Mitsubishi offers historic apology to Western PoWs

Mitsubishi is to make the first formal apology by a Japanese firm to prisoners of war forced to labour in its mines during the Second World War.

Senior officials of Mitsubishi Materials Corp will on Sunday make the apology to an American former PoW, 94-year-old James Murphy, captured in the fall of the Philippines in 1942. Mitsubishi will address Mr Murphy and other survivors of Imperial Japan's notoriously harsh prison camps in a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

James Murphy, World War II veteran and prisoner of war, is photographed at his home in Santa Maria, California (AP)

But relatives of British PoWs insist that a similar apology needs to be made directly to the families of British men who continued to suffer even after their repatriation at the end of the conflict.

"The company - and other Japanese companies - should be apologising to the families of all the soldiers who were held prisoner," said Sandy Gibson, of Kilmarnock.

Mr Gibson's father, James Gibson, was a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders who was captured in Malaya in 1942. Transferred in early 1945 to the Sendai 6 camp, he was forced to labour in shipyards and a copper mine operated by Mitsubishi, witnessing mine shafts collapsing and flooding, while his comrades were executed for stealing food to survive.

Mr Gibson died in 1982 at the age of 62 after suffering a series of health problems that were a result of his treatment by the Japanese guards.

"Like most other men, my dad never talked much about his experiences in the war, but an apology was all that he would ever have wanted," said Sandy Gibson, 55, a care worker.

Mr Gibson's father was held at a prison camp in Kuala Lumpur and then the notorious Changi jail in Singapore, from where he was later transported aboard a "Hell ship" to Japan.

Pvt. Gibson eventually arrived at Sendai 6-B Camp, also known as Hanawa PoW Camp, where inmates were required to work in Mitsubishi's Osarizawa copper mine.

"The conditions were horrendous", Mr Gibson said. "My father told us that inside the mine there would be roof cave-ins, flooding and pockets of poisonous gas.

"It was also high up in the mountains and freezing cold much of the time, yet the PoWs only had the clothes they had been wearing in the tropical jungle," he said. "They used to make mittens and other clothes out of grass.

"There were no Red Cross parcels as the Japanese used to keep them for themselves," he added. "My father told my brother about a man who tried to steal a bit of food from the shipyard but was caught and beaten up.

"The next day, the Japanese staked him out over a bed of fast-growing bamboo, which grew through his body and eventually killed him."

After the war, Hichiro Tsuchiya, the mine foreman, was sentenced to 15 years hard labour after being found guilty of nine counts of assaulting prisoners, including with the handle of a pickaxe.

The prisoners were "treated as rubbish" because they had surrendered, as the Japanese had been brought up to believe that committing suicide was preferable to surrender, Mr Gibson said.

Records from the camp show the harsh reality of life in Hanawa, with prisoners dying of tuberculosis, malnutrition, starvation and in accidents in the mine.

"It was an old copper mine; a dangerous place to be and exhausting to work in," Mr Gibson said. "You had to walk down 1,600 steps to get down into it, then work a 12-hour day and then back up those same 1,200 steps.

James Gibson

"In the winter, there were 20-foot snowdrifts and there was no heating in the huts the PoWs lived in", he added.

Repatriated after Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, Pvt Gibson worked in coal mines in Ayr, but "never forgot the treatment he and his friends had received", Mr Gibson said.

"When he married my mother, he said to her 'Make sure all the children always have enough food, because I know what real starvation is' ", he said. "He and my mum would never eat until we had all eaten and we all had to finish what was on our plates".

James Gibson died of kidney cancer in 1982 at the age of 62, with his health problems in later life blamed on the poor treatment he had received at the hands of his Japanese captors.

"He did say that he had forgiven the Japanese people of today, because it was nothing to do with them, but he never forgave their government for the ill-treatment they received over three-and-a-half years", he said.

One year ago, Mr Gibson was looking at photographs of the liberation of Hanawa Camp and noticed his father.

"Something just caught my eye and when I zoomed in on it I recognised his distinctive jawline", he said. "I nearly fell off my seat and couldn't quite believe it was him, but I checked with other relatives and they all said the same thing".

And he believes his father would have welcomed the apology, even though it is long overdue.

"Most PoWs have died without ever knowing that a proper apology was ever likely to be forthcoming", Mr Gibson said. "After the war, they struggled with all kinds of post-traumatic stress disorder and disease; many of them were still being treated in their old age at the Liverpool School for Tropical Medicine".

Vera Houghton agrees that the apology is a good thing, but "long overdue".

"Even if they had done it in 1950, people would have accepted it, I think", said 90-year-old Mrs Houghton, of the Wirral. "But this apology is not coming from the people who did these things; it's coming from their grandchildren".

Her husband, Leslie Houghton, was a corporal in the RAF who was captured trying to escape from Singapore in 1942. Shipped to a PoW camp on the outskirts of Osaka, he was also put to work in a copper mine.

"He was working in the mine one day when a truck turned over and he was injured", Mrs Houghton said. "He had to stay down there until the shift finished but then his friends carried him back to the surface. Some of the guards were alright, he said, but the Korean guards were swine."

Mr Houghton died at the age of 74 in May 1995.

"These companies used prisoners in their steel mills and mines and I believe that all of them should apologise", she said. "I also think the entire country should apologise because they know what happened".

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In total, six PoW camps provided labour for Mitsubishi Materials Corp. during the war, holding 2,041 prisoners. Of that total, 672 were British servicemen.

"During the war, the Mitsubishi conglomerate had an unofficial cabinet seat where they helped to set wartime labour policy and today the head of Mitsubishi Corp. is close to Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, so it is only fitting that they make the first efforts toward reconciliation", Mindy Kotler, who heads the Asia Policy Point think tank in Washington DC, told The Telegraph.

Mitsubishi has significant business interests in the US, not least the upcoming bids for California's high-speed rail project, and there is the sense that the company is under pressure to display good corporate citizenship.

"Most important to the American PoWs is not to be forgotten," said Ms Kotler. "Justice is to be remembered, whether it is in a history book, on the Internet, at a memorial at their former PoW camp, where they arrived in Japan, or in a company history.

"Hopefully, now the other Japanese companies that used and abused American and Allied PoW labour will follow with their own apologies and acts of remembrance," she added.

After reading about the planned apology by Mitsubishi Materials, Mr Gibson contacted James Murphy, the former US PoW who will be receiving the apology in Los Angeles today (SUN) and was also held at Hanawa Camp.

"He sent me a reply saying he would be honoured if I attended the meeting." Mr Gibson said. "I don't think he realised that I was thousands of miles away in Scotland. It was very short notice, but my wife said I should go, so I went straight down to the travel agent.

"They have waited 70 years for an apology", he said. "For most of them, it's too late now, but I feel I would be letting my father down if I didn't go".