Kajima’s Throne of Blood

Mike Davis

Eighty-year-old Geng Zheng is a survivor of a World War 11 Japanese slave - labor camp in northeast Honshu. After an abortive uprising in 1945, 113 of his Chinese compatriots were tortured to death. Now living in China, he has spent a half - century fighting to keep their memory alive.

Although Ana and Geng have never met, they know each other's stories, and, as Ana puts it, "are learning to speak with one voice against injustice." Just before Christmas, she helped organize a local rally in support of Geng's landmark lawsuit for reparations in Tokyo. Geng and other massacre survivors, meanwhile, weighed possible actions against the New Otani Hotel in Beijing.

These are some of the fruits of a remarkable solidarity that links Asian - American community activists, Latino hotel workers, former Chinese slave laborers and Japanese leftists in a common struggle against an arrogant empire with a dark history, known as Kajima.

The Ghosts of Hanaoka
Kajima, the world's second - largest construction firm (and developer of the New Otani Hotel in Los Angeles) is headquartered behind formidable iron gates in Tokyo's once - bawdy Akasaka district. The chaste whiteness of the Kajima skyscraper belies a reputation for bribery and bid - rigging that has kept the corporation under repeated criminal indictment since the late 1980s. (An indiscreet 1994 poll of Kajima's own employees found that 88 percent agreed with the proposition that the company was "prone to corruption.")

Fifty years ago, however, Kajima was not just passing fat envelopes of 5,000 - yen notes to corrupt Diet members and former government ministers of construction. It was running a full - fledged slave - labor camp at the Hanaoka copper mine in Akita Prefecture. In 1944 the Japanese empire had sent there 1,000 Chinese peasants and P.O.W.s (including captured Communist guerrillas) to undertake the dangerous work of diverting a river next to the mine. It gave Kajima carte blanche to "squeeze them like a damp towel until not one drop remains."

By March of 1945 the emaciated and exhausted Chinese were dying at the rate of thirty per week. "One day," according to Geng's published memoir, "one of our comrades, to stave off his hunger, picked up an apple core discarded on the side of the road. A Kajima supervisor saw this and beat him to death on the spot."

The enraged laborers decided to gamble everything on a desperate uprising against Kajima. They hoped to reach the coast, liberate a nearby camp of American P.O.W.ss and steal a fishing boat to freedom. On the evening of June 30, 1945, they attacked their guards with stones and bare fists, killing three Kajima employees and a Chinese informer. They never made it to the American camp or to the coast, though. Hunted down like rabbits by police and local militia, they were returned to Hanaoka where, for three days and nights, they were the object of sadistic sport. Some had water forced down their throats while police and Kajima goons jumped up and down on their swollen stomachs. Others were hung by their thumbs and beaten until their faces were unrecognizable. A few were simply dispatched with sledge - hammers and shovels.

In a surreal postscript, Geng and a dozen other survivors were put on trial after the surrender of Japan and sentenced to life imprisonment for leading the revolt. The rest of the starving camp was kept at slave labor until finally being liberated by U.S. occupation forces. Although three Kajima supervisors were sentenced to death by the Yokohama War Crimes Tribunal for their role in the massacre, the executions were never carried out, and by 1956 all had been released from prison. Kajima was even compensated by the Japanese government for the repatriation of its former slaves.

Today, the "Hanaoka incident" might have been lost entirely in the moral amnesia of the cold war had it not been for the persistence of Geng and the lonely vigils of two Japanese chroniclers of the slaughter, Nozue Kenji and Yachita Tsuneo, whose courageous stories are told in Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt. Unlike Germany, Japan was not obligated by the Allies to make reparations to the millions of victims of its "Greater Far East Co - Prosperity Sphere." More hungry for yen than for justice, one Asian country after another - including China in 1972 - renounced official war claims against Tokyo.

The legal standing of individual victims, however, has remained largely untested in Japanese courts. Beginning in 1990, Geng and his lawyers entered into negotiations with Kajima executives, who stubbornly refused to acknowledge any institutional responsibility for the massacre. Last June, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hanaoka uprising, Geng and ten other survivors filed suit in a Tokyo court. Their demands include a formal corporate apology, $ 50,000 compensation for each survivor and the construction of memorials in China and Japan.

