Cast Light on Japan’s War Crimes

The U.S. government has never been eager to fully document and expose the atrocities committed by Japan against Americans and other captives during World War II. On the contrary, it has sometimes made sure that information about Japan’s extensive war crimes would stay hidden. In the early 1950s the United States even returned to Japan a vast intelligence trove seized by American forces at war’s end, effectively assuring that this information, much of it incriminating, would not become public. Nazi Germany’s crimes have been abundantly and in many cases precisely documented. Much has yet to be revealed about Imperial Japan’s heinous wartime behavior.

Now Congress has acted to change that--maybe. It has passed legislation, sponsored in the Senate by Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), to create a new task force that would be charged with getting access to classified U.S. intelligence files on Japan’s wartime abuse of Allied prisoners and other crimes. A similar group, looking at what U.S. agencies knew about German atrocities, has been at work for several years. But doubt has already been cast on how effective the projected search for Japanese data in U.S. files will be.

At some point in the legislative process language was changed to deny the war crimes committee power to override the 1947 National Security Act. That law allows the CIA director to keep secret any materials he believes could reveal damaging information about intelligence operations. It’s easy to see how that broad authority can be misused, especially when international political considerations come into play, as they clearly have with Japan.

Historians have long noted that Washington’s Cold War worries over assuring that Japan remained a cooperative ally were an incentive to downplaying or keeping secret what was known about Japanese atrocities, from its invasion of China in 1937 to Tokyo’s defeat in 1945.

Scholars number the victims of Japanese war crimes in the millions, most of them Asians but many Western military and civilian captives as well. All of them--the slave laborers, those subjected to hideous biological experiments, those routinely starved and brutalized in POW camps--deserve to have the truth revealed. The war ended 55 years ago. It’s time to end the immoral U.S. policy of cover-up and secrecy about Japan’s wartime atrocities.