Mitsubishi to apologize to US POWs
The Associated Press reports that Mitsubishi Materials Corp., a company that used American Prisoner of War labor during World War II, will apologize to a former POW in a ceremony orchestrated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center;
A senior executive of Mitsubishi Materials Corp. will apologize to 94-year-old James Murphy, of Santa Maria, California, and relatives of other former POWs who toiled at plants its predecessor company operated in Japan during the conflict.
[…]
A press release from the Wiesenthal Center said the apology will be made by Hikaru Kimura, senior executive officer for Mitsubishi Materials Corp. The company did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment late Monday. Mitsubishi Materials U.S.A. Corp. said Tuesday it had no information about it.
Masato Otaka, spokesman for the Japanese Embassy in Washington, said to the extent of his knowledge, it was an initiative of Mitsubishi Materials. He said the Japanese government has no involvement.
The picture above is supposedly one of Mitsubishi’s POW camps at a mine in Hanshu, Japan.
Category: Historical
On behalf of my late friend, US Army Tech Sgt Louis Sachwald, POW and slave laborer who was forced to work an ancient mine for the Japanese, burying many of his comrades over the years of his captivity, Mitsubishi can go straight to Hell. Lou and many others were thrown into the hold of a merchant ship in the Philippines, pushed together at bayonet point, packed like sardines with no room to lie down, living among their own filth and their dead, and this apology is to do what? Make amends? I don’t have words for this.
One-hundred percent lacking…. it is meaningless unless it comes from the government–and that ain’t gonna happen, axe the Chinese.
The apology is way too late. The Japanese people who were born here or legal citizens put in camps in American were reimbursed. Although I thought it was crap when younger I understood we couldn’t trust anyone.
POW is a completely different thing. They treat our guys and women nurses like shit and we treated Japanese POWs via the Geneva Convention Rules.
Most our POWs are dead morons, waited way to long to apologize. How about giving the relatives a nice fat check in memory of their loved ones..
2/17 Air Cav…Thank you and well said. Screw Mitsubishi and their apology and be folded neatly, run under warm water and then while lying on their left side, gently shoved as far up their asses as possible…with a rusty WWII Arisaka bayonet.
Car sales must be down. Not sure if this marketing ploy is going to work….
Probably the #1 point of this whole thing.
Word
“Historical guilt” apologies from corporations don’t mean any more than “historical guilt” apologies from political leaders.
Someone who was really responsible for such enormous past crimes would do better to commit suicide. Someone who isn’t would do better to keep quiet.
How can they be responsible? They’re all dead! Wait. Okay, there’s like one guy left. When he dies can we move on?
Are we talking about Mitsubishi or the Confederacy?
And how come Japan gets to keep their meatball flag???
Naah, we have to wait for that last 170-year-old American slaveholder to die too.
Can we protest/ban Mitsubishi a symbol of hate, slavery and oppression?
It is no coincidence that Kabuki theater was invented in Japan. There are some stains that can not be washed away. The Japanese are just lucky that we ran out of Atomic Bombs after two. If we had more, Japan would still be radioactive. They got off very lightly, considering the horror they inflicted on the eastern half of the globe. Bull Halsey put it best when he stated that the war would continue “until the only place the Japanese language would be spoken was in Hell”.
How magnanimous of them, considering the war has been over for 70 years and 99% of the POWs are dead.
I know a couple of Americans who are waiting for Russia to apologize for putting them in slave labor camps at the end of the war.
These two Americans were born in California to Japanese parents and were sent back to study in Japan. While there, they were drafted into the Japanese army. One man had just graduated his pilot training and was waiting for a mission assignment. He was captured by Soviets and sent to a labor camp. After he was freed, his citizenship was restored because he was a minor when he was “drafted.” Then, he went into the US Army and ended up in Korea.
I’m certain he’d like an apology.
Here’s a meaningful gesture they could make:
Sponsor new expansions to the museums in Nagasaki and Hiroshima that offer context as to WHY we nuked their asses. Educate their people about the mass-murder, the firebombing, the Rape of Nanking, the treatment of POWs, the slavery, the Comfort Women, the cannibalism, the atrocities against British personnel in Singapore, the massacre of the US Army hospital on Guam, the activities of Special Unit 731 and others like it…how much time ya got?
Stop pretending that they didn’t deserve to get slaughtered. Stop pretending that they were innocent. Stop pretending that the rest of Asia fucking HATES THEIR GUTS to this day for no reason. That would be a meaningful gesture.
They’ve never taught that to their citizens, and no chance they’ll do so anytime soon.
