japanese government orders in
1942, they were supposed to be paid a few yen a week. Yet of the
thousands of POWs held in wartime Japan, hardly any enslaved worker
prisoners are known to have received one penny.
Marilyn
Caruana discovered the Aso connection when I traced her father and
eight other Australian inmates of Camp 26, and interviewed them
for a Sydney newspaper. They were astonished and several expressed
displeasure about Japan's having appointed to high office someone
they regard as neglectful of a basic human responsibility. (An official
of the German embassy in Tokyo says its government would not have
made such an appointment of someone like Aso.)
"I
would like to give Mr Aso a piece of my mind," said Joe Coombs,
85, of Regent's Park, NSW, a former infantry corporal who toiled
at Aso Mining and never received his wages. "I'd like to tell
him what happened: the beatings, the starvation diet, the back-breaking
work, the danger. Then I'd invite him to apologise."
Coombs,
like ex-farmer Hall of Trundle, NSW, and each of their POW fellows,
emphasize their wish to avoid any impression of seeking large reparation
funds from Japan. They also acknowledge receipt of $A25,000 each
in 2001 as goodwill compensation paid by the Australian government.
But the lost wages are legitimate back pay.
In
her letter to Aso, which she spontaneously decided to write, Caruana
asks for the cash, and an apology. She tells Aso that her army signalman
"dad" was captured in Singapore in 1942 and taken to Japan
where he remained until 1945, first working in a shipyard, then
at Aso Mining.
She
writes: "He endured tremendous hardships. He worked 12 hours
a shift for 13 days, then 1 day off to do his washing. He lived
on 3 cups of half-cooked rice a day. Dad tells us [his family of
seven offspring] the dangerous treacherous conditions the workers
endured."
Directly
addressing Taro Aso she continues: "As your father [Takakichi]
was the mine owner, he allowed the prisoners to be treated in a
shocking unhumane way. My father is now 87 and he is very disabled
due to the effects of those conditions. My request to you on behalf
of my father is to give him a written apology and remuneration for
his suffering over the years."
Her
final paragraph states: "As you are the foreign minister, please
do not quote Geneva conventions, peace treaties, court cases, or
any of those legal matters. Responding favorably to this request
would be the honorable and decent thing for you to do. Your dad
owes my dad some money for work done."
In
fact, Japan's failure to pay any personal money to enslaved POWs
does come under various legal protections. Although Japan signed
the 1929 Geneva Convention that outlawed POW forced labor, no ratification
followed. And as recently as June 16 a Tokyo appeals court dismissed
a law suit against 10 Japanese firms from 42 Chinese forced into
wartime work. Although the court admitted illegal enslavement, it
was consistent with previous rulings in rejecting any legal redress,
largely because of passing time -- "which is what they want,"
as one ex-prisoner said.
Various
pacts, from the 1951 San Francisco Multilateral Peace Treaty to
later ones with South Korea and China, protect Japan against compensation
payments. But when these agreements were signed, the extent of Japan's
war crimes -- the sexual degradation of thousands of Asian "comfort
women" for instance -- was unknown. In the POWs' case, Tokyo
pleaded lack of funds in 1951. The US accepted this and persuaded
reluctant allies to agree, but that plea is now strenuously disputed.
It
was part of what the leading authority on the prisoners' payment,
Linda Goetz Holmes, an American author and history adviser to the
Japanese Imperial Records Interagency Working Group in Washington,
describes as Tokyo's "masterful con game." She adds: "Japanese
corporate CEOs who made millions in wartime profits led Americans
to believe they were virtually penniless, and might need to turn
to the Soviets for help if we didn't provide it."
The
honor argument, touched upon in Caruana's letter, has also reached
a much higher official level. According to Holmes, as the Clinton
presidential administration drew to a close in late 2000, the deputy
US Secretary of State Thomas Pickering had some advice for the new
Japanese ambassador, Shunji Yanai. Pickering said that despite the
1951 treaty, Japan "DOES have a moral obligation to them [the
POWs], and you should look into doing something about it."
Nothing has been done.
American
scholar William Underwood is investigating Japan's wartime forced
labor in a Kyushu University research project. In addition to the
POW cash, most of it probably still sitting in Japan's Postal Savings
accounts, the total including unpaid money for the much larger contingent
of Asian slave workers forcibly taken to Japan, could be worth today
about $2 billion, he believes. That would include financial multipliers
such as compound interest.
Yet
Japanese corporations, government departments, and the Bank of Japan
and Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank, which are thought to be holding funds
unpaid to the Asians, continue to pursue a "six-decade record
of cover-up, dishonesty, and denial," he says. "Can Japan
realistically expect historical reconciliation as long as it evades
honest accounting of past conduct?"
Marylin
Caruana is more personal: "Allowing Mr Aso to be a leading
public figure, especially foreign minister, when he comes from a
background of an obviously selfish and arrogant family, reflects
badly on the Japanese people. Dad is a soft gentle person who welcomes
all regardless of color or race. But Mr Aso's dad still owes my
dad some money. It should be paid."
Indeed
it should.
Christopher Reed is a British journalist living
in Japan. He can be contacted at christopherreed@earthlink.net
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