Facing Up to Losing Face
How truly unfortunate. German industrialists made use of manpower opportunities that beckoned throughout the Second World War, with the serendipitous presence of prisoners of war. Prisoners of war have no choice; they perform the tasks they are ordered to do, on pain of death. They become slave labourers. They exist on scant provisions, stagger from a bare pallet, nourished on thin gruel, diseased and unkempt, to the factories where their labour produced output for the war effort.Germany earned its place in collective infamy among civilized countries of the world with its debasing inhumanity. It was not alone. Its ally, Japan, in invading China and Korea and slaughtering and imprisoning countless numbers of their populations, still staggers under the weight of distrust, anger and antipathy thrust its way from both countries.
Germany did ultimately express its profound regrets over the unforgivably stridently vicious injuries it caused to humanity through its own regrettable loss of humanity. Japan has experienced far more difficulties in facing up to its militantly destructive past.
The matter of Korean comfort women remains unresolved. But stiff apologies have been voiced through diplomatic and political channels toward those of its neighbours whom the country preyed so destructively upon. The Japanese treatment of allied prisoners of war incarcerated in remote areas, from their capture to the end of the war has been well documented.
There are no conceivable reparations for the kind of brutality meted out by the Japanese military toward defenceless prisoners; their treatment was legendarily miserable. And now, the Prime Minister Taro Aso himself has been implicated in just such prisoner atrocities through his family's use of prisoners of war as forced labourers in its coal mines.
He was a mere child at the time. It was his family that had used Allied prisoners and some ten thousand Koreans as slave labourers. Twenty-five years later, Mr. Aso took charge of his family's industry, re-named and re-invented as Aso Cement. He has steadfastly denied rumours of prisoner of war slave-labour as unauthentic, brushing them off as unproven allegations.
It is not really that he was personally implicated that causes such perturbation, but the obvious fact that he would be quite aware of the truth, and yet, has chosen to deny it. Obviously, for his own purposes. For to accept the allegations as verifiable truth would be to potentially eliminate his aspirations to political control of the country as the head of the LDP.
A political party which has ruled the country almost without interruption since the end of WWII. Japan, a beautiful country with industrious people, a marvellous culture and fascinating history and traditions, still struggles to achieve a status of trust within its geography.
Its prime minister's response to the unveiling of the reality of the past, does him no credit, and does a grave disservice to the country, blemishing its moral status through association.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Political Realities, World News
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, December 21, 2008
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