Nothing That Looks Like Justice

More than 50 years after the end of World War II, the Justice Department has denied entry into the United States to 16 Japanese accused of war crimes. Some of the men, many now in their 80s, allegedly were involved in forcing tens of thousands of young women and girls from Korea, China, the Philippines and other conquered countries to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese armed forces during the war. Others were members of the notorious Unit 731, which conducted inhuman biological warfare experiments in Manchuria on Allied prisoners of war.

The names of some of those who participated in the abuse and in many cases the killing of captive women have become known only recently as a number of the surviving victims have come forward to tell their stories and demand public apologies for what they suffered. But the identities of the Unit 731 personnel have been known from the day they were arrested by U.S. forces after the war ended. Why, only now, are they being formally classified as war criminals and barred from American soil?

The answer is that a half-century ago, U.S. officials decided to strike a deal with the devil. The men who subjected American and other prisoners of war to grisly tortures in the guise of medical experiments were given immunity from prosecution in exchange for turning over the records of Unit 731 and cooperating in debriefings about what they did.

Decades later, when the activities of the secret unit became widely known, the grant of immunity was justified by U.S. explainers on the shaky grounds of Cold War expediency: The United States didn’t want the data on bacterial and chemical warfare experiments to somehow fall into Soviet hands. That perceived imperative overrode all other considerations of justice.

So war criminals who had no scruples about brutalizing and killing hundreds of helpless prisoners were themselves permitted to live out their lives unpunished, in some cases in honor and prosperity. The failure of American officials to do the right thing in this case 50 years ago was, and remains, morally insupportable. And the contemporary move to deny visas to the perpetrators of crimes against humanity is little more than an absurdly empty gesture.