Journalist's Journal
By Christopher Reed Posted Jan 1 2007
The headline in Japan Focus, a scholarly e-journal of East Asian topics, was enticing and provocative:, “Family Skeletons: Japan’s Foreign Minister and Forced Labor.” The note underneath was even better: “Japanese translation available.”
I thought the weeks of silence were over. Now would come the breakthrough, an eruption of media coverage about what was surely a major national scandal.
Or not. The silence continued as it had since my first disclosure on Feb.2, 2006, in the U.S.-based radical political website CounterPunch.org about the embarrassing wartime past of the family corporation that had enriched Japan’s present foreign minister, Taro Aso. In many countries it was news that would have brought major headlines. But utter silence continues to this day in the Japanese-language media, with only a modest showing in the rest of the world; the least in the U.S.
Yet in many countries it was a disclosure that would have brought major headlines.
What had happened? Surely Japan, hailed in the West as a democracy with a free press, could accommodate awkward revelations about the foreign minister.? After all, the aristocratic Aso, (— his family is related to the Japanese emperor), — shares family relations to wartime figures, even war criminals, with a surprising number of current politicians in the Diet (Japan’s parliament) family. The new Pprime Mminister Shinzo Abe, for instance, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, Japan’s premier from 1957-60 but also a prisoner for three years under U.S. occupation as a suspected war criminal from for his wartime cabinet service.
Aso’s relations are not so prominent and his connections not so stark. His father Takakichi Aso exploited (“employed” is hardly the word) more than 8,000 Korean forced laborers and 300 British and Australian prisoners of war in gruesome conditions during the Pacific war. They toiled in the family’s coal mines in Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Many escaped from the dangerous work, starvation rations, and frequent beatings, but some died. It was illegal slavery, and Japan has failed, in the opinion of most Asians and allied POWs who suffered it, to make suitable recompense, even after all these years later.
But was Aso, the foreign minister born in 1940, responsible for these horrors? As my report in Japan Focus on April 29 related: “Aso himself ran the company from 1973-79, when he entered politics. During that time he did not address its history of forced labor, nor has he since, while he continues to maintain his relationship with the firm. This stance forecloses the possible argument that at 65, Aso has the excuse of a generational separation.”
Quotes from a German embassy official followed, presenting the argument that whereas wartime ancestry should not, and was is not, held against Germans, their post-war behavior mattersed. It would “not be acceptable” to take a post such as foreign minister without a suitable attitude of atonement for the past. Someone like Aso “might get into parliament,” said the German official, ““but not into government.”” The Japanese foreign ministry declined repeated requests for comment, so this argument remains officially unchallenged..
The foreign minister has maintained his connections to Aso Mining, now called the Aso Group. As reported in Focus,: ““In 2001 [the firm] entered a joint venture with Lafarge Cement of France, the world’s largest cement maker. Aso’s younger brother Yutaka remained president of what became Lafarge Aso Cement Co. In December 2005, the French ambassador in Tokyo awarded Yutaka the Legion d’Honneur at a champagne reception. Guests of honor were Taro Aso and his wife Chikako.”
It was also the case that Aso was is hardly an obscure politician. He already had a certaihas gainedn notoriety for his hard right-wing, neo-nationalist views and tendency toward racist remarks. In a public speech in October 2005 Aso described Japan as ““one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, and one race, the like of which there is no other on earth.”” The observation, which is untrue, echoes Japan’s fascist period of 1930-45. Remarks such as these brought him an extraordinary rebukedrew criticism in a New York Times editorial, extensively quoted in my Focus article.
On Feb.13, 2006 under the headline “Japan’s Offensive Foreign Minister,” the newspaper accused him of being “neither honest nor wise in inflammatory statements about Japan’s disastrous era of militarism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World War.” It added that “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 thousands of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanjing.”
In a curious oversight, the Times did not mention enforced serfthe forced labor of more than a million Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese and other Asians — not to mentionand tens of thousands of Allied POoWs — in its list of Japanese war crimes. And like every other major American mainstream newspaper, it ignored the Aso family involvement, even although by the date of the Times editorial my first article had appeared in CounterPunch.