This is the first attempt by individuals to establish the liability of private Japanese capital for wartime atrocities. If successful, the Hanaoka suit would open the door for thousands of other aging victims of what some call the Pacific Holocaust - including Koreans, Filipinos, Burmese, Malays, Micronesians and the "comfort women" - to claim some measure of financial and moral vindication.

Little Tokyo's Broken Heart
Kathy Nishimoto Masaoka is standing in front of the twelve - foot - tall "Friendship Knot," a double helix of concrete anchored in the mall next to the New Otani. She is scowling at the bronze plaque that dedicates the sculpture to Morinosuke Kajima, the wartime boss of the Hanaoka slaves, but here described as an "international businessman, whose vision and generosity initiated the revitalization of Little Tokyo."

"This used to be the heart of the community," she explains, pointing toward a courtyard of glitzy tourist shops selling Armani suits and English hunting gear under the cold shadow of the New Otani. "Three old hotels provided affordable housing for elderly Issei first - generation immigrants as well as young Latino families. There were scores of traditional, family - run storefronts and cheap restaurants.

"But then, in 1973, Kajima created the East - West Development Corporation to oversee the redevelopment of this area. The residents wanted replacement senior housing and the preservation of existing businesses. The Downtown corporate leaders and the city's Community Redevelopment Agency (C.R.A.), on the other hand, pushed Kajima's plan for a luxury hotel and shopping center. They saw Little Tokyo as a conduit for Japanese corporate investment, not as a vibrant Japanese - American neighborhood. Kajima eventually selected the New Otani chain, headed by a wealthy Japanese family, to manage the hotel."

"We formed the Little Tokyo Peoples' Rights Organization (L.T.P.R.O.) to fight Kajima and the C.R.A."' Kathy continues. "We felt that the very soul of our community was at stake. It was a long, bitter struggle that climaxed in the brutal eviction of hundreds of residents, often without compensation or relocation assistance. The last die - hard protesters were forcibly removed from the Sun Hotel in 1977 to make way for more New Otani parking space. We were haunted by the ironic parallels between the redevelopment evictions and the 1942 internments."

Although the New Otani Hotel, in which Kajima retains the controlling interest, triumphantly opened its doors in late 1977, L.T.P.R.O. succeeded in forcing the C.R.A. to build low - income replacement housing at other sites. Members of the organization later formed the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, which played a leading role in the successful campaign to convince Congress to compensate Japanese - American internees. "But we never forgot about Kajima;" Kathy adds, "or the increasingly frequent complaints about the maltreatment of New Otani workers."

Suites at the New Otani go for anywhere from $475 to $1,800 per night, but most of the hotel's staff (70 percent Latino, 25 percent Asian) earn Motel Six wages. After repeated pleas for help from a group of pro - union workers, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 11 launched a full - scale New Otani organizing campaign in 1993. Management immediately hired the most notorious unionbuster in Southern California, who held "captive audience" meetings to intimidate union sympathizers.

The company's campaign involved the sinister threat that "a few of our employees show disrespect to managers and, over a period of time, they will be dealt with in the appropriate manner." Indeed, over the next two years, the New Otani made work life hell for union sympathizers, who were repeatedly assigned demeaning tasks and suspended for imaginary "insubordinations." The hotel issued an "open letter to lawless Local 11" that childishly proclaimed, "You are disgusting!"

Harassment of the staff also had ugly racial overtones. According to the New Otani's general manager, Latino workers, especially those "born in other countries"' were "not yet as sophisticated perhaps as some others." Thus, Mexican and Salvadoran waiters were demoted to busboys and replaced by Anglos. Japanese workers were forbidden to fraternize with Latinos, and at one point Latinos were forbidden to speak to one another in Spanish. Despite the protests of several L.A. City Council members, five of the most senior, pro - union workers - including the popular Ana Alvarado - were fired.

This repression galvanized a Little Tokyo support committee which included veterans of the 1973 - 77 struggle as well as younger community and campus activists. (As Kathy emphasizes, "Asian - American/Latino unity has been our conscious goal since the early days of the Sun Hotel battle.") Meanwhile, as the fiftieth anniversary of V - J Day approached, the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations began mobilizing Japanese - American support for the Chinese, Filipino and Korean efforts to reopen the debate about Japanese war crimes.

