hankyoreh

Taro Aso was chosen as Japan’s new prime minister in an election yesterday by that country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Tomorrow he will be officially inaugurated, and he plans to use the wave of public opinion he is riding to dissolve the Diet’s House of Representatives and hold elections in October or November. It is not entirely improbable that he could, depending on the outcome of the election, be in office for a very short time. Nevertheless we feel compelled to express our concern about a Japan led by Aso, because the fact that he is popular not only within the LDP but also among the general public is, in our view, a reflection of the atmosphere in Japan today.

There has been discord between Japan and Korea even under Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, when the Japanese government ordered that textbooks present Dokdo as Japanese territory. Relations are still hurting as a result, so to have an individual with an ultra-right, nationalist world view like Aso take the stage makes it probable that it is going to be even harder to improve relations.

Aso has long offended other nations, enough to have earned himself the nickname “misstatement machine.” The descendant of the founder of Aso Mining, which earned itself a bad name because of its exploitation of Korean forced laborers, Aso himself is famous for saying there never was any forced labor. He has said that the practice of Koreans assuming Japanese names came about “because Koreans wanted to” and that Taiwan is what it is today “because Japan enacted compulsory education there when it was a colony.” It was also Aso who said that the U.S. House of Representatives resolution criticizing Japan on the issue of its “military comfort women” was “not based in objective fact.” Even though the Japanese emperor himself has chosen not to visit Yasukuni Shrine, Aso, while campaigning for party chairman, said in September that the emperor should worship at Yasukuni, noting that “only Korea and China are opposed” to official visits to worship there.

The same man who thoroughly and consistently lacks any introspection about Japanese colonial rule and the country’s militarist past quite surprisingly talks about “one Asia.” The problem there is that his idea is of an Asia under Japanese leadership and not based on the idea of coexistence grounded in mutual respect. He asserts that Japan needs to be wealthy and militarily strong so as to cultivate the strength it would need to lead an Asia that enjoys freedom and prosperity, and when he does he reminds you of imperialist Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

It is a falsehood to say you are going to seek friendly relations with neighboring nations when that is your view of things. If Aso really wants to see “one Asia,” then he needs to withdraw his mangeon (“reckless remarks”) about history and begin by seriously reconsidering Japan’s past. Without doing so he will be unable to win the trust of Japan’s neighbors.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]