Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [212]
The question of reparations and individual compensation proved equally tricky and frustrating to the ex-POWs who sought it. The War Claims Act of 1948 created a fund to pay out lump-sum compensation to ex-prisoners of war and civilian internees. From seized and liquidated Axis assets of $228 million, a prisoner was entitled, under the 1952 amendment to the act, to $1 per day if he could prove that the enemy failed to feed him as required by the 1929 Geneva Convention. An additional $1.50 per day was payable if he was subjected to “inhumane treatment.” The full $2.50 per diem stood to bring the average railway survivor a total of about three thousand dollars. If he failed to claim his piece by the statutory deadline, March 31, 1955, he received nothing. The 1951 Multilateral Peace Treaty with Japan, meanwhile, permanently blocked his right to sue for anything more.
The peace treaty repeatedly thwarted lawsuits and legislation aimed at extracting money from either the Japanese government or its corporations, which, POW advocates say, had been unjustly enriched by the slavery of Japan’s war prisoners. The absence from the Tokyo indictment of corporations such as Mitsubishi, which ran the huge prisoner-staffed shipyard at Nagasaki and sold the crossties that the army used to build the railway, was an outrage to POW groups. It led to the passage by the 107th Congress of the Justice for United States Prisoners of War Act of 2001, which tried to revive World War II–era claims against Japanese nationals that were barred by the 1951 treaty. But since the State Department considered that treaty “the cornerstone of U.S. security policy in the Pacific region,” a position that most courts found persuasive, those suits went nowhere. “A great nation does not repudiate its treaties,” said State Department legal counsel William H. Taft IV at a House hearing on the bill. At a time when a litigation-conscious U.S. Congress was granting individually tailored multimillion-dollar awards to families of victims of Islamic terror attacks, Taft seemed content to require veterans to look to that same body, not overseas private defendants, for recompense, even if in granting a $2.50 per diem to prisoners our legislature had long ago exhibited its essential disinterest in the men who lived and died to build the Death Railway.
The war over World War II continues, with some states such as California permitting lawsuits against Japanese defendants, and with some courts in Japan ruling in favor of plaintiffs with restitution claims. It was a Mitsui executive who predicted that if the zaibatsu—Japan’s great banking and industrial combines—were destroyed by war crimes tribunals or private litigation, Japan would be fertile ground for communism. Yet it was Mitsui Mining that in 2002 was ordered by the Fukuoka District Court to pay 165 million yen ($1.45 million) in restitution to fifteen Chinese nationals who worked as slaves in the prefecture’s mines during the war. Unavoidably the wheels of time move faster than the wheels of jurisprudence. By the time the appeals are exhausted, few of the survivors will be left to savor any victory. They are living to see, however, Japan finally apologize for its well-documented atrocities. In May 2005, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, in Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch opposite number, Jan Peter Balkenende, said, “Humbly accepting the fact that Japan inflicted grave damage and pain on people of many countries including the Netherlands during World War II, we would like to deeply reflect on this and offer heartfelt apology.”
More than a few Houston men resolved to get justice on their own terms. When Charley Pryor was in South Korea during the Korean War, he kept an eye out for targets of opportunity unrelated to the current needs of the U.S. Marine Corps. He meant to get even with his onetime Korean guards. “If I had ever seen three or four of these guys, I’ll tell you they would have suffered unusual consequences…. I would have made a horrible