http:\/\/www.fccj.or.jp\/~fccjyod2\/node\/1160<\/a><\/p>\nJapan\u2019s foreign minister, Taro Aso, has made so many embarrassing and asinine remarks, several betraying racist-colonial attitudes, that he was attacked in a New York Times editorial as \u201cinflammatory.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he is connected to a much nastier ghost from Japan\u2019s imperial past.<\/p>\n
Unmentioned by the NYT and deliberately under-reported in the Japanese media is the story of the aristocratic Aso\u2019s connection, through his family coalmining firm, with the cruel and degrading exploitation of thousands of Korean laborers in slave-like conditions. Indeed this scandal, together with Japan\u2019s reluctance to confront other past atrocities, remains its primary foreign policy obstacle.<\/p>\n
In other countries, a link with slave labor would be intolerable for an important government official. The Korean pit workers were systematically underpaid, overworked, underfed and confined in penury.<\/p>\n
They suffered chronic ill health, frequent death from unsanitary conditions or work accidents and were under 24-hour watch by brutal police. Their release came only with Japan\u2019s 1945 defeat. Neither the survivors nor their families have received a penny in personal reparations, despite pleas from both Koreas.<\/p>\n
Aso, 65, cannot plead generational separation. From 1973-79, when he entered politics, he ran the family company in Fukuoka Prefecture. He did not then address its history of peonage labor nor has he since. The Foreign Ministry did not respond to my inquiries.<\/p>\n
The Aso company changed its name more than once and in 2001 entered a joint venture with Lafarge Cement of France, with Aso\u2019s younger brother, Yutaka, remaining president of Lafarge Aso Cement Co. In December, the French ambassador in Tokyo awarded Yutaka the Legion d\u2019Honneur at a champagne reception.<\/p>\n
Guests of honour were Taro Aso and his wife, Chikako.<\/p>\n
It seemed a fitting tribute to a family steeped in Japan\u2019s recent aristocratic traditions. The Aso line includes a noble samurai, one of five who led the 1868 overthrow of the centuries-old shogunate that ushered in the modern era.<\/p>\n
His great grandfather, Takakichi, founded the Aso mining firm in 1872. At one time it owned eight pits in Kyushu\u2019s rich Chikuho coal fields and was the biggest of three family corporations mining an area producing half of Japan\u2019s \u201cblack diamonds.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the scion of landed gentry, Taro Aso graduated from the university that traditionally educates Japan\u2019s imperial family, spent time at London University, joined what was then Aso Industries, and quickly became a director. Completing the aristocratic tradition, he joined the Japanese rifle shooting team in the 1976 Olympics.<\/p>\n
A grandfather was Shigeru Yoshida, prime minister of Japan five times between 1946 and 1954, and an autocratic conservative who, conveniently for the Aso family, conducted a 1950s purge of \u201creds\u201d in the coal mining unions. Aso\u2019s wife adds to family influence as the daughter of Zenko Suzuki, prime minister from 1980\u201382.<\/p>\n
There is even a royal link. Aso\u2019s sister, Nobuko, married Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, recently in the headlines over his opposition to a woman occupying the chrysanthemum throne. Tomohito suggested continuing the male line through concubines, an imperial tradition that would move Japan back several centuries.<\/p>\n
The Aso connection to forced labor \u2014 unmentioned in its official website history \u2014 has been catalogued by three amateur historians in Fukuoka assisted by a Korean living in Japan. The four present a shocking picture with local library references, and documented in their books.<\/p>\n
Tokyo\u2019s National General Mobilization Law that forced all colonial subjects to work wherever it suited Japan, was not passed until 1939, but the historians found that before then, Korean laborers were shipped to Aso Mines. Precise numbers are unknown, but it was several thousands, especially after an Aso Mine strike of 400 miners in 1932. After 1939, the historians calculate, the number of Koreans in Japan\u2019s labor force swelled to over a million; their figure is 1,120,000. Tokyo\u2019s official number is 724,287.<\/p>\n
The 12,000 Aso miners were paid a third less than equivalent Japanese labourers to dig coal to fuel Japan\u2019s war.<\/p>\n
It amounted to \u00a550 a month, but less than \u00a510 after mandatory confiscations for food, clothes, housing and enforced savings that often remained unpaid. All workers toiled underground for 15 hours a day, seven days a week, with no holidays at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cHousing\u201d was cramped, dirty dormitory huts with six to seven tiny rooms in each. Single men lived and slept on a single tatami mat. There was no heating or running water. Lavatories were in earthen pits. A three-metre high wooden fence topped with electrified barbed wire ringed the outside. Workers were prisoners, guarded by police.<\/p>\n
They kept statistics, however. In March 1944, Aso Mines had a total of 7,996 Korean laborers of whom 56 had recently died. A staggering 4,919 had escaped. Across Fukuoka, total fugitives amounted to 51.3 percent but at Aso Mines it was 61.5 percent because conditions there were \u201ceven worse,\u201d said Noriaki Fukudome, one of the historians.<\/p>\n
Most workers suffered malnutrition with no meat or fish provided. Early last year in Seoul the government-appointed Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization Under Japanese Imperialism began inquiries, toured 16 Korean provinces, conducted hearings, and took evidence from witnesses. Its chairman, Dr Jeon Ki-ho, also visited Japan to clarify what he boldly called its \u201catrocities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Korean commission compiled a list of hundreds of Japanese companies that exploited forced Korean labour, and likely would have knowledge of remains of the dead. One firm prominently on the list: Aso Mines. But a spokesman said the firm could not investigate the whereabouts of remains as no records were available.<\/p>\n
