Beijing slams Mitsubishi’s ‘selective’ wartime slave labor apology

Prime Minster Shinzo Abe.

Mitsubishi Materials Corp. should expand its apology for using U.S. prisoners of war as forced laborers during World War II to include captured Chinese soldiers, state-run Xinhua News Agency said in a commentary.
By addressing only U.S. prisoners, just two of whom are still alive, the company “made a selective and hypocritical apology,” according to the article published Monday. A spokesman for the company wasn’t immediately available to comment yesterday.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is set to issue a statement in August to commemorate 70 years since Japan’s surrender. Abe has said he will uphold the statements of previous prime ministers, but won’t reiterate wording that detailed Japan’s past aggression and colonial rule in Asia. Failure to satisfy China risks undermining a nascent recovery in ties between Asia’s two biggest economies.
“As the saying goes, ‘If a leader sets a bad example, it will be followed by his subordinates,’” the commentary says. Mitsubishi’s apology “stopped short of directly offering a sincere apology to Asian countries, especially China and South Korea, which suffered the most from Japan’s wartime atrocities.”
Mitsubishi Materials forced 3,765 Chinese nationals to work at 12 sites belonging to the company during the war, 720 of whom were tortured to death or died from extremely heavy labor, according the Xinhua commentary citing “official Japanese data.”
“To mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Japan should make a wise choice to bravely face up to its dark wartime past, offer a sincere apology to those who most want it instead of U.S. POWs only, and take concrete action to prove to the world that Japan will firmly follow a path of pacifism,” Xinhua said. Greg Ahlstrand, Bloomberg