Construction company Mitsubishi Materials Corp (5711.T) became the first major Japanese company to apologize for using captured American soldiers as slave laborers during World War Two, offering remorse on Sunday for “the tragic events in our past.”
A company representative offered the apology on behalf of its predecessor, Mitsubishi Mining Co, at a special ceremony at a Los Angeles museum.
“Today we apologize remorsefully for the tragic events in our past,” Mitsubishi Materials Senior Executive Officer Hikaru Kimura told an audience at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
Oh for fucks’ sake-I could give a shit about your war efforts. Seriously, at this point WTF difference does it make?
I swear when they learn how to clone humans, they’re gonna dig up Robert E Lee and put him on an apology tour.
And those Japanese scientists wearing those shirts with risque girls printed all over them. How dare they. Hang your head in shame!
My thoughts exactly. Most of those men are dead. It was their govt’s who was at fault. Everybody paid a terrible price for the war both financially and population wise. They are wiser for the experience. Still, the apology offered was at least offered. Still waiting for the Soviets to issue one for the havoc they caused, imprisoning our military in Siberia gulags and shit loads of other atrocities though I’m not holding my breath for that length of time.
I demand that they build me a new house.
fukunursubaru!! … I read somewhere that we were going to drop 9 more A-bombs before an land invasion… they be lucky!!!
Better late than never, I suppose…
Mighty white of em.
An empty gesture.
Did they apologize to their Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Burmese, Indian, and Indonesian slaves?
Did they offer reparations?
Their apology costs them nothing, but it prolly makes somebody feel good. How bout you fuckin Japs resurrect my wife’s great grandparents who died in a Jap prison camp in the Philippines?
Where’s their apology?
If I were to apologize to those I starved, imprisoned, abused, tortured, worked to death, and dehumanized, yeah, I’d wait 70 years after the fact when that generation is nearly gone.
There was no honor in Mitsubishi’s wartime action or their shallow, too little, too late, meaningless, self-serving apology.
Actually, the 2 we had & used were it-no more in the pipeline
So when does japan apologize for stuffing american POW’s into the steel holds of cargo ships and transporting them in tropical heat to Japan. Accd to many Bataan survivors the “Hell ships” was the most heinous, unforgiveable act of all
This is a no-win situation for the Japs. They were criticized for decades for not apologizing, even though they probably felt like they had done nothing wrong, according to their standards. Now they have apologized and a lot of people don’t want to accept their apology, which they probably suspected would be the case all along. Right about now they gotta be thinking (a.) they should have kept their mouths shut, and (b.) they aren’t going to make THAT mistake again.
Bottom line: It sucks to lose a war.
🙁
True. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there wasn’t enough uranium in the U.S. to light up a watch dial. Harry Trumann was a hell of a poker player…