Photo/Illutration Attendees offer flowers at a monument dedicated to Koreans massacred after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, following a memorial service in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward on Sept. 1. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

No historical fact should ever be obliterated. Probing for the truth is essential in learning lessons from history.

Ethnic Koreans and others were massacred in the chaotic aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake by citizens, service members and police officers who believed the false rumors that Koreans were doing harm.

The government, however, has continued saying that no records are available of that historical fact.

“No records have been found in the government that would allow the facts to be established,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said at a recent news conference.

More than one minister has made the same remarks in the Diet and denied a need for a probe. That is a tricky form of historical revisionism that could sweep the government’s responsibility under the carpet without serious debate.

A report released in 2009 by an expert panel of the government’s Central Disaster Management Council says, among other things, that, “Koreans accounted for the largest part of those killed and injured.”

Matsuno has said that passage does not represent the government’s stance on the matter.

He should, however, present the reason if he disavows what is written in the report of the council, which is headed by the prime minister as stipulated by law.

The report states clearly that what it says is based, among other things, on documents and materials of the military and police, so it qualifies as a respectable “record.” The chief Cabinet secretary’s statement that no records are available is difficult to understand.

Other records also indicate the facts of the massacre.

A tabular list worked out by the Kanto Martial Law Enforcement Headquarters based on reports of the military says, among other things, that Koreans were shot dead for security reasons. The document that contains it is in the possession of the Tokyo Metropolitan Archives.

A telegram sent by the head of the Home Ministry’s bureau of police and public security on Sept. 3, 1923, which is kept at the Defense Ministry’s National Institute for Defense Studies, shows that Home Ministry officials had taken the false rumors as facts and had ordered crackdowns.

“Koreans are setting fire in different areas to perpetrate their rebellious goals,” part of the telegram says.

A Yokohama-based civil advocacy group recently announced the discovery of a document that likely represents Kanagawa Prefecture’s report to the Home Ministry describing the circumstances of the killings.

“So many documents on the matter remain buried,” said Masataka Tanaka, a professor of modern Korean history with Senshu University. “There is a need to systematize them.”

The problem is that the government has failed to undertake a probe into the actual facts of the case, which had such a broad extent and a serious nature.

In the Imperial Diet 100 years ago, a lawmaker cited the Home Ministry’s telegram and asked Prime Minister Gonbee Yamamoto if he believed the government is responsible for the false rumors that it had sent out on its own. Yamamoto replied the matter was “under investigation.”

One could say the government’s consistently negative stance on a probe originated at that time.

It is not too late for the government to order ministries and agencies to scrutinize documents to ascertain how many ethnic Koreans and others were killed in such and such areas and why members of the military, police and the general public ended up as assailants. It should then apologize to the victims.

Plausible arguments have been made in recent years that the killings were an act of “legitimate self-defense.” To contain groundless arguments of that sort, the government should show a willingness to uncover the truth.

We should learn about the facts so we will never again turn our hands to human rights violations that are based on discrimination and prejudice.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Sept. 10

Related News