Apology, act of convenience for sake of alliance

This file dated May 16, 2015, shows the Kagoshima Foreign Engineers´ Residence at the Shuseikan complex in the city of Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee on Sunday, July 5, 2015, approved the inclusion of sites related to Japan´s industrial revolution from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji era into the U.N. cultural agency´s World Heritage list, including the Shuseikan complex. [Photo/IC]

Mitsubishi Materials Corp will apologize to former prisoners-of-war from the United States this weekend in Los Angeles for forcing them to work as slave laborers during World War II, said the Simon Wiesenthal Center which is hosting the closed-door event. This is the first time it has made such an apology. The Japanese Embassy in Washington has denied the Japanese government's involvement. Comments:

Using POWs as slavelaborers is a war crime that the Japanese government has been trying to portray as company labor dispute, not a government-directed act. As much as it hates to, Tokyo still has to admit the wartime crime for the sake of the US-Japan special alliance, which explains its reluctance to apologize to Chinese and Korean laborers.

Yu Xin, a senior fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies affiliated to Renmin University of China, July 15

As far as I know, this is a piece of history, it's the first time a major Japanese company has ever made such a gesture. We hope this will spur other companies to do the same.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, July 15

After UNESCO's World Heritage Committee decided to include Japan's controversial "Meiji Industrial Revolution Sites" on the World Heritage List in July 5, Tokyo denied using forced labor at some of the sites during the WWII. Such attempts to whitewash Japan's wartime atrocities are worth noting, and should be stopped before they lead the country further astray.

Workers' Daily, July 13