Kawakita Found Guilty of Treason (3 SEP 1948)

Photo By Erin Thompson | Tomoya "the Meatball" Kawakita and his attorney, Morris Lavine, hear the jury verdict, 3 September 1948. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)  

UNITED STATES

09.01.2023

Story by Erin Thompson 

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian

3 SEPTEMBER 1948
On 3 September 1948, Tomoya “the Meatball” Kawakita, a Japanese American, was found guilty of eight counts of treason for crimes committed during World War II. Initially sentenced to death, he was eventually deported to Japan with the stipulation he never return to American soil.

Kawakita was born in Calexico, California, in 1921 to Japanese immigrants. In 1939, he went to Japan to attend a preparatory school for “Nisei,” the name given to children born to Japanese parents while in America. Kawakita then graduated Meiji University with a degree in commerce in 1943 and was employed as an interpreter for the Nippon Yakin Nickel Refinery, a private corporation in Oeyama, on Japan’s west coast, that mined and processed metals for munitions.

Approximately seven and a half miles from the factory was a prisoner of war (POW) camp, later designated Osaka Camp 3-B, Oeyama, next to one of the refinery’s surface mines, where prisoners were forced to work. Kawakita was contracted by the camp to act as an interpreter between military personnel and the primarily British and Canadian POWs. In August 1944, four hundred American internees, many captured from Corregidor and Bataan in 1942, arrived from other camps across Japan. Most of these soldiers arrived malnourished and weakened.

Upon Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the camp was turned over to the U.S., and Kawakita interpreted for American military personnel for several months. In December, he went to the American consul in Yokohama to confirm his citizenship as an American and not a foreign national. He then enrolled at the University of Southern California and moved to Los Angeles. In late 1946, a member of the 115th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment who had been a prisoner at the Oeyama Camp between 1944–1945 recognized Kawakita and reported him to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Kawakita was charged with thirteen counts of treason, to which he pled “not guilty.” His trial began a year later. Dozens of former prisoners, including members of the 115th CIC Detachment, testified that between August 1944 and August 1945, Kawakita, called “the Meatball” by camp internees, took part in the humiliation, beating, and torture of American POWs. Witnesses claimed Kawakita made them run laps until they collapsed, beat them, forced them to beat each other, and ignored serious injuries to prisoners working in the mines. Kawakita’s defense argued that confusion over his citizenship status at the time of the alleged acts disqualified him from being convicted of treason. The jury, however, decided his December 1945 claim in Yokohama that he was a naturalized citizen of the U.S. proved his actions in the camp were treasonous. On 3 September 1948, a jury of nine women and three men found him guilty on eight counts of committing “acts showing adherence to the enemy, [and] giving them aid and comfort.” He was sentenced to death.

In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the jury’s verdict; however, appeals from Japan’s government led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to commute Kawakita’s sentence to life imprisonment. Further petitions for clemency from his family and various Japanese entities were heard by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and, in 1963, twenty-nine days before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy ordered Kawakita conditionally released and exiled from the United States in perpetuity. Kawakita had served more time than any other Japanese war criminal.

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• Date Taken: 09.01.2023
• Date Posted: 09.01.2023 16:56
• Story ID: 452680
• Location: US