Decades After Abuses by the Japanese, Guam Hopes the U.S. Will Make Amends
By JAMES BROOKEMERIZO, Guam, Aug. 11 – In July 1944, American warships were bobbing on the Pacific horizon when a squad of Japanese soldiers swept through this old Spanish fishing port. Jogging down sandy alleys and bursting into stucco homes, they rounded up 30 villagers, all known for their ties to the United States.
“They didn’t want any leaders to be around when the military landed,” Ignacio Cruz said as he recalled the roundup he watched as a 17-year-old. “Then, they machine-gunned them, they grenaded them, and if they found them surviving, they bayoneted them.”
“Dad got killed, and a lot of young babies were brought up without fathers,” continued Mr. Cruz, who grew up, joined the Marines and became the village mayor, the post his father once held. “I managed to survive, and go to school, and build a house for my mother and continue my education.”
With the 60th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender on Monday, Mr. Cruz, who is now 78, and other elderly Guam residents hope American politicians will go beyond solemn speeches and act to compensate them for abuses they suffered under Japan’s 32-month occupation.Often overshadowed by the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s occupation of this American island started Dec. 10 and continued until American soldiers returned to Guam on July 21, 1944, a date celebrated as Liberation Day.
With 83 Congressional sponsors supporting the Guam World War II Loyalty Recognition Act, a House bill introduced in April, momentum for compensation is building.
A 1951 treaty between the United States and Japan absolved Japan of future individual American war claims, which means American taxpayers would be asked to pay for abuses committed by Japanese soldiers on American nationals on American territory.
The bill was introduced by Delegate Madeleine Z. Bordallo, a Democrat, who is Guam’s nonvoting representative in Congress.
Compensation for the Guamanians would be roughly comparable to the compensation paid to Japanese-Americans who were interned in the United States during the war.
Under that program, each claimant was paid $20,000. Over the program’s 10-year span, 82,250 Japanese-Americans were paid a total of $1.65 billion.
The Guam compensation program would cost about $135 million: $12,000 to each of the roughly 9,000 survivors of the occupation, and lump sums of $25,000 to children of about 1,000 Guam residents killed by Japanese occupation forces.
“It has been 60 years,” Ms. Bordallo said Wednesday in an interview. Hers is the latest of 11 bills submitted on the issue since 1983. “We have tried time and time again.”
The Bush administration has not taken a public position on the bill. But David B. Cohen, deputy assistant secretary of the interior for insular affairs, the only administration official to have testified at Congressional hearings on the issue, was not encouraging in testimony last summer
“Reasonable people might disagree in good faith, however, about the appropriate level of financial compensation to be paid by the federal government for damages that were caused not by the fault of the United States, but rather by the fault of a foreign occupying power,” he said. “Reasonable people might also disagree in good faith about what is prudent in light of our current circumstances. There are many worthy programs competing now for limited federal dollars.”
Mr. Cohen, who arrived on Guam on Thursday for other business, would only say this on the bill’s prospects: “It is a challenging issue, especially in this fiscal environment.”
Guam officials have asked the State Department to ask Japan for a formal apology. They did not include the request in the bill for fear of creating diplomatic problems.
In 2003, President Bush signed legislation authorizing the appointment of the Guam War Claims Review Commission. The result was a collective convulsion for older residents, people newspapers here now call Guam’s “greatest generation.”
On an island of 160,000, 8,300 people petitioned to testify before the commission.
Often speaking in Chamorro, the Spanish-influenced dialect of Guam’s native people, elderly witnesses painted a picture of Japanese colonial occupation that turned progressively violent against anyone suspected of sympathies with the United States. At the time of the Japanese occupation, the United States had governed Guam as an unincorporated territory for four decades.
Initially, Japan treated Guam as its latest Pacific colony, renaming it Omiya Jima, or Great Shrine Island, and seeking to turn the 22,000 islanders, all American nationals, into Japanese subjects. Chamorros, as native residents are called, were forced to learn Japanese and to bow deeply to Japanese authorities. But as the American military’s island-hopping campaign drew closer to Guam, Japanese officials suspected that Chamorros were spying for the Americans and were hiding fugitive American soldiers in the jungle.
In hearings here, Manuel Merfalen testified that he watched the Japanese police whip his older sister, who was married to a sailor in the United States Navy. When she fell unconscious, he said, police interrogators revived her by pouring gasoline on her wounds.
“One witness recalled that, as an 8-year-old boy, he watched as his father was repeatedly beaten and paraded naked through the village for his loyalty to America and as a warning to the others that they should be loyal to Japan,” the Guam commission report said.
With American connections potentially fatal, Antonio Lizama recalled in testimony that he rubbed mud on his baby sister, fearing that her fair skin would arouse suspicions of Japanese soldiers seeking to purge all traces of the American past.
Ten days before the American attack, Japanese troops herded most of the island’s civilian population into three concentration camps in the island’s interior, a move that spared many from the fighting.
After Japan’s surrender, the Navy Department, which had administered Guam before the war, started to judge damage claims filed under the Guam Meritorious Claims Act of 1945.
At a time of high illiteracy rates, no newspapers or telephones, and a language barrier between Navy administrators and the largely Chamorro-speaking population, many claimants missed what amounted to a six-month window to file claims. In the testimony, many older residents said they were never aware in 1946 of the claims system.
“In 1946, I went to Hawaii for one and a half years, and I never got any money,” Cecilia Yatar said in her home in Santa Rita. Repeatedly clubbed on the back by the Japanese as a girl, Mrs. Yatar, now 80, said she has had back problems all her life.
The family had come under suspicion because the Japanese police believed that a brother, a crab fisherman, was spying for the Americans. Mrs. Yatar said her mother was tortured, her brother and an uncle were beheaded, and surviving family members were thrown into a hard labor camp reserved for natives who were considered pro-American.
Last year, the review commission studied the 1946 claims process. Although $8 million was paid at the time, largely for property damages, the report said that the 1946 process was hurried and missed many claims.
“This is about a group of Americans who were authorized to make claims against the U.S. government, but were not treated fairly by the U.S. government,” said Robert A. Underwood, who fought to win compensation during the decade from 1983 to 1993, when he was Guam’s delegate. “It is not a question of Japanese brutality, but a question of whether the U.S. government treated its own nationals fairly.”