The commission continues to press for information.<\/p>\n
As if this record was not bad enough, Aso has continued to offend Japan\u2019s neighbors \u2014 and the world \u2014 with a series of offensive and inaccurate remarks.<\/p>\n
Fundamentally he seems to share Japan\u2019s racial supremacy ideology of the 1930s, encapsulated in his remark last October at a museum opening, that Japan was \u201cone nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, and one race, the like of which there is no other on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
This ignored the presence of the indigenous Ainu in Hokkaido, and the natives of Okinawa, both of whom have their own languages, and the Ainu, different racial characteristics. But Aso-style genealogical mythology was scientifically discredited decades ago. It remains the currency only of the racist inclined.<\/p>\n
Aso also suggested that Koreans \u201cvoluntarily\u201d changed their names to Japanese ones, thus ignoring a Tokyo law compelling them to do so. Above all he remains a Yasukuni enthusiast, but his remark that the emperor should visit the shrine and its sanctified war criminals \u2014 he has conspicuously avoided doing so \u2014 was too much for the LDP establishment.<\/p>\n
Aso\u2019s blunder was belittled. But is he just a political loudmouth of the kind many nations occasionally produce? His continued presence in office suggests he may be more than this. What the New York Times\u2019s editorial described as \u201cinflammatory statements about Japan\u2019s disastrous era of militarism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World War,\u201d runs contrary to the new Old Right version of those events.<\/p>\n
In this scenario Japan was a pitiful victim of western imperialist aggression and the war was merely defensive. Is this now the accepted version, and is Aso merely its stalking horse? If so, the Japanese (again) embark on a self-destructive foreign policy.<\/p>\n
The whole issue should be opened for debate, but here the media are lamentably deficient. Two Japanese media scholars, Takesato Watanabe of Doshisha University in Kyoto and Tatsuro Hanada of Tokyo University, identified the cause as the dead hand of Japan\u2019s kisha clubs.<\/p>\n
The closely-knit journalist specialists of the kisha clubs conspire to keep out of the news anything they think will embarrass their department, and thus make their jobs more difficult. In this they abnegate the prime requirement of the press: to report without fear or favour.<\/p>\n
As Hanada said: \u201cAs Aso is a candidate for prime minister, his attitudes and behaviour are a political issue with the question of his qualifications an important subject that should be open to the Japanese public.\u201d As for Aso himself, Watanabe came briskly to the point.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe should be replaced,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Posted by Martyn Williams on Sat, 2006-07-15 22:31
\nENDS
\n\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n
That NYT Editorial:<\/p>\n
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\nJapan’s Offensive Foreign Minister<\/b>
\nNEW YORK TIMES Editorial: February 13, 2006
\nhttp:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/02\/13\/opinion\/13mon3.html?ex=1297486800&en=e70214f6699633cb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss<\/a>
\n(Thanks to Gen Kanai’s weblog)<\/p>\nPeople everywhere wish they could be proud of every bit of their countries’ histories. But honest people understand that’s impossible, and wise people appreciate the positive value of acknowledging and learning from painful truths about past misdeeds. Then there is Japan’s new foreign minister, Taro Aso, who has been neither honest nor wise in the inflammatory statements he has been making about Japan’s disastrous era of militarism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World War. <\/p>\n
Besides offending neighboring countries that Japan needs as allies and trading partners, he is disserving the people he has been pandering to. World War II ended before most of today’s Japanese were born. Yet public discourse in Japan and modern history lessons in its schools have never properly come to terms with the country’s responsibility for such terrible events as the mass kidnapping and sexual enslavement of Korean young women, the biological warfare experiments carried out on Chinese cities and helpless prisoners of war, and the sadistic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanjing. <\/p>\n
That is why so many Asians have been angered by a string of appalling remarks Mr. Aso has made since being named foreign minister last fall. Two of the most recent were his suggestion that Japan’s emperor ought to visit the militaristic Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Japanese war criminals are among those honored, and his claim that Taiwan owes its high educational standards to enlightened Japanese policies during the 50-year occupation that began when Tokyo grabbed the island as war booty from China in 1895. Mr. Aso’s later lame efforts to clarify his words left their effect unchanged. <\/p>\n
Mr. Aso has also been going out of his way to inflame Japan’s already difficult relations with Beijing by characterizing China’s long-term military buildup as a “considerable threat” to Japan. China has no recent record of threatening Japan. As the rest of the world knows, it was the other way around. Mr. Aso’s sense of diplomacy is as odd as his sense of history.
\nENDS\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Japan’s outspoken foreign minister said “blue-eyed, blond” Westerners probably would not be as successful as the Japanese in Middle East diplomacy. Aso: “Japan is doing what the Americans can’t do. The Japanese are trusted. It’s probably no good with blue eyes and blond hair,” he was quoted as saying by the papers, referring to projects in Jordan River Rift Valley initiated by Japan.” Along with more articles on Aso’s past and NYT Editorial of Feb 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,26,4,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-ironies-hypocrisies","category-japanese-government","category-japanese-politics","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}