This silence involves, by association, the absence of discussion about the most vital matter of all — the crimes the Times editorial did mention, and Japan’s defensive or indifferent attitude toward them. Yet these have become the main obstacle facing the nation in its relations with Asian neighbors. Japan may be the world’s second biggest economy, but it remains a diplomatic dwarf, largely because of its obduracy overunwillingness to atonement for war crimes such as enslavement and massacres.
So, the news about Aso’s family connection and his typical refusal to face it lay at the heart of Japan’s current foreign difficulties. Yet silence remained the preferred stance.
The Japanese translation in Focus, which is widely read by influential Japanese scholars and journalists as well as foreigners, provoked no follow-up. Nor had my earlier report in No. 1 Shimbun, the in-house monthly published by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. This is one of the world’s most distinguished such associations, and its Shimbun (newspaper)newspaper is read by every bureau chiefs, major correspondentss and freelancers, embassy staffers and , as well as numerous Japanese members, many of whom are journalists.
Rejection or silence greeted my attempts as an accredited freelance journalist in Japan to pitch the story to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde, Figaro, Toronto Star, Canada’s “national newspaper” The Globe and Mail, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age of Melbourne, the Bulletin news magazine and the Canberra Times of Australia, and the liberal weekly New Statesman and the daily Independent in Britain. Almost all of these already knew of my work, but the story was not even run in my old paper, The Guardian of London.
Rejection or silence in Japan came from the publishing house Shinchosa; two major dailies, Asahi and Yomiuri, and the weeklies, Shukan Kinyobi, Shukan Sekai, and Shukan Post. A Japanese-speaking Caucasian editor kept the manuscript for two weeks before rejecting it as “an old story.” This allegation was repeated and needs to be dealt with.
Until I discovered three amateur Japanese historians in Kyushu who had spent years studying Aso Mines’’ slave labor, and who had never spoken to a reporter, there were only two or three passing mentions of Aso and forced labor as ““allegations.” “ only. One appeared on the BBC but in less than a paragraph, as were other passing references. No article proving detailingthe connection and providing details appeared anywhere before my first publication in CounterPunch. In 30-plus years as a freelance reporter around the world, that counts to me as a new story.
The only Asian taker at first was the weekly Sisa Journal in South Korea, which published two translated articles. Otherwise I continued to hear nothing until a colleague suggested The Japan Times, the independent English-language-only newspaper read almost exclusively by foreigners. It ran the Aso article on April 25 and followed up. Still nothing appeared in Japanese.
Matters improved when, through an academic contact, came the hitherto unrealized news I found that British and Australian POWs were enslaved at Aso Mines in Kyushu. Two had died. Now it was a home-grownlocal story. Concentrating almost entirely on the Caucasian involvement I landed features in the Observer of London, the Sunday Age of Melbourne, and The Australian. Radio stations in France, Australia and Britain ran short broadcasts. The U.S. media remained almost entirely absent throughout.
During these unhappy experiences it became obvious where the new journalism lies —- on the Internet. Several websites used my Aso material, including New Matilda in Australia, Pacific New Service in California, the History News Network, Z-Net, Asia Studies Monthly, and Asia Times. One problem: Sadly, most do not pay. This account of editorial rejection is not the grumblings of a slighted correspondent — my survival continues — but a telling insight into current media attitudes. Why the resounding silence? Editors rarely explain their silence or their rejections. With the U.S. one can only surmise a reluctance to hurt a close ally by delving into the embarrassment of one of its major (conservative) political figures. Call it timidity.
For the Japanese the explanation seems to be that despite its apparent “Western” attitudes, Nippon remains a deeply conservative Confucian hierarchy where reputations, especially of powerful men, must not be disturbed. Appearances, however false, must be maintained above truth. If that is indeed the case, Japan deserves to remain a diplomatic dwarf for many years.