September 18, 2021

Akahata 'current' column

It has been 90 years since the start of the 15-Year War with the "Manchurian Incident" following a bomb explosion of train tracks involving Japan's Kwantung Army in Liutiaogou in China's northeastern suburban city of Mukden (currently Shenyang) in 1931.

As local news, Akahata introduced an article of "The Second Proletarian Shimbun" dated November 28, 1931 issued by the Japanese Communist Party and written by a Sendai correspondent. The correspondent in his article brought to light the first death in the Army's second infantry.

The correspondent wrote that "it was a huge task for the Second Proletarian Shimbun's Sendai Bureau" to survey 19 Kwantung Army soldiers who were mobilized to Japan's war of aggression and died in service. His article featured their bereaved families, most of whom were poor peasants and day laborers. "Three of them are receiving military relief, and seven cannot live without relief," according to the article.

Akahata, in its introduction to this article, ran the list of soldiers' names who died in the Manchurian Incident. One of the names listed was Sato Hayato, who was 21 years old and a Sendai City government employee working for the Electric Department. About him, the article said, "Without him, his family's life as poor peasants will be difficult." A niece of Sato found her uncle's name in the Akahata article. She told Akahata that Sato's nephew said, "It is amazing to know that there was a newspaper reporting the facts about war deaths when all the things about the Manchurian Incident had been hidden from the public."

Sendai at that time was a military city. Soon after the Manchurian Incident, a progressive trade union center which had close ties with the JCP and the Communist Youth League of Japan (now the Democratic Youth League of Japan) distributed antiwar leaflets and put them up on walls and telephone poles throughout Sendai in their resistance against the ongoing suppression of political dissidents. One of the leaflets emphasized, "Do not send any soldier to battlefields!" The JCP's and the communist youth league's struggle to protect people's lives was already in play at the beginning of the 15-Year War.