hankyoreh

of which former Japanese prime minister Taro Aso is chairman.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the forceful annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. A number of issues, however, remain unresolved between South Korea and Japan. Thus, the Hankyoreh will begin a new series about traces of history in hopes that both countries are able to move together toward a brighter future after having resolved remaining issues concerning conscripted labor and other human rights issues.

The Chikuho region, located right in the center of Fukuoka Prefecture on the Japanese island of Kyushu, reigned for decades as Japan’s top coal producer after mining development started in the late 19th century. Once its coal yield dropped in the 1960s and the Japanese government switched its basic energy source from coal to petroleum, the region’s economy contracted considerably. One storied mine after another shut down, and the miners, who were willing to take on mining work to eke out a bare livelihood, went off in search of other jobs.

Nowadays it is difficult to find any trace of the old mines in Chikuho. The top three mining centers here are Iizuka, Nogata and Tagawa. Currently, the only place where the pithead remains intact is the Hoshu mine site in Tagawa’s Kawasaki Village. This is because the government gave instructions that the pithead be filled up for safety reasons when the mine was shut down. The Hoshu Mine, where a residential area stands today, is a placer mine where the shafts descend obliquely. They go down a full kilometer, and it is said that it took a miner 30 minutes to walk down and another hour to come back up. After the mine was shut down in 1945, its coal exhausted, it stayed alive for rescue training purposes.

Yokogawa Teruo, the 70-year-old expert on forced labor issues who served as my guide on Jan. 5, took me inside the pithead so that I could sense a bit of the kind of working environment the miners faced. Yokogawa, who was a high school geography teacher before his retirement in 2001, is active in the Fukuoka Prefecture-based Truth-Seeking Network for Forced Mobilization. When we reached a spot that natural light could not reach, it became impossible to see anything in front of us. Yokogawa picked up a little stone and tossed it forward, and we heard a “plunk.” We could go no further, as it was not only pitch black but swamped in water as well.

There were no noticeable signs of the original look of Chikuho, save for a coal museum, the mine’s high chimneys, and the site of the winch that once rolled up the ropes, left alone by the local government for preservation purposes. Fewer still were traces of the forced mobilization that brought masses of Korean and Chinese laborers here to suffer human rights abuses until Japan’s defeat in World War II. Just after the defeat, the Japanese government and mining company either obliterated or concealed the related data, and the old mining site was mostly turned into apartment housing and parks. However, no matter how much the government and the companies that ran the mines feign innocence, there is no concealing the truth of history. The human remains that have emerged from the old mining site, where beatings, abuse and accidental deaths once ran rampant amid poor working conditions, provide clear evidence as to how things were at the time.

The Aso Iizuka Golf Club, located in the Keisen village of Kaho-gun, Fukuoka Prefecture, is emblematic of the forces seeking the conceal the past. Located about 15 minutes by car from Iizuka Station, it was built on the old Yoshikuma Mine site, which was run by the Aso family. This site, where piles of the waste stone produced when coal is mined once stood, was refurbished and opened as a 237-hole golf course in October 1973. Its chairman is Representative Aso Taro, who was prime minister of Japan before stepping down last August after a defeat in the general election. A stone monument next to the course’s entrance bears the name of Suzuki Zenko, Aso’s father-in-law, who served as prime minister for over two years beginning in 1980. Aso’s maternal grandfather is Yoshida Shigeru, who laid the groundwork of conservative politics in Japan after the war. With three generations of prime ministers represented, no family with more prestige exists in the Japanese political world.

A few hundred meters from the entrance is an old supermarket. It was built on the location of the Yoshikuma mine’s bathhouse. It is said that there was a pithead nearby. A sign hanging there reads “Aso Yasaka,” perhaps a reflection of the Aso Group’s influence. The neighborhood’s administrative district is Yasaka, Keisen Village, Kaho-gun. Behind the supermarket is the Yasaka citizens’ center, with a children’s playground situated next to it. It is quiet and peaceful, with warm rays of winter sunshine falling over it. Shrouding this setting, which looks like something out of any other quiet country village, is a brutal history unsuited to its tranquil mood. Between December 1982 and January 1983, bulldozers were pulling up the ground here to build the new village citizens’ center when the remains of three people were found fully intact. The shocked villagers notified Aso, the owner of the land. Later it came to light that the site was a cemetery for people without surviving next of kin. Buried there were those among the people who died in or around the mine who had no family to collect their remains. The Japanese media paid little attention to the discovery.

A map of such burial sites for the dead of Yoshikuma Mine without surviving family, drafted by Aso Mining for internal use, was filled with records of sites with remains. It included no fewer than 504 such sites. Thirty-three had stone markers, twenty-one had wooden markers, and the remaining 450 had no markers at all. The map was never disclosed by the Japanese media. It is now almost impossible to determine the identity of the remains, since any materials that might provide a clue are no longer extant. Nearly all of the Japanese who did physical labor in mines during the Japanese Empire were from the lower class. Second and third sons of poor farming villages without rice paddies to inherit went to work at the mines if they had no better means of survival. A number of them were burakumin, subject to discrimination from society. When people died, those who had no one to take their remains were simply buried in the ground. Even if there was an intention to cremate them, the high price of coal resulted in their effective abandonment.

It is very likely that some of the remains from the Yoshikuma cemeteries are those of Koreans recruited or conscripted into labor during the Japanese Empire. The Yoshikuma mine was the largest of the seven mines run by Aso Mining in the Chikuho area. According to figures from January 1928, before forced mobilization began, there were 705 Koreans in total working at Aso Mining, with 162 at the Yoshikuma Mine. The figure increased rapidly as forced mobilization began in earnest.

On the evening of January 25, 1936, a fire broke out in the Yoshikuma mine shaft, taking the lives of 29 people. Twenty-five of them were Koreans. Some have attested that the company sealed up the entrance out of concerns that the fire might spread, even though it knew there were survivors in the shaft. The report on the tragedy in the January 27 edition of the Fukuoka Nichinichi Newspaper included the names of many Koreans among the deceased and severely injured. The article also includes a sentence that reads, “With a large number of Korean laborers in the shaft, the scene was chaotic, and at the pithead was the sad sight of Korean women who had rushed over out of concern for their fathers, husbands and brothers and collapsed from weeping.” There is a simple reason why the percentage of Korean victims was overwhelmingly high when an accident occurred in the mines. It is because Koreans were the ones mainly sent into the mines where large quantities of gas presented danger.

Today, an outsider would not have any idea at all what was where in the Yoshikuma Mine site without guidance from an expert who has studied the problem of forced mobilization on the scene. After a long absence, Yoshikuma did show up in the Japanese news in December 2008. It was not because of Korean victims, but because of the sudden surfacing of a story about abuse against Allied POWs who had been brought here for forced labor during the Pacific War. Representatives from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which was then the opposition party, asked then-prime minister Aso about the mobilization of 300 Allied POWs from Australia, Great Britain and the Netherlands to perform labor in a POW camp within the Yoshikuma Mine. Two of the Australian soldiers died in the mine. Aso, who was born in 1940, has dodged this issue whenever it has come up by saying that he was very young then and that he has no memories of it. However, he was ultimately forced to admit to the forced mobilization when the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare acknowledged the belated discovery of related documents stored in its warehouse.

The Aso Group, however, maintains that it has nothing to do with the 504 sets of human remains discovered in the Yoshikuma graves. It simply says that the remains were collected during the redevelopment process and interred in a charnel house. Naturally, it does not acknowledge any responsibility. It is entirely unbecoming for a family line that has produced three generations of prime ministers.

By Kim Hyo-soon, Senior Reporter

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