Linda Goetz Holmes : unjust enrichment

Anybody read this? Published in 2001. I have not but it seems like it is one of the "black" books one must read (?)



http://www.rense.com/general8/pows.htm

Linda Goetz Holmes: What struck me when I was doing the research was that the companies immediately asked for the use of the prisoners. It wasn't something the Japanese army decided to do with all these men they'd taken. It was the companies that asked and the army that said, "Okay, but first pay us a fee per day for the use of the prisoners." The companies paid two yen per man per day, which was a good piece of change back in 1942 and 1943.

They paid that to the government for leasing them the use of the prisoners. Then the government said, "You will pay the prisoners the pay of Japanese soldiers according to their rank." The companies made monthly reports as if they were paying the men, and the official Japanese government records show the men being paid.But they were not paid.

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When the war ended, [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur [the postwar governor of Japan] was given a directive: "You will assume that every member of the zaibatsu was involved in the prosecution of the war and is a potential war criminal." They were all rounded up and detained. Then Donihi and his fellow investigator could not find enough evidence, enough of a paper trail, to feel that they could sustain an indictment, and the zaibatsu were let off. German industrialists left a paper trail that the investigators could follow. The Japanese did not, and none of them stood trial.

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From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
In September 1999, some 500 American WWII veterans filed suit against five Japanese corporations (including Mitsubishi and Kawasaki), seeking reparation for having been used as slave laborers during the war. According to the plaintiffs, these corporations built their postwar success on a foundation of American forced labor. The companies say they have been wrongly targeted, because the modern conglomerates have no relation to the wartime entities accused of these practices, prohibited now as then under the rules of the Geneva Convention. Holmes (4,000 Bowls of Rice), a respected historian and researcher who is part of a presidential panel working to declassify the records of Nazi war crimes, weighs in heavily on the side of the former American POWs. Using recently declassified documents, Holmes bolsters the vets' claims. (One formerly top secret Japanese cable read, "Due to a serious shortage of labor power in Japan, the use of the white POW is earnestly desired.") But the most emotionally charged evidence comes from the former POWs themselves.

 

Anyone read this?