AUGUST 16, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 6

Striking Back at Japan Inc.

CAPTIVE AUDIENCE: Forced laborers, like these Korean prisoners at a Japanese copper mine, were vital cogs in the war effort.

Survivors are trying to hold wartime companies accountable for exploiting them as slave labor
By DONALD MACINTYRE Tokyo

Ralph Levenberg spent a good deal of time thinking about T-bone steaks, baked potatoes and "good Iowa corn" during the year he spent in a Japanese forced labor camp. That was the only way to forget the hole in his belly, which the tiny rations of rice bread and rice gruel could not fill. And it helped keep his mind off the other hardships as well: the cold of unheated barracks, the lack of medicine, the beatings. By the end of the war, his weight had dropped to 33 kg, from nearly twice that, and at war's end he had to be carried out of the camp on a stretcher. "We were always writing recipes on the back of whatever we could write on," says Levenberg, now 78. "I thought of all the wonderful food my dear mother had cooked at home." More than half a century later, Levenberg may soon be sharing his memories of the camp with a California jury. Last week, he filed a class-action suit under a new California law that authorizes any World War II slave-labor victim to sue for compensation. The defendant is Nippon Sharyo, one of Japan's biggest makers of railroad cars. Levenberg is demanding compensation and a clear, no wiggle-room apology. If he wins the case, it could cost Nippon Sharyo millions of dollars in damages and a heap of bad publicity in California, where it recently won a big contract. Says Levenberg: "They caused us undue pain. We were placed into slavery and bondage and never paid for the labor we did."

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The suit has already sparked interest among lawyers trying to win compensation in Japanese courts for former forced laborers from Korea and China. It will be closely watched in corporate boardrooms in Tokyo as well. Levenberg's lawyers already have other big Japanese corporations in their sights, including heavyweights like Mitsubishi Corp. and Mitsui & Co. Both firms were named in a suit Levenberg filed earlier this year in a U.S. federal district court and both could face litigation under the new California law. Passed last month, it overrides any applicable statute of limitations, thus removing one of the biggest legal hurdles in this kind of suit--victims can file claims until 2010. Pushed through the legislature with support from Holocaust-survivor groups, it opens a huge window of opportunity for the veterans of Japanese labor camps. Says Gordon Fauth, one of the lawyers handling the case: "This makes it a great deal easier."

The case comes amid a blizzard of lawsuits aimed at European corporations that colluded with wartime Germany or made money from Nazi death camps. Holocaust survivors last year won a $1.25 billion settlement against Swiss banks that had refused to return their deposits after the war. Last week, 16 German firms that allegedly profited from slave labor--including Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen--were trying to negotiate a settlement with work camp survivors.

If companies in Europe are moving, however reluctantly, to close the final accounts of the war, their counterparts in Japan have not yet begun. Japanese courts have thrown out a handful of compensation cases brought by Koreans and Chinese, citing the time elapsed. American and other Allied POWs and civilians interned in camps launched an appeal this year after a lower court rejected their demands for compensation. (International law doesn't let individuals sue a state, the judge said.) Other appeals are moving through Japan's glacially slow court system. But even lawyers for the plaintiffs aren't hopeful about their chances in front of Japan's conservative judges.

Imperial Japan Inc.'s wartime track record is just as bad as corporate Germany's. Dozens of Japanese construction companies, steelmakers, mining companies and shipbuilders relied on slave labor during the war, but Japanese scholars say only one--Kajima Corp.--has ever apologized. Earlier this year, steelmaker NKK became the first Japanese company to pay out money to a former forced laborer when it settled out of court with a Korean who sued the firm in 1991. His lawyer, Kazuyuki Azusawa, says the threat of losing a subway contract in Seoul may have prompted the settlement. "Japanese companies are not sincere," says Azusawa. "They would like to ignore the problem."

