Pressure in Japan to Forget Sins of War

By Martin Fackler, The New York Times

29 October 2014

SARUFUTSU, Japan — More than a half-century has passed since the postmaster in this seaside hamlet on the frigid, northern tip of Japan pulled aside a young man and shared a secret. Somewhere in the village, the old man confided, was a lost graveyard hiding Korean bones.

It took years for Koichi Mizuguchi to grasp the significance of that utterance, and decades more to pry the grim truth from his tight-lipped neighbors: At least 80 Korean laborers died of abuse and malnutrition here as they built an airfield at the behest of the Japanese military during World War II. Eventually, Mr. Mizuguchi helped find the graves, and he and other residents began building a six-foot stone memorial at the site.

A decade ago, a village trying to preserve the memory of its wartime sins might have gone unnoticed in Japan. But Sarufutsu’s tiny village hall was inundated late last year with menacing phone calls denouncing residents as traitors. The campaign, orchestrated on the Internet, also called for a boycott of the village’s scallop industry. Shaken, the mayor ordered a halt to construction of the monument.

Coming to terms with its militarist past has never been easy for Japan, which tried to set aside the issues raised by the war as it rebuilt itself into the peaceful, prosperous nation it is today. But pressure to erase the darker episodes of its wartime history has intensified recently with the rise of a small, aggressive online movement seeking to intimidate those like Mr. Mizuguchi who believe the country must never forget.

Known collectively as the Net Right, these loosely organized cyberactivists were once dismissed as radicals on the far margins of the Japanese political landscape. But they have gained outsize influence with the rise of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative government, which shares their goal of ending negative portrayals of Japan’s history, and with the acquiescence of a society too uninterested or scared to speak out.

“I don’t blame the mayor for giving in,” said Mr. Mizuguchi, 79, an architect who guided a visitor to the site of the old airfield using a hand-drawn map. “I blame the rest of Japan for not speaking out to support us.”

Scholars say the Net Right has no more than a few thousand active members, many of them from Japan’s growing ranks of contract workers who have been unable to find coveted lifetime jobs. But these extremists have benefited from a broader upwelling of frustration among young Japanese over their nation’s long economic and political stagnation.

The activists blame a crippling lack of national pride, arguing that Japan’s self-confidence has been sapped by 70 years of unfair portrayals as the villain in the war by the United States and others who ignore their own wartime crimes, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We are tired of Japan being constantly told to apologize,” said Kazuya Kyomoto, 26, a popular blogger among conservative youth who condemned monuments like the one in Sarufutsu for promoting a “masochistic” view of Japanese history. He said just a few overzealous extremists used intimidation tactics.

Mr. Kyomoto and others said their resentment was fueled in part by intensifying disputes over history and territory with China and South Korea, two victims of Japan’s early-20th-century empire-building that now seem to be eclipsing it economically. “The Net Right gives voice to Japan’s worries about its own decline,” said Shojiro Sakaguchi, a scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

The extremists, who organize on ultranationalist websites and sometimes target ethnic Koreans in Japan with racist hate speech, hold more sway than before in part because of the collapse of Japan’s left-leaning political opposition, which is in disarray after a resounding election defeat two years ago and an unsuccessful stint in power.

Mr. Abe’s government has been criticized for being slow to distance itself from the Net Right. Last month, a photograph surfaced of Eriko Yamatani, the cabinet member in charge of national law enforcement, with a prominent member of the biggest online extremist group, the Zaitokukai, but the government has remained largely silent on the issue.

Mr. Sakaguchi and other experts say one result has been a shift in Japanese political culture that has emboldened the ultranationalists to target even acts of historical contrition that Japanese society previously embraced.

In July, for example, the government of Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo, decided to remove a decade-old monument to Korean forced laborers from a public park after angry phone calls and protests. A similar campaign led the city of Nagasaki, long a bastion of antiwar sentiment, to delay approval of a cenotaph to Korean laborers who perished in the 1945 atomic bombing. The monument was supposed to be unveiled in April.

“Since Mr. Abe became prime minister, everything has become so emotional and reactionary,” said Yasuhito Maeda, 90, a former deputy mayor of Sarufutsu who wrote a book published two decades ago that detailed the use of forced laborers from Korea and Japanese convicts to build the wartime Asajino airfield here. “When I looked into Asajino, not even conservatives disputed that coercion had been used.”

Officials in this village of 2,400 on the island of Hokkaido said that no more than 100 people were behind the calls that tied up their phone lines. But Akira Tatsumi, the mayor at the time, said accusations of treason — in part stemming from the fact that the village accepted money from the South Korean government to build the monument — had finally led him to give in.

“This isn’t a fight that one small village can wage alone,” Mr. Tatsumi said.

Few, if any, of the activists used their real names on the websites that organized the phone calls. But one, Mitsuaki Matoba, agreed to be interviewed by email, describing himself as a 60-year-old doctor in Hokkaido. He defended the Net Right’s pressure tactics, saying it was the only way to make themselves heard over mainstream media outlets that repeat falsehoods about Japan’s wartime actions.

Like those who called Sarufutsu’s village hall, he objected to the term “forced laborers” to describe the Koreans. “To say they were ‘coerced’ is a fabrication,” he wrote. “If Koreans were involved in the construction of the airfield, they came of their own free will.”

Mainstream historians say that as many as 700,000 Koreans were rounded up and forced to work in wartime Japan. Mr. Maeda said there was little doubt the Koreans buried in Sarufutsu were among them, noting that villagers have described hundreds of Koreans being held in windowless, prisonlike barracks. Many of the Koreans tried to escape, he added, and were captured and beaten.

After its defeat, the Japanese Army hastily burned records to eliminate evidence of war crimes. But Mr. Maeda said a document found in a village safe listed the names of 82 Korean workers, all in their 20s and 30s, who died during construction of the airfield. Most perished from typhus and other diseases that indicate poor sanitation, malnutrition and harsh work conditions.

Mr. Mizuguchi, the architect who first heard about the Koreans from the village postmaster, helped organize three excavations of the grave site from 2006 to 2010. Hundreds of Japanese and South Korean researchers and volunteers participated, finding 38 sets of remains.

On a recent visit to the site, now a bucolic vista of dairy farms, he said he had not given up on building the monument.

“These outsiders are trying to intimidate us into closing our eyes again,” he said, standing next to excavated graves covered with blue plastic tarps. “We cannot let them prevent us from finding closure.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.

Copyright 2014 The New York Times

Featured image: copyright Ko Sasaki/ The New York Times

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