Initially there appeared to be no direct link between the two campaigns. Then, in mid - 1994, Local 11's researchers discovered the story of the Hanaoka massacre in a Japanese newspaper account of Geng's negotiations with Kajima. "We were stunned," says Kathy. "Although we had fought Kajima for twenty years, we knew little about its actual history. Local corporate leaders had placed a saintly halo over Dr. Kajima's head. Now that we know about Hanaoka, it redoubles the importance of community support for organizing the New Otani."

A Small Earthquake
December 18: Ice rattles in the martini glasses and some nervous guests wonder, "Earthquake?" But it is only the Taiko drummers bouncing their martial percussions off the walls of the New Otani. Three hundred demonstrators - workers and their families, students, community leaders - rally beneath huge black - and - white signs proclaiming "Union Jobs Better L.A." and "Tourism Workers Union Now." As smirking security guards kibitz from the hotel's portecochere, speakers from a half - dozen Asian nationalities, as well as U.C.L.A.'s African Student Union, denounce the latest round of firings and suspensions of union sympathizers.

This action was a militant preface to the January 24 kickoff of a full - scale boycott of the New Otani. Heavily dependent on package tours and business travelers from Japan, the hotel is also a popular watering hole for bureaucrats from nearby state and city office buildings, including the Los Angeles Police Department's headquarters at the Parker Center. And if L.A.'s huge hotel and tourism industry, capitalized as it is on minimum wage immigrant labor, is closely watching the current test of strength between the New Otani and Local 11, so too are the many public agencies that have become part of Kajima's spider web of high - profile construction deals.

Despite its anti - union behavior, Kajima recently has captured such prize contracts as the Tampa and Long Beach aquariums; subway construction in Hollywood; light - rail in Portland, Oregon; an underground pipeline in Toledo, Ohio; courthouses in Miami and Los Angeles; and, fittingly for a company whose executives have been charged with felonies, an expansion of the notorious Soledad Prison in Central California. Over the past five years, Kajima's subsidiaries have reaped close to $ 500 million in prime public - works contracts in Southern California alone.

Kajima's secret is its ability to finance its own projects. Because of its size, as well as its intimate relationship with Sumitomo Bank, it is able to run circles around competitors when it comes to providing up - front development and construction loans. Last fall, for example, a Kajima - led team won exclusive rights to negotiate the lucrative contract for a new high school and residential complex near Downtown L.A. by offering to bankroll more than $ 100 million in construction costs. This was obviously a strong persuader in a state where voters routinely reject school - bond ballot measures.

When the National Coalition and Local 11, supported by several school - board members, confronted district officials with Kajima's record - from Hanaoka to the recent bribery scandals - the response was dismissive. "Every major firm has some problems," the school district's top development officer told the Los Angeles Times. So now the union and its supporters must figure out how to apply political, as well as economic, pressure against Kajima and its public - sector bed partners.

The union's strategic weapon, of course, is its fighting version of multiculturalism. Although Latino elected officials have contributed important support, nothing has so cheered the largely Mexican and Central American New Otani workers as the untiring solidarity of their Asian - American (particularly Japanese - American) friends.

In 1994, for instance, the Little Tokyo worker - support committee stunned traditionalists by delivering an "open letter" to Japan's Emperor Akihito during his visit to L.A., calling for more social accountability by Japanese corporations operating in the United States. They also made surprise visits to the offices of Kajima's Japanese business partners and organized community forums to protest the victimization of pro - union workers.

Indeed, the New Otani struggle, so crucial to the future of Latino unionism in Southern California, also has become a crucible for progressive Asian - American politics. By New Year's Day, forty - six Asian/Pacific groups - including representatives of the Cambodian, Samoan and even Tibetan communities - had endorsed the boycott. Over Christmas, an advance team representing the National Coalition and Local 11 spent more than a week in Japan. They met with trade unionists and reparations activists to lay the groundwork for boycott - related work in Japan and for a larger delegation in the spring that will include rank - and - file New Otani workers from Los Angeles.

They also attended the first day of hearings on the Hanaoka suit and participated in a rally in front of Kajima's Tokyo headquarters. Later, during a banquet for survivors of the massacre, Geng presented Local 11 with a banner in exquisite Chinese calligraphy calling for victory against the New Otani. "Successful struggle," he reminded them, "is always an amalgam of hope, memory and sheer stubbornness."