Hopes of reparations for victims of Japan atrocities
By Maureen Maratita
HAGATNA (Guam): Can wartime suffering have a price? According to a bill making its way through the US Congress, losing a spouse or a parent is worth $25,000.
The figure is part of an act intended to compensate the Chamorro people of the Pacific island of Guam for atrocities during the Japanese occupation from December 1941 to July 1945.
About $85 million has been earmarked for survivors and remaining family members through the Guam World War Two Loyalty Recognition Act introduced in Congress earlier this year.
The list of reparations is stark: For rape, paralysis or loss of a limb, $15,000; for forced labour, scarring or disfigurement, $12,000; for internment or forced march, $10,000.
Marian Johnston Taitano is 86, the daughter of a Chamorro mother and an American father from Tennessee who was working on Guam in the civil service in 1941.
When the Japanese invaded, Taitano was 21 and engaged to a US Navy ensign, a gunnery officer. His ship, the USS Penguin, was returning from patrol when the Japanese attacked.
“He happened to be the first American that shed his blood,” Taitano said. “When the Japanese came, the fire (from the planes) cut him across the chest.”
His shipmates put the body on a raft and pushed it to shore.
Taitano’s father, William Johnston, was taken prisoner and then shifted to Japan in 1942 with about 500 American military personnel and civilians. She never saw him again.
“Can you imagine what it was like to watch your father on one of those trucks?” she said.
Taitano has kept everything of her family’s documents from the war years.
“My father was the second one who died in the concentration camp in Japan,” she said. “I have a portion of my father’s diary, from the day Guam was bombed until the day he died. I haven’t been able to read it through completely.”
Taitano’s family was displaced throughout the occupation and she was part of a group of Chamorros forced to march to a prison camp in Manenggon in June 1945, a journey many did not complete.
“I saw them fall by the wayside,” said Taitano, who was at the camp for about a month before the war ended. “It seemed like eternity. Whatever food we had we held off from eating it to give it to the babies.”
Taitano remembers seeing the liberating US troops arrive.
“When I looked up towards the mountain, they looked like Greek gods,” she said. “They didn’t look like GIs to me.”
One of Taitano’s brothers developed tuberculosis during confinement and later died.—Reuters