Several years ago, one of my young firefighters brought his Japanese exchange-student girlfriend to the station for dinner one night. Nice girl, easy on the eyes, but she made the mistake of trying to “educate” us when a war movie came on. Well, being the history nerd that I am, I couldn’t let that stand. So I went into Raging Dick mode and gave her a little impromptu Pacific Rim History 1900-1950 101 session, complete with photos and videos (the Internet is a wonderful thing), history books, citations of personal testimony of Japanese veterans, experiences of Allied POWs, accounts of Chinese and Filipino civilians, and books she should read (“Ghost Soldiers” by Hampton Sides about the Cabanatuan rescue and “Ship of Ghosts” by James Hornfischer about the USS Houston were at the top of the list). She was in tears when I told her the story of SGT Frank Fujita and the three-year nightmare he endured as an ethnically-Japanese American Soldier in a jap POW camp. She really lost it when I had her google “hell ships”.
I kinda felt sorry for her, because she was a nice girl and I managed to destroy her entire worldview in 90 minutes, but the truth hurts.
I’ve seen the effects of “historical guilt education” in the U.S. and I wouldn’t wish it on the Japanese or anyone else. They’ve got enough problems without piling that one on.
They deserve it, we don’t.
Rubbish. No one deserves it, and more importantly, it isn’t healthy for anyone. Personal guilt is supposed to sting you into being a better person henceforth. Historical guilt can’t reform the behavior of your ancestors, but it can waste time and energy now, not to mention encouraging other people to play the victim, even people who never tasted the wrong themselves.
Besides which I doubt there’s any people who can’t trace their ancestry back to some beastly and barbarous deeds. And if they can’t it’s because they didn’t keep good records.
Japan’s demographics suggest they’ve got enough “national malaise” already without piling that stuff on.
I can’t agree that the only taster of the wrong done is the POW slave laborer. Those who survived carried great and special pain which, despite their best efforts in many instances, I am sure, spilled over to those they loved. In Mitsubishi’s case, their personnel were directly involved in the slave ops on mining sites. So this isn’t merely a situation in which a company that produced some serious killing machines is taking the fall for Japanese atrocities and war making. Mitsubishi is directly responsible for much pain and agony. I hope their guilt carries through generation after generation of its corporate life.
I don’t. When you punish a company you punish its stockholders, and I don’t see any moral case for attacking them.
Punishment for crimes ought to be an individual thing, with full due process. Otherwise, you win wars, you either cut the enemy’s throat or help him to his feet, and you move on from that.
Who is punishing the company? Maybe I missed something, but I understood that Mitsubishi was unilaterally apologizing to all of its former slaves through James Murphy. As for Mitsubishi’s crimes, it’s not apologizing for serving tea in a coffee cup. My guess is that the company discussed this for a very long time before deciding to apologize and that it may be a boon, not a bane, to stockholders.
I was referring to your idea that “guilt” should carry through “corporate generations”…guilt implies some kind of punishment or suffering; and I am rejecting the idea of “persistent corporate guilt” against anyone for any kind of crimes. Because it’s hurting current stockholders for the deeds of past managers. (If that were the rule, then what if Mitsubishi merged with some other company that wasn’t involved?)
In general publically assuming guilt for something these days is simply inviting people to sue you about it…and as you’ve seen in this very thread, it seems to be drawing more derision than public goodwill. So for my part I don’t see the benefit to Mitsubishi or to anybody else from this gesture. And I want to get rid of this ideology of “historical guilt” completely, rather than giving it legitimacy by parsing out whose is the worst.
“I cannot deny that I am partly responsible for the deaths of many POWs, and I apologise sincerely for what we did during the war.”
Hiroshi Abe
1LT, Imperial Japanese Army (ret.)
Songkrai Railway Supervisor
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Keiko C. Holmes, OBE, runs an NPO called “Agape.” Agape runs reconcilliation programmes and twice a year they organize trips for former Allied POWs to Japan. On various occasions their guards have apologized. ILT Abe attends the memorial every year to meet the soldiers.
After many uphill struggles since the first pilgrimage to Japan in 1992. Agape has taken hundreds of FEPOWs to Japan’s former war camp sites. Many FEPOWs express how their hated towards Japan has changed into love for the Japanese people. Holmes was awarded the O.B.E by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle on 28 April 1998.
These apologies and meetings are not with the GoJ, but with former soldiers, workers, and families of soldiers. Although not from the Government, healing does occur.
Screw them:
I met some JDF in Iraq ten years back. Their domestic laws limited their mission – but they still came out and put their shoulder to the wheel when we asked.
I’m grateful to Japan now and think we, and they, would do better to leave the past in the past.
There are a handful of those slaves alive today and many of their sons and daughters are alive and well. Some forgive and others do not. It will take several generations for the past to seat itself.