GERMAN REACTION
According to one German Embassy official in Tokyo, speaking on the understanding of anonymity, while family lineage on its own would not be held against an individual in his nation, Aso’s actions here make him an unsuitable foreign minister by German standards. “Because Aso’s family connection gave him the opportunity to address wrongs in the firm, and he did not do so,” as well as comments that “seem to defend criminal policies of the past,” Aso would “not be acceptable” for a post such as foreign minister. “He might get into parliament,” said the official, “but not into government.” The Foreign Ministry in Tokyo did not respond to inquiries on the issue.
The Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, also recently quoted a German government official’s puzzlement over the “silly act” of Japanese prime minister Koizumi Junichiro’s continuing visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where 14 Class-A war criminals are enshrined. A German leader, the government official told Li, would never worship at the burial places of Adolf Hitler or convicted Nazi war criminals.
Such thoughts from Germans are reinforced by Aso’s espousal of Japanese racial supremacy, such as displayed in a remark in a speech at the opening of the Kyushu National Museum in Fukuoka last October. Then, he described Japan as “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, and one race, the like of which there is no other on earth.” It was an observation that echoed Japan’s fascist period of 1930-45.
Japanese media scholars have expressed concern at the lack of detailed reporting on Japan’s corporate forced labor, and on Aso’s family’s role in particular. “As Aso is a candidate for prime minister in September, his attitudes and his behavior are political issues,” says Hanada Tatsuro of Tokyo University. “The question of his qualifications is an important subject that should be opened to the Japanese public.” Hanada as well as Ofer Feldman, an author and Japan political scholar, blame Japan’s kisha press club system, in which journalists keep quiet about controversial issues that might harm their contacts, for media silence on the Aso connection.
CORPORATE HISTORY
The Aso family coal mining business dates back to the 19th century in Kyushu’s rich Chikuho coal fields in Fukuoka. Aso’s great-grandfather, Takakichi, founded the firm in 1872. At one time it owned over half a dozen pits in Kyushu and was the biggest of three family corporations mining an area producing half of Japan’s “black diamonds.”
The issue of the foreign minister’s family links to Korean wartime forced labor has already arisen in meetings between Japan and South Korea. Choi Bong Tae, a member of a bilateral commission studying the issue of forced labor, told reporters in November that the Japanese side had provided no information on the Aso company and others it had named. A spokesman for the Aso Group, the successor company of Aso Mining, said that it would be difficult to provide such data since records aren’t available from that long ago.
However, research conducted by Kyushu historians has provided new information on the role of the Aso family in exploiting Korean labor before and during the war. Hayashi Eidai, Ono Takashi, and Fukudome Noriaki, all now retired, drew on official and local library resources to gather contemporaneous statistics and reports on the Aso family’s mining operation, some of which Hayashi published in books.
Documents outlining work requirements at a POW mining camp
According to the company’s own statistics, by March 1944, Aso mines had a total of 7,996 Korean laborers, of whom 56 had recently died. Some 4,919 had managed to escape the forced labor regime. Across Fukuoka, the total fugitive figure amounted to 51.3 percent of the forced laborers. At Aso Mines, the figure was 61.5 percent, “because their record was worse,” said Fukudome. Data compiled by the Kyushu trio shows that Korean workers at Aso Mines were paid a third less than equivalent Japanese laborers to dig coal. It amounted to 50 yen a month, but less than 10 yen after mandatory confiscations for food, clothes, housing and enforced savings. The enforced savings, to discourage attempts at escape, often remained unpaid. Workers toiled for 15-hour days, seven days a week, with no holidays. A three-meter high fence topped with electrified barbed wire ringed the perimeter.
In 1939, the Japanese government passed the National General Mobilization law, which forced all colonial subjects, including Koreans, and those in Taiwan and Manchuria, to work wherever needed by Tokyo. The Kyushu historians have documented the fact that Aso Mining was shipping Korean laborers to Kyushu as early as the mid-1930s, before the law was passed. Although precise numbers are unavailable, an estimated 12,000 laborers passed through the company, some necessitated by a strike of 400 miners in 1932. After 1939, the historians calculate, the number of Asians kept in forced labor throughout the Chikuho region swelled.
The Aso Group has changed names more than once and in 2001 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. Last December, the French ambassador in Tokyo awarded Yutaka the Legion d’Honneur at a champagne reception. Guests of honor were Aso Taro and his wife, Chikako.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
It seemed a fitting tribute to a family steeped in Japan’s recent aristocratic traditions. Aso is the scion of a family of landed gentry throughout the 19th century. His great-great grandfather, Okubo Toshimichi, a samurai, was one of five powerful nobles who led the 1868 overthrow of the centuries-old shogunate era that ushered in modern times in Japan. Aso Taro graduated from Gakushuin University, which traditionally educates Japan’s imperial family, spent time at London University, joined what was then Aso Industries, and quickly became a director. Appropriate to his high-born antecedents, he joined the Japanese rifle shooting team in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
Aso’s grandfather, Yoshida Shigeru, served as prime minister of Japan five times between 1946 and 1954. An autocratic conservative, conveniently for the Aso family, he conducted a 1950s purge of “reds” in the coal mining unions. Chikako adds to the family’s upper-class luster as the daughter of Suzuki Zenko, Liberal Democratic Party prime minister from 1980-82.
There is even a royal link. Aso’s sister Nobuko married Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, the emperor’s cousin, 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.
With his history of relatives who occupied senior political positions, Aso follows both a tradition and a type of thinking largely unchanged for many decades. Including the prime minister himself, Koizumi’s cabinet contains six men directly related to former premiers, government ministers, or Diet members. A seventh, regional minister Chuma Koki’s father, was mayor of Osaka. Koizumi’s grandfather and father were ministers, and his cousin a kamikaze pilot who dove to his death in 1945. He shares the ‘divine wind’ relationship with chief cabinet secretary Abe Shinzo, but his kamikaze-trained father never made his ultimate flight. Instead he rose to be foreign minister from 1982-86.
Liberated Allied POWs at a Kyushu prison camp on September 15, 1945
Abe, frontrunner to succeed Koizumi as prime minister next fall, is also the grandson of Kishi Nobusuke, who spent three years in Sugamo Prison as a Class-A war crimes suspect. Remarkably, Kishi went on to become prime minister from 1957-60, in which capacity he actively blocked efforts by Japanese activists and the Diet itself to obtain government records about Chinese forced labor – the war crime that Kishi himself helped perpetrate as a wartime cabinet minister in charge of economic production and munitions. (For details see a previous Japan Focus report: Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for Redress.)
These backgrounds may help to explain the frame of mind that has produced the series of provocative, neonationalist remarks by Aso, such as the museum speech claim about Japanese uniqueness. These have angered Japan’s neighbors, particularly China and the Koreas, through their reiteration of colonialist attitudes. The museum remark ignored Japan’s actual racial origins, and its lack of the homogeneity that many falsely claim. Aso appeared oblivious to the presence of his country’s aboriginals, the Ainu of Hokkaido, who bear physically different biological characteristics, and the people of Okinawa. Both these populations have their own languages, and anthropologists and archeologists have long agreed that the mainland Japanese owe their origins to several areas of Asia.
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