Statement for the Record to the Military Personnel Subcommittee House Armed Services Committee for a Hearing on

Improving Recovery and Full Accounting of POW/MIA Personnel from All Past Conflicts

Dr. Lester Tenney
Commander, American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor
2 April 2009

Madam Chairwoman, on behalf of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor (ADBC), which represents the surviving POWs of Japan and their families I would like to call to your and other members of the Subcommittee’s attention to the fact that there remain in Japan records and certain documents concerning American prisoners of war (POWs) held by Imperial Japan during World War II. These documents have never been examined by historians, POW families, or the public. I hope that you will help change this, so that we can assure a full accounting of POWs in the Pacific.

On December 18, 2008 the government of Japan acknowledged for the first time that Allied prisoners during World War II were made to work at a coal mine owned by the family of Prime Minister Taro Aso, contradicting his longstanding denials. The acknowledgement came after the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, under prodding from opposition lawmaker Yukihisa Fujita, released documents showing that 300 Australian, British, and Dutch prisoners of war worked at a mine owned by Aso Mining. Included was a letter of request from the head of the company's Yoshikuma Coal Mine in Fukuoka to General Gen Sugiyama, the Minister of War, to use 300 prisoners in the mines to undertake 12-hour working days for a year.

Japan has long used the absence of official Japanese government or industry documents to avoid responsibility for possible wartime crimes, rejecting documents from other countries or accounts of survivors. Japanese officials burned documents in Japan and across Asia in the days and weeks after the surrender to the United States. But the belief of many scholars that significant documents survive has been strengthened by recent events involving the wartime coal mine owned by the family of Prime Minister Aso.

In late fall 2008, Japanese researchers presented Senator Fujita with POW records compiled by Aso Mining during and immediately after the war. Fujita then presented these records, originally obtained from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, to the Japanese government for authentification. Japan’s Health Ministry responded by releasing four related but different records from its basement archives, and by acknowledging that it possesses eight additional records but refusing to divulge their contents on “privacy grounds.”

American POWs were not the primary focus of recent records release by the Health Ministry because the POWs at Aso Mining were Australian, British and Dutch. But it now seems very likely that this Ministry possesses records directly related to American POWs that were never furnished to Occupation authorities and have never seen the light of day. It is further likely that other Japanese Ministries currently are holding their own POW-related records that have never been examined by independent researchers of any nationality. Japan’s weak national archive system allows individual ministries and government agencies to decide which records to retain, which to transfer to the central archive, and which to destroy.

As Commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, a survivor of the Battle of the Philippines, the Bataan Death March, a “Hell Ship,” over three years in a Mitsui coal mine near Nagasaki, and as an American, I ask you to demand the immediate release of these documents, so that POW families can learn more about their loved ones who toiled in horrific conditions for Japan and that the souls of my comrades can finally rest in peace. It is in the spirit of reconciliation and the strong U.S.-Japan alliance that has developed between once bitter enemies that these documents need to be shared with the public. They will not only answer many questions about the American POWs of Japan but also help ensure that this sordid history is never repeated.

For more background information, see Professor Larry Repeta's recent article on "Aso Revelations on Wartime POW Labor Highlight the Need for a Real National Archive in Japan." http://www.japanfocus.org/-Lawrence-Repeta/3023