Apologies are long overdue...and for many, may come too late

Unfinished Business: For 65 years, Japanese corporations have escaped responsibility for abusing American POWs during World War II

Lester Tenney entered World War II as a strapping 21-year-old, weight 180 pounds. By the time he emerged from Japanese captivity in 1945, he was a shattered, emaciated cripple. His left arm and shoulder were partly paralyzed due to an accident in a coal mine where he'd been sent as a slave laborer. His overseers there -- civilian employees of the Mitsui Corp., not members of the Imperial Army -- had knocked out his teeth in repeated beatings with hammers and pickaxes. At war's end, he weighed in at 98 pounds. It took him a year in U.S. Army hospitals to regain something like a semblance of his old well-being.

Sixty-five years later, Tenney and his fellow ex-prisoners of war (POWs) -- the rapidly diminishing group of those who remain alive, that is -- are still awaiting the full fruits of victory. The Japanese companies that once abused Tenney and his fellow prisoners have never acknowledged responsibility for their crimes, let alone offered compensation or regrets of any kind. (The companies needed the POWs to compensate for a wartime labor shortage.) The Japanese government has only just begun to offer its regrets for what happened -- far too late for most of the veterans, but, still, something. Perhaps most depressingly of all, the U.S. government has spent years allowing the Japanese to get away with it -- a policy of complicity that has its roots in the two countries' complex postwar relationship. There are signs that this, too, may finally be changing. Hope never dies, as they say.

Just like businesses that reaped the benefits of Jewish slave labour in German areas of Europe in World War II have a moral obligation to apologise and offer reparations to those who suffered (and in several cases, that has been the case), so do Japanese companies who used American POWs.

Survivors of Japan's WWII POW Camps Call on Japan for the Same Treatment as Siberian Internees

World War II former prisoners of war of Japan are calling on Japanese government and industry to provide the same commitment to the memory of their suffering and forced labor. The call comes after Japan's parliament approved on June 16th $200M to benefit Japanese veterans who survived the Soviet Union's post-WWII Siberian labor camps and to provide an accurate historical account for future generations.

Three past commanders of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC) applaud Japan's government for taking action now. Dr. Lester Tenney, Mr. Edward Jackfert, and Mr. Ralph Levenberg all survived Japan's notorious prisoner of war camps and endured brutal forced labor, providing profit for some of Japan's largest corporations during WWII. Over 60 well-known Japanese companies, such as Mitsui, Sumitomo, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, and Nippon Sharyo, used American and Allied POW labor in harsh conditions to sustain their war production.