TOKYO: Customs officials in Japan were yesterday appealing for the owners of bank notes, stock certificates and foreign currency seized by occupying forces at the end of World War II to come forward.
After nearly seven decades, around 870,000 items confiscated by customs under on the orders of the Allied Forces were still being kept while they wait for some 268,000 legal owners to claim them.
Occupiers, led by US Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who controlled Japan until 1952, limited inflows of assets amid fears of hyperinflation and economic chaos if the flood of returnees brought with them large amounts of liquid assets.
Hundreds of thousands of Japanese came back to their defeated country when the Imperial Japanese Army was ejected from China, the Korean peninsula and other parts of the empire.
Those that returned had stock certificates, wills, deposit books, Japanese cash and foreign currency temporarily seized on arrival.
Japanese customs trying to return seized wartime assets
