Sixty years late, the bastards

The New York Times has an article by Norimitsu Onishi about the Japanese, at long last, fessing up:

The Japanese government has acknowledged for the first time that Allied prisoners during World War II were made to work at a coal mine owned by the family of Prime Minister Taro Aso, contradicting longstanding denials by the Japanese leader. The admission came after the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, under prodding from an opposition lawmaker, released documents showing that 300 British, Dutch, and Australian prisoners of war worked at a mine owned by Aso Mining during the last four months of World War II in western Japan.
At a parliamentary session on Thursday, health and foreign ministry officials acknowledged the validity of the documents, about 43 pages retrieved from the basement of the Health Ministry’s building. The acknowledgment was another embarrassment for Mr. Aso, whose popularity has plummeted since assuming office only three months ago. Erratic stewardship over an increasingly shaky economy and a series of insulting remarks leveled at various groups have pushed his approval ratings to about 20 percent and drawn public attacks from inside his own Liberal Democratic Party.
One of Japan’s wealthiest politicians, Mr. Aso has long denied what historians and survivors of his family’s coal mine have consistently said: that the mine, like many others during the war, had used prisoners of war as well as forced laborers from Asia. In the 1970’s, Mr. Aso served as president of the company, which is now called the Aso Group and is run by his family.
Last month, when questioned in Parliament about the use of prisoners of war at his family’s mine, Mr. Aso said “no facts have been confirmed” and that he was only “four or five years old at the time". Mr. Aso has yet to comment on the documents released by the Health Ministry.
Yukihisa Fujita, a legislator of the opposition Democratic Party who questioned Mr. Aso on the subject, said there had always been overwhelming evidence, including American government documents, of the mine’s use of prisoners of war. “But Mr. Aso has consistently tried to escape responsibility,” Mr. Fujita said Friday in a telephone interview. “There’s nowhere he can escape now with these official documents.”
The Japanese government has long used the absence of official Japanese government documents to deny wartime crimes, rejecting documents from other countries or accounts of survivors. According to scholars, Japanese officials burned documents in Japan and across Asia in the days and weeks following its surrender to the United States to avoid prosecution. But many scholars believe that significant documents survive, as in the case of the 43 pages related to the Aso family mine..
The Japanese government, led for more than half a century by the Liberal Democratic Party, has long resisted pressure to release war-related documents. But the opposition’s capture of the upper house of Parliament last year has given it more power to seek information and documents from Japan’s powerful bureaucrats. “There’s still a massive amount of documents on Aso Mining left in the basement of the Health Ministry,” Mr. Fujita said.

Rico says his trip to Japan for Claris back in the late 1980s gave him plenty of experience with Japanese amnesia about the war...