Why US Shields Japan's WWII Denials
By Jerry Meldon
February 24, 2007
Editor's Note: Over
the years, we have written a number of stories about Rev. Sun Myung Moon's
influence-buying schemes inside U.S. conservative political circles – and the
federal government's odd refusal to aggressively enforce laws when Moon's
operation is caught in legally questionable activities. [See, for instance,
Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'.]
In this guest
article, Jerry Meldon examines the mysterious roots of the money that has
funded right-wing Asian politics since World War II and that has sometimes
spilled over into the United States:
On Feb. 19, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso took
exception to a U.S. congressional resolution introduced by Rep. Mike Honda,
D-California, calling on Japan to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept
historical responsibility” for coercing 200,000 Asian women into slavery as
“Comfort Women” (wartime prostitutes) for 3.5 million Japanese soldiers. Mr.
Aso said he considers the accusation groundless and extremely regrettable.
Six decades after World War II, can it really be that
Japanese officials are still distorting history and insulting the Chinese,
Koreans, Filipinos and others across Asia whom Hirohito’ s forces savagely
brutalized and robbed?
And why does Washington turn a deaf ear?
The answers may be rooted in what transpired behind
closed doors in Tokyo when Japan was occupied by the U.S. military in the
post-war years .
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave suggest a motive in their eye-opening – and at times stomach-turning –
2003 book, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold. In the
war’s immediate aftermath, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of Allied
occupying forces, secretly joined hands with Japanese war criminals.
Rather than convict, imprison and throw away the keys,
MacArthur coddled those responsible for one of history’s bloodiest wars of
aggression. When the U.S. occupation ended in 1952, he released all those who
were still in custody.
And it may have gone a lot further than that.
According to Gold Warriors, even as the United
States “introduced democratic reforms
and a new constitution … [it ] put Japan back under the control of men who were
devotedly undemocratic … [insisting] that Japan never stole anything and was
flat broke … [when, in reality, America had given it ] huge infusions of black
money.”
Washington even had Article 14 of the 1951 Japan Peace
Treaty state : “It is recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied
Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless
it is also recognized that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient
… [Therefore] the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied
Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan.”
As historian Christopher Simpson put it , the United
States thereby insured “that the victims of the war – rape camp survivors,
slave laborers and POWs – [would] be left with nothing.”
Furthermore, according to the Seagraves, “records of
Japan’s looting and economic conspiracy have been removed from Western archives
and databases, remain under secret classification and will not be made public
for another half-century.”
The cover-up notwithstanding, the Seagraves somehow
penetrated the veil of secrecy and reported that the source of the black money
that MacArthur bestowed on the Japanese. They wrote that after arriving in
Japan, the general’s aides located $100 billion in gold, platinum and other
treasures that Hirohito’s forces had systematically plundered from occupied
Asian nations and buried deep underground.
When MacArthur reported this to Washington, President
Harry S. Truman’s brain trust – which included John McCloy, who as U.S. High
Commissioner for Germany would authorize the early release of many Nazi war
criminals – decided to devote the
fortune to covert operations such as the bankrolling of rightist political
parties and the recruitment of war criminals as U.S. intelligence agents for
the Cold War that was just beginning.
One of the most notorious crooks MacArthur embraced was
yakuza godfather Yoshio Kodama. With the
exalted rank of rear admiral in the Japanese navy, Kodama had overseen the
wartime looting of Asia’s criminal infrastructure. In the process, he stashed
away a personal fortune estimated at $13 billion.
Arrested as a Class A war criminal, he made a deal with
MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Gen. Charles Willoughby. Kodama handed the CIA
$100 million in return for his release from Sugamo Prison. Returning to the
underworld, he regained control of the Asian heroin traffic.
According to the Seagraves and others, he also remained a
CIA asset until his death in 1984. It was apparently in that capacity that he
became a major behind-the-scenes political force, primarily in Japan but,
indirectly, across the Pacific as well.
Together with his fellow racketeer and Class A war
criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa, Kodama underwrote the creation of two Japanese
political parties that later combined to form the Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP). Except for a brief hiatus when voters had had their fill of corruption,
the conservative LDP has ruled Japan ever since. According to sources cited by
the Seagraves, the LDP secretly contributed to the 1960 presidential campaign
of Richard M. Nixon.
The LDP was not the only organization which Kodama and Sasakawa bankrolled, that
lavished the gangsters’ ill-begotten wealth on American politicians. They also
underwrote the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, which owns the
right-wing daily, the Washington Times.
When Gen. Park Chung Hee staged a coup and installed
himself as South Korea’s dictator in 1961, he designated the Unification Church
to be his political arm. Successive South Korean leaders have used it to
influence U.S. foreign policy.
A 1978 congressional inquiry found that Moon’s
organization, in coordination with South Korea’s CIA-molded intelligence
agency, the KCIA, paid off several U.S. congressmen. Rep. Richard Hanna,
D-California, and Otto Passman, D-Louisiana, accepted approximately $200,000
each.
Hanna was slapped with a six-to-30-month sentence and
spent a year behind bars. Passman managed to have himself tried in his home
town and was acquitted. Fortunately for Reps. Cornelius Gallagher, D-New
Jersey, and William Marshall, R-Ohio, the five-year statute of limitations ran
out before they could be prosecuted. Three others congressmen were reprimanded
for lying about their gifts.
Kodama and Sasakawa, together with followers of Rev.
Moon, also underwrote the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) as a
propaganda mill for the dictatorships of Taiwan and South Korea. In 1966, the
APACL expanded to become the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) . European
neo-nazi terrorists and Latin American death squad leaders attended WACL
conferences in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ronald Reagan – whose 1981 presidential inauguration was
attended by the godfather of Central America’s death squads, Mario Sandoval
Alarcon – sent the following message to the 1985 WACL convention in Dallas:
“I commend you all for your part in this noble cause. Our
combined efforts are moving the tide of history toward world freedom. We must
persevere and never falter. I send all you who help in your crusade for liberty
my best wishes. God bless you.”
The previous year, Congress had blocked continued White
House funding for the counter-revolutionary Nicaraguan contras. Undaunted, the
Reagan administration solicited donations from private right-wing sources,
including the two organizations that Kodama and Sasakawa had spawned. WACL and
the Unification Church each obliged the Reagan team with generous donations
that kept the contras afloat.
In that same period, WACL also contributed heavily in the
United States to right-wing candidates running against progressive incumbents.
One such beneficiary, WACL conferee Steven Symms, unseated the chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church, D-Idaho. A prominent Vietnam
War critic, Church had chaired a 1975 Senate investigation that uncovered CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders.
Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, a picture
emerges of CIA-controlled Japanese wartime loot being funneled by Japanese war
criminals, via rightist Asian conduit organizations, to American politicians.
Maybe that explains why Washington turns a deaf ear when
Japanese officials sanitize their country’s wartime atrocities. After all, the
bruised feelings of a couple of billion Asian mainlanders is a small price to
pay for keeping a lid on the truth.
Jerry Meldon is an Associate Professor of Chemical
Engineering at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
