Nobusuke Kishi and His Design of Forced Labor

by Maya Jately

Introduction
As the force behind Manchuria’s industrialization, Nobusuke Kishi remains the most significant individual case study for understanding how fascism was adapted into Japan’s policy. In Manchuria’s case, Kishi was the embodiment of the “technocrat” rank, the force behind Manchuria’s industrialization, and served as the senior official responsible for designing and overseeing the forced labor system that supported Japan’s wartime economy across its occupied territories. William Underwood researched the Japanese government archives and documented that Kishi was a “wartime czar” of Chinese forced labor. This title bespeaks the scope of his administrative authority in the empire, where he created a forced labor system that was coordinated, rather than “random,” at the level of single worksites or corporate bodies.[1]

Kishi’s Administration of Forced Labor in Manchukuo and Korea
Kishi’s strategy for economic administration in “Manchukuo,” or Japan’s unrecognized puppet state created after the invasion of Manchuria, was structured around a philosophy of labor rationalization. When appointed to the state’s industrial ministry in 1936 following the consolidation of military rule in the region, Kishi was given authority over Manchukuo’s economy by the Kwantung Army. Their leadership agreed that maximum industrial output justified any and all administrative means needed to achieve that goal.[2] Kishi’s process eliminated worker compensation and was implemented through a process of forced recruitment, physical intimidation of workers who resisted the production quotas, and yakuza enforcement to repress any resistance among the workers, creating a system in which labor was treated as an easily expendable resource.[3]
The official sanction of this system happened in 1937, when Kishi signed a government decree to legally allow forced labor practices from Manchukuo and northern China—though this had already been an operational practice across the territory’s industrial sites.[4] At the Fushun coal mine, one of the central industrial operations under Kishi’s administration, the workforce was kept at about 40,000 workers at any given time, with roughly 25,000 of those workers needing to be replaced each year since those who came before them had died from the labor conditions.[5] Upon his return to Japan in 1939, Kishi rose through the national government and became Minister of Commerce and Industry in Hideki Tojo’s wartime cabinet in 1941,[6] carrying his abusive framework into the highest level of Japan’s state.
Kishi’s postwar path provides a clear instance of how taking responsibility for the forced labor system was prevented through political calculation. He was arrested in 1945 as a Class A war crime suspect and released three years later without trial,[7] depicting America’s determination to “contain communism” and create an anti-communist, postwar Japanese state. After reentering politics, Kishi united the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955.[8] He became the Prime Minister in February of 1957,[9] twelve years after his arrest as a suspected war criminal, illustrating how certain Cold War policies blocked accountability for Kishi’s administrative record.

The Romusha System and the Mobilization of Korean Workers
    The forced labor system that Nobusuke Kishi created in Manchukuo reached its highest documented scale with their use of Korean workers between 1939 and 1945. The language applied to this group of workers has its own significance: the term “Romusha,” written in Japanese with the characters for labor and obligation, gives official documentation of forced labor through the linguistics of the word itself,[10]  revealing how the Japanese Empire twisted language to change the narrative of its forced labor system into “civic duty” or “national conscription”. 
The mobilization of Korean workers across the Japanese empire developed through three escalating stages and was accelerated through the National Mobilization Law of 1938, a statute that provided the legal framework for state control of the labor market across the empire and its colonial territories.[11] Between 1939 and 1942, Japanese corporations recruited Korean workers under colonial administrative authorization. Koreans were lured into applying for what seemed to be attractive job opportunities, but when arriving in Japan, they learned Korean salaries were often withheld, their wages lower than their Japanese counterparts.[12] The second phase, between 1942 and 1944, amassed substantially more Korean workers and formalized the role of state authority. From 1944 to the end of the war, the final phase involved the enforcement of labor mobilization by Japanese military police, who supervised recruitment areas in Korean villages, where representatives of major zaibatsu corporations (including Mitsui and Mitsubishi) participated in collecting workers. Those who refused faced severe consequences.[13]
    South Korea’s Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism, which conducted investigative work between 2004 and 2015, documented 798,043 Koreans who were forcefully mobilized to Japan between 1939 and 1945 in order to labor across over a thousand of worksites operated by 2,900 companies—a number that covers only the individuals sent to the Japanese home islands and does not include the millions also mobilized within Korea, Manchuria, and throughout the broader imperial territories of Japan.[14] The Commission approximated that of the workers “more than 10 percent died or went missing from sites or during repatriation,” meaning that it is possible that nearly 80,000 Koreans sent to Japan went missing or died. Only 9,043 of the workers who died in Japan were identified by their names.[15] 
The financial dimension of the Korean forced labor system remains unresolved through the postwar decades in a way that makes the material stakes of historical erasure traceable. Wages owed to Korean workers that were withheld during their employment were subsequently transferred into the Bank of Japan in the late 1940s, where they remained held in the following decades while the workers and their families were legally foreclosed from accessing them by diplomatic arrangements.[16] The Korean Broadcasting System’s 2009 definition of this situation as a “sixty-year cover-up” accurately describes the active suppression, which was sustained through deliberate institutional choices across successive Japanese governments.[17]

