Loot
November 30th, 2003
The London Review of Books has a fascinating review by Chalmers Johnson of Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold by Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave. The Seagraves’ book discusses the fate of the war treasure looted by the Japanese during the late thirties and early forties. The first question is why the two main Axis powers were treated so differently by the occupying powers.
The real differences between the two nations, however, developed in the years and decades after 1945. Survivors and relatives of victims of the Holocaust have worked for almost six decades to win compensation from German corporations for slave labour and to regain possession of works of art stolen from their homes and offices. Litigation continues against Swiss banks that hid much of the Nazi loot. As recently as July 2001, the Austrian Government began to disburse some $300 million out of an endowment of almost $500 million to more than 100,000 former slave labourers. The German Government has long recognised that, in order to re-establish relations of mutual respect with the countries it pillaged, serious gestures towards restitution are necessary. It has so far paid more than $45 billion in compensation and reparations. Japan, on the other hand, has given its victims a mere $3 billion, while giving its own nationals around $400 billion in compensation for war losses.
One reason for these differences is that victims of the Nazis have been politically influential in the US and Britain, forcing their Governments to put pressure on Germany, whereas Japan’s victims live in countries that for most of the postwar period were torn by revolution, anticolonial movements and civil wars. This has begun to change with the rise of Sino-American activists. The success of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1997), a book the Japanese establishment did everything in its power to impugn, heralded the emergence of this group.
More significant, however, are differences in US Government policies towards the two countries. From the moment of Germany’s defeat, the United States was active in apprehending war criminals, denazifying German society, and collecting and protecting archives of the Nazi regime, all of which have by now been declassified. By contrast, from the moment of Japan’s defeat, the US Government sought to exonerate the Emperor and his relatives from any responsibility for the war. By 1948, it was seeking to restore the wartime ruling class to positions of power (Japan’s wartime minister of munitions, Nobusuke Kishi, for example, was prime minister from 1957 to 1960). The US keeps many of its archives concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws.
As recounted by Johnson, the story the Seagraves tell of the US efforts to grab as much Japanese wartime loot as possible ties in somewhat with one of the subplots in my current reading, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. (NB: I’m only just over halfway through Stephenson’s novel: if there are any plot developments which invalidate that comparison, please don’t tell me!) The Seagraves’ book looks like yet another candidate for the To-Read pile.
December 1st, 2003 at 7:19 am
Interesting you should blog that. I had read that review this morning, and thought strongly about blogging it, as trying to educate people about the war crimes of the Japanese, and in particular, the war guilt of the Emperor, has been one of my pet buttons for about thirty years.
So I was very tempted to quote large chunks of the review. But too much of the material about the basic point of the book, the Golden Lily stuff, sounded too shakily sourced or verified. I decided I didn’t want to lend credibility to a book I’d not yet read that was, by the specific words of the reviewer, full of blatant errors, things that weren’t so, and dubious assertions, even if I fully agreed that it was correct in its larger general assumptions as to the war guilt of Hirohito, and the central US involvement in covering that up for decades.
I would like to read the book. But meanwhile there are plenty of fully reputable books in recent years documenting Hirohito’s war guilt, and Japan’s murderous war crimes, and the continued thread of militarism, along with a refusal to examine its own crimes and guilt, even if they don’t have juicy but out there stuff about jillions in Hidden Gold.