The following is from consortiumnews.com. See also
http://www.ideaworx.com/slatewiper/slatelinks.htm, and http://www.skycitygallery.com/japan/japan.html.
. "Commerce is War" has been a
post-War slogan of Japanese industry for the last sixty-plus years. The War is
not taught in Japan. I'd like to see -I'm not kidding - an anime version of WW
II without the cleaning-up of the Nazi-Germany of the East. Henry_Allen
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, Philippinos 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, e ven 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 vict ims 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. His e-mail is jerry.meldon@tufts.edu .
