Michael Bazyler: Japan Should Follow the International Trend and Face Its History of World War II Forced Labor
In what has become an international trend, many nations in recent years have apologized, paid compensation, and created historical commissions to reevaluate World War II policies and actions that they had failed to acknowledge for many years after the war. These include Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Belgium, Austria – and even the United States.[1] New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi wrote an important article, “An Unyielding Demand for Justice” (International Herald Tribune Nov. 15, 2006), in which he described how Japan was going against this trend by refusing to come to terms with her history of WWII forced labor.
The Japanese Foreign Ministry soon posted its rebuttal to this article on the website of its New York Consulate General. I understand that the page was removed recently because one reason for the rebuttal, the charge that POW forced labor was employed at the current Prime Minister’s family coalmine, turned out to be true.
However, I found other parts of the rebuttal also problematic.
First, the rebuttal argues that comparing Germany and Japan is inappropriate because of the different postwar circumstances surrounding the two countries. But the Onishi article was about WWII forced labor, which both countries dealt with only recently. That the German government’s approach in compensating the victims of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps was different from Japan’s postwar settlement with her former enemy countries is irrelevant.
What happened to Germany and Japan in recent years on the issue of WWII forced labor was in fact very similar. Corporations of both countries were sued for compensation in the U.S. by victims. Although the courts found that neither German nor Japanese companies were legally responsible for providing compensation, they took opposite courses of action after the dismissal of their cases. As for Germany, two American courts in 1999 decided that postwar treaties between Germany and the Allied nations barred individual suits for compensation against German industry. Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise wrote in his ruling to dismiss the forced labor case against German companies Degussa and Siemens:
The critical issue is whether in light of post-World War II diplomatic history, the plaintiff victims, and representatives of victims of the Nazi regime, can bring an action in this Court against private German companies which participated in and profited from the atrocities committed against plaintiffs and those they seek to represent.To state the ultimate conclusion…the questions whether the reparation agreements made adequate provision for the victims of Nazi oppression and whether Germany had adequately implemented the reparations agreements are political questions which a court must decline to determine.[2]
Judge Joseph Greenway Jr. also dismissed the lawsuit against Ford and its German subsidiary Ford Werke, although he found that Ford’s “use of unpaid, forced labor during World War II violated clearly established norms of customary international law.”[3]
Yet the German government and its industry, even after these legal victories, did not walk away from the bargaining table. Rather, they continued to negotiate to bring the matter of the wartime role of German private industry to a moral closure. This led to the creation in 2000 of the German forced labor foundation, “Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future,” which has paid more than $5 billion to more than 1.5 million Nazi slave/forced labor victims.
As for Japan and its industry, both also claim that the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty bars private claims for slave labor. In 2000, Judge Vaughn Walker accepted that argument and dismissed the lawsuits filled by American POWs and Allied POWs against Japanese companies for WWII forced labor.[4]
Unlike Germany, however, Japan’s government and corporations refused even to sit down and discuss this matter of slave labor claims with the victims and the U.S. Government, which had played the facilitating role in the German settlement. In one of his last interviews before leaving public office, Stuart Eizenstat, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration and the point person for the U.S. government in the negotiations with the German government and industry, publicly expressed disappointment at Japan's failure to discuss these claims against Japan's private industry.
Eizenstat told a reporter, as I recount in my book Holocaust Justice, that “one of his regrets was his inability to get Japan to make a similar commitment to Chinese, Koreans and others whose assets had been seized or who had been forced into slave labor. The 1951 treaty with Japan clearly foreclosed a lot of options to seek redress, he said, adding, ‘In the end we never heard back from the Japanese government or companies.’”[5]...