Japanese firms say they don't bear responsibility and insist all the relevant records were lost in the "confusion" at the end of the war. (Nippon Sharyo says it can't comment on a case before the courts.) But the shroud of secrecy over corporate Japan's war record has started to lift in recent years. Using eyewitness accounts and documents gleaned from archives in China, Korea and the U.S., historians and activist lawyers in Japan have been piecing together details of a shocking story. As the war drained Japan's supply of able-bodied young men, companies asked the government to find them more workers to man the production lines and dig the coal fuelling Japan's war effort. Minister of Commerce and Industry Nobusuke Kishi obliged: the government conscripted millions of forced laborers in the Korean peninsula, then a Japanese colony, and started seizing workers in China, eventually shipping almost 40,000 to Japan. (Kishi later served as Prime Minister from 1957 to '60.)

In the months following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army captured more than 30,000 Americans soldiers and sailors as it overran large chunks of Asia. Thousands, including Levenberg, were shipped to Japan, crammed into the fetid, unventilated holds of transport ships and freighters. Left without toilets, food or water, men licked condensation off the metal inner walls of the hold or drank their own urine, according to survivors' accounts. Many died of disease and starvation before they reached Japan. In violation of international law, the ships weren't marked as prison ships and became targets for Allied bombers and submarines.

Conditions in the labor camps in Japan were nearly as harsh. James King was shipped to the southern island of Kyushu in late 1942 and put to work at a steel plant run by Nippon Steel, today one of the world's biggest producers of the metal. "I don't think I ever had a full meal," Kings says, recalling dinners of watery soup. "If you closed your eyes it wasn't too bad, but there were always little bugs in it." When he was released at the end of the war, his weight had dropped from 76 to 45 kg. He lost two teeth in a "pretty serious" beating. Some of the guards liked to practice martial arts on the prisoners, he recalls. At the time, "Anyone would have traded places with any Marine on the front line."

The Japanese captured only a quarter of the 130,000 American military personnel taken prisoner during the war (Germany seized most of the rest). But a staggering nine out of 10 of the U.S. POWs who died in captivity perished in Japanese hands, according to the Florida-based Center for Internee Rights, a non-profit advocacy group for Allied POWs and internees. The death rate in Nazi-run POW camps was 1.1%; in Japanese camps it was a staggering 38.2%, according to CFIR. As the aftereffects of beatings, deprivation and disease catch up with them, the former prisoners of the Japanese camps have died off at a much faster rate since the war ended.

Despite the appalling death tolls, Japan Inc.'s war record has largely escaped scrutiny in the postwar years. The vast majority of the victims were Koreans, Chinese and other Asians who lacked political and economic clout. Until recently, their governments were focused on squeezing aid and loan money out of Tokyo, not compensation. After a brief push to purge Japan of war criminals during the Occupation, the U.S. embraced men like Kishi in the interests of turning the country into an anti-communist bulwark in Asia. CFIR executive director Gilbert Hair, who is also a plaintiff in the POW/internee lawsuit in Tokyo, says Washington has never shown much interest in pressing Japan for compensation. "They have been irresponsible to the victims since the war, swept them under the rug."

After the war, Levenberg spent eight months in a hospital receiving treatment for back injuries, malnutrition and other ailments. He eventually returned to the military and later worked for the federal government. After disabilities forced him to retire in 1974 (he still needs physiotherapy for his back twice a week), he became active in veterans' aid groups. He first thought seriously of seeking compensation after the U.S. Congress in 1988 approved $20,000 payments to men and women of Japanese descent interned in the U.S. during the war. It was hard to swallow, he recalls: after the war, Washington had given him $1,244 for his 1,244 days in captivity.

An attempt to win compensation through the United Nations failed because the U.S. wouldn't back the claim, he says. Washington argued that a 1951 peace treaty signed by Japan, the U.S. and other Allied countries closed the door on further claims. Levenberg and his lawyers dispute that interpretation, which will likely form part of Nippon Sharyo's defense. The aging veteran, a survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March, thinks he will have a fighting chance in a California courtroom. But even a major victory wouldn't be enough to erase the memory of those years: "You can't wipe this out, you can't wipe the slate clean by the stroke of a pen and so many dollars," says Levenberg. "But it shows people are interested in doing something and admitting their guilt."