Taro Aso has a history problem with Australia

• boy in blues

  17 May 06, 13:24

  When Foreign Minister Taro Aso visited Australia recently, did he know that the father of the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, had been a Japanese prisoner of war in the notorious Changi jail in Singapore? And if Alexander Downer Sr. had been sent to a certain camp in Kyushu, as some 200 other Australian POWs were, he might have become a slave laborer in the Aso family coal mine. Aso was in Australia for security talks with his American and Australian counterparts.
  
  Japan's history problem is also with other U.S. allies such as Australia and Singapore. And Aso has special problems, since his family has never acknowledged what it did, let alone offered restitution. The Aso family coal mine enslaved 197 Australian, 101 British and two Dutch POWs. And there were 10,000 Koreans there as well, treated appallingly. If readers wish to see a photograph of Fukuoka POW Branch Camp No 26 at Keisen, which serviced the Aso Kogyo Co.'s Yoshikuma mine, it can be found on the Internet.
  
  Like Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, Aso also has visited Yasukuni Shrine, which served as a spiritual apparatus for Japan's war mobilization. At the Yushukan there, renovated in 2002, sits one of the engines of the Thai-Burma railway. That is an insult to every Australian.
  
  The death rate among Australians captured by the Japanese was about 30 percent, in comparison with about 2 percent for those captured by Nazi Germany. And in the litany of atrocities inflicted on Australian POWs, the Thai-Burma Railway is almost as notorious as the Sandakan death march of 2,400 Australian prisoners in Sandakan, Borneo, only six survived (because they escaped). None of the 750 British prisoners survived. And one of the Australian victims at Sandakan was the uncle of Paul Keating, Australian prime minister from 1992 to 1996.
  
  Moreover, it is not only Australians who should be outraged by the presence of that engine at Yasukuni. There were more than 600 Americans enslaved on the Thai-Burma railway. They were mostly survivors of the USS Houston, sunk in the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, and an artillery battalion of the Texas National Guard that had been captured in Java.
  
  That might be of considerable interest to the current American ambassador to Japan, who is from Texas. Perhaps Ambassador Tom Schieffer should spend a few hours at Yasukuni with a translator/interpreter. The Yushukan preaches that Japan was "lured into war" by the United States. And that America imposed "victor's justice" on Japan in 1945. So how can the U.S. hope to build a "normal alliance," of the kind it has with Britain and Australia, if Japan turns to leaders who subscribe to such views?
  
  But in Australia, a rising generation is reading about the Pacific War. For example, a spate of new books has been published on the Kokoda Track, in which raw Australian conscripts fought the cream of the Imperial Japanese Army in New Guinea. So a new generation is reading about the atrocities inflicted on Australian soldiers and civilians, including children and missionaries. Yet at Yasukuni, there is a memorial to the "brave Japanese soldiers" who fought "to the north of Australia."
  
  Aso and Abe are both contenders to succeed Koizumi, although Abe is much more likely to win. But if either becomes prime minister, and continues to visit Yasukuni, he should not be surprised if Japan starts to have a big "history problem" with Australia. The Cold War is over. Australians no longer need to turn a blind eye to the fact that Japan has, unlike Germany, proved unable to settle the issues of World War II. So the LDP should think very carefully indeed when it decides on Koizumi's successor.
  
  Robyn Lim is professor of International Relations at Nanzan University Nagoya and is a former Australian intelligence analyst.
  The Japan Times: Wednesday, May 17, 2006
• boy in blues

  17 May 06, 13:39

  UK former POW's denounce Japanese foreign minister
  
  THE OBSERVER , TOKYO AND LONDON
  Monday, May 15, 2006,Page 5
  
  Embattled Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso has been denounced by British former prisoners of war (POWs) for his connection to Allied prisoners forced to work in slave-like conditions in his family's coal mines during World War II.
  Aso, under harsh criticism from Washington to Beijing for what the New York Times called his "offensive and inflammatory"; attitudes, has never admitted or apologized for his firm's use of slave labor.
  
  Nor has the Japanese government paid compensation to the hundreds of thousands of enslaved workers, or to the families of the many who died.
  
  The British ex-prisoners of war discovered Aso's connection only through inquiries by the London-based Observer newspaper. When told, Steve Cairns, 88, of the Far East Prisoners of War Fellowship, who still suffers from injuries suffered in four years under Japanese slave labor, said: "I think it's bloody scandalous. Aso should do more than apologize, he should make reparations to those who suffered in the mines."
  
  Arthur Titherington, 84, chairman of the Japanese Labor Camps Survivors' Association, said: "It's quite disgraceful, but it's absolutely typical of Japanese politicians from the prime minister down. Taro Aso is obviously as two-faced as it's possible to get."
  
  "This is quite normal with the Japanese. They refuse flatly to admit to anything. I've been attempting to get a meaningful apology since 1946. Over the years they've been killing the story with silence," he said.
  
  Yet, to Japan's surprise and irritation, its silence and indifference over this and other unresolved war crimes have now become its main obstacle to good relations with Asian neighbors.
  
  They suffered the most from its atrocities, which began even before the 1931 invasion of northern China, and caused the deaths of millions across Asia.
  
  Aso's coal mines exploited an estimated 12,000 Korean slave laborers as well as 101 British prisoners at its Yoshikuma pit on Kyushu island. Enslaved workers there -- and in other firms' pits -- were kept in appalling and dangerous conditions. They were starved and beaten. Many died.
  
  Authorities in Tokyo ordered records destroyed in 1945, but three amateur historians in Kyushu have documented what happened from local sources. They found the workers were underground for 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
  
  The aristocratic Aso headed the family firm, which is now called the Aso Group, from 1973 to 1979 before entering politics with the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. During that time he did not address the complaints of foreign former slave workers. He maintains close links to the firm. In 2001 it entered a joint venture with Lafarge Cement of France, with Aso's younger brother, Yutaka, as president of the new company.
  
  German officials, whose country has paid US$6 billion reparations to European workers enslaved by the Nazis, say that, though family links alone do not disqualify German citizens from public office, they are obliged to show atonement or make amends. But Aso has defended Japan's iron-fisted colonization of Korea (1910-1945) and Taiwan (1895-1945), and made racial supremacist remarks reminiscent of Japan's prewar fascist period.
  
  Aso, who is related to the imperial family through marriage and is the grandson of a former conservative prime minister, is one of three leading candidates to succeed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September.
  
  "Because of this," said critic Tatsuro Hanada, a Tokyo University professor, "his attitudes and behavior are a political issue and his qualifications an important subject to open to the Japanese public."
  
  Neither Aso nor the Japanese Foreign Ministry answered inquiries about the forced labor issue.