Weekend Edition
March 25 / 26, 2006
Slave Labor and Hell Ships
Mitsubishi Awaits Judgment on War Crimes
By CHRISTOPHER REED
A Japanese judge is to rule on Wednesday, March 29, in a case that could shame the nation's leading corporation for using Nazi-style slave labor during the second world war. Yet whereas Germany long ago admitted such crimes against humanity, Japan still evades the issue.
In an extraordinary legal gambit, the giant Mitsubishi conglomerate with the famous triple-diamond logo, is denying liability for thousands of Chinese serf laborers in its coal mines. It argues that Japan never even invaded its neighbor and although millions of Chinese died, the firm's lawyers told the judge that Japanese hostilities in Asia's 1931-45 war "should be viewed essentially as a political dispute."
That would be like Germany claiming its wartime conquests in eastern Europe and Scandinavia were merely local disagreements over the relative importance of Teutonic culture.
A realistic and more pertinent comparison is that Mitsubishi became in imperial Japan what the Krupp steel and armaments corporation was to Germany: a fascist war machine. But whereas Krupp chief Alfried Krupp and 10 directors received three to 12 years imprisonment each in the 1947 Nuremberg trials for enslaving thousands, Mitsubishi has never even been fined.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/reed03252006.html
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