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Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso

“If there’s an emergency, it’s certain that refugees will get on boats and make their way toward Niigata, Yamagata and Aomori. How are we going to deal with them? Those refugees could be armed. Could the police handle the response? Would the Japan Self-Defense Forces be dispatched? Would they shoot them dead? We ought to be thinking about this seriously.”

During a lecture at Utsunomiya on Sept. 23, Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso suggested that North Korean refugees could be shot dead. Aso is a politician who is known for his frequent gaffes. Among his various howlers, he has said that the Koreans wanted to adopt Japanese names during the Japanese colonial occupation, that old people who want to die should be allowed to hurry up and get it over with, and that Nazi tactics should be learned and applied in amending the constitution. Recently, he had to retract yet another remark – he said that, “Results are the important thing for politicians. Hitler may have had the right motivations, but he shouldn’t have killed millions of people.”

While there’s nothing new about Aso’s tendency to put his foot in his mouth, his remarks about North Korean refugees are appalling. They reflect the assumption of a certain segment of Japanese society that any remarks or actions can be justified by the threat of North Korea. Aso has not yet retracted his remarks about the possibility of fatally shooting North Korean refugees.

In a meeting with local government leaders this past June, Masanori Tanimoto, Governor of Ishikawa Prefecture, suggested that the North Korean people should be starved to death. While discussing how to deal with North Korea’s missile launches, Tanimoto said, “We have to starve the North Korean people by attacking their army’s food supply.” Tanimoto retracted the remarks after they became a problem, but he also said that “North Korea’s methods go beyond violence, and sanctions are pointless unless they cause the [North Korean] people to feel pain.”

The North Korean threat has also served as a reason for discrimination and exclusion inside Japan. The place where this is best illustrated is the Chosen Gakko (pro-North Korean schools) inside Japan. On Sept. 13, the Tokyo District Court ruled that the government was acting within the law when it excluded the Chosen Gakko from a government program to provide free high school education. The court reached this verdict, it said, because the Japanese government’s conclusion that the Chosen Gakko are connected with North Korea by way of the (North Korea-affiliated) General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon) could not be regarded as unreasonable. In other words, the Chosen Gakko can be excluded from free high school education because they might be linked to North Korea.

Japan’s policy of free high school education began in 2010 under the Democratic Party with the purpose of providing equality of educational opportunity. From the very beginning, subsidies for the Chosen Gakko were put on hold because of their connection with Chongryon. Because the very purpose of the system is equality of educational opportunity, it implies that even the Chosen Gakko should be eligible for the subsidies. After the Liberal Democratic Party came to power in 2013, however, the administration regulations were revised to completely leave the Chosen Gakko out of the program. This prompted much criticism that it was discriminatory to omit the Chosen Gakko from the program for political and diplomatic issues that are unrelated to the program’s purpose. In fact, the Osaka District Court ruled against the government on Aug. 28, finding that the exclusion of the Chosen Gakko “was based on political views that are irrelevant to the equality of educational opportunity.”

After the decision was reached in the trial over free high school education at a Chosen Gakko in Tokyo, the plaintiffs’ legal team said they were shocked that the court had treated various unconfirmed articles about North Korea, Chongryon, and the Chosen Gakko as the main grounds for its decision. “We are also individual people who are living here. We also clearly exist here,” said one mother from an association of mothers at the Chosen Gakko in a demonstration that was held in downtown Tokyo after the trial on Sept. 13.

I think that North Korea’s repeated nuclear tests and missile launches can’t be supported because they damage regional stability. But I also don’t agree with a situation in which it’s possible to justify discriminatory behavior that is irrelevant to the original purpose of a government program and in which you can get away with talking about killing people just because of the threat of North Korea.

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

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