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January 8, 2011
The
Honorable Jerry Brown c/o Washington Office of the State of California, Fax: (202) 624-5280
Dear Governor
Brown: In your upcoming meetings with Japanese bidders for California’s high-speed rail contracts, I ask that you insist that they acknowledge their role in violating the human rights of American citizens. These Japanese companies should come clean about their wartime misuse and abuse of American POWs by apologizing and creating an educational fund to preserve the history of us American veterans. Without this acknowledgement, accepting Japanese bids and financing on high-speed rail projects is tantamount to accepting “Blood Money.” Nearly all the Japanese train component manufacturers, such as Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Mitsui, Kawasaki, and Nippon Sharyo, used POW forced labor in brutal conditions that they contracted for from Japan’s military in order to maintain their war production and keep their companies profitable, this all in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. During my time shoveling coal in the Mitsui coal mine, my arm and back were broken and my head split open due to the beatings in the mine by Mitsui employees. SNCF, the French bidder on high speed rail contracts, apologized last November for its complicity in the Holocaust and committed itself to educating new generations about their war crimes by funding dialogues, historical research and remembrance projects with museums and private organizations. By contrast, the Japanese companies, including those companies involved with manufacturing high-speed rail, have never acknowledged or apologized for their enslavement and torture of American POWs. In September, I headed the delegation of six American POW survivors and several descendants to Japan and we received a meaningful apology from Mr. Katsuya Okada, Japan’s Foreign Minister. The apology was sorely needed and widely welcomed even though 65 years late. The need for an educational program, similar to SNCF’s, was made abundantly clear in a recent article in a prominent Japanese magazine. The article attacks me and implies that my descriptions of the abuses and tortures I endured as a POW and the horrors I endured on the Bataan Death March, which I outline in my book My Hitch in Hell, were merely Jewish lies! (A translation of this outrageous anti-Semitic and revisionist article is attached.) We American POWs of Japan do not ask for compensation. We simply ask for an honorable apology for our slave labor and the establishment of an educational fund to ensure that the sort of history outlined in this popular Japanese publication receives in the future a fair counter historical presentation. It is public knowledge that with the encouragement of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, SNCF, the French bidder of high-speed rail contracts, finally acknowledged its complex Holocaust history. I hope that you will insist upon the same from Japan’s great corporations.
I will welcome
an opportunity to talk with you further about this important issue affecting
California’s veterans who honorably served our Nation in times of war.
cc: Senator
Barbara Boxer, Fax: (202) 224-0454
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