Creation of Unit 731 and its Coerced Labor Practices
    Kishi’s administrative system engaged coercive industrial labor in Manchuria, shaping the organization of Japan's most classified wartime research program: Unit 731. Formally known as the designated Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 was (operationally) the world’s largest biological warfare research facility. It was built by Chinese prisoners and civilian laborers from the occupied population in 1936.[18] The facility’s operational secrecy was tied to the prisoners used for its construction and those used as test subjects. In August 1945, as Soviet forces closed in on the unit’s headquarters in Harbin, Commander Shiro Ishii gave orders to destroy the compound and kill all surviving prisoners. The laborers who had built the facility were executed as well, ensuring that Japan's national secret would die with them.[19]
The experimental program at Unit 731 has been charted through postwar testimony, American and Soviet records, and the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials conducted by the USSR in 1949. Prisoners held at the facility, who were predominantly Chinese but also included Korean, Mongolian, and Soviet individuals,[20] were subjected to biological and medical experiments, including vivisection without anesthesia, injection of plague, cholera, anthrax, syphilis, and typhoid bacteria into living prisoners, and frostbite experiments.[21]  The loss of life in the program is estimated to be anywhere from 200,000 to 580,000 civilians and prisoners.[22] American investigators who arrived in Japan after its surrender confronted evidence of Unit 731’s existence and entered into negotiations with its scientists and leadership regarding the data they had collected, and eventually acknowledged that Unit 731’s activities were extremely inhumane while also concluding that “[t]he value to the U.S. of Japanese [biological warfare] data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from ‘war crimes’ prosecution.”[23] On the basis of their conclusion, Unit 731’s scientists were granted immunity for their actions in exchange for their research data.[24]
The erasure of Japan’s forced labor system was created through a sequence of political and legal decisions made by actors whose institutional interests were served by the foreclosure of accountability, and the mechanisms through which this construction occurred are well documented in declassified government archives. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which convened in May 1946 following the prosecution of 28 senior Japanese military and political leaders, addressed a substantial range of wartime crimes including the Nanjing Massacre, the mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war, and the aggressive warmaking across the Asia-Pacific region, while the systematic forced labor of Korean and Chinese civilian populations across Japan’s industrial operations was largely absent from the central prosecution record, showing a clear pattern of exclusion reflecting the strategic priorities of the prosecuting powers rather than any sort of deficiency in evidence.[25] Unit 731 is a perfect example of this: the pattern of exclusion was built into its political arrangements, establishing that Cold War alliance-building would take precedence over a comprehensive accounting of the heinous crimes committed by the state whose conduct the Tribunal was nominally studying.[26]

Postwar Rehabilitation of Kishi and the Concealment of Forced Labor Records
Another well-known example of how the cover-up was administered rather than “passively permitted” is the postwar career of Kishi himself. His release from Sugamo Prison in 1948 without indictment reflected the American occupation authorities’ view that his experience and anti-communist orientation made him a useful ally in containing communism.[27] After becoming prime minister in 1957, Kishi and his administration sought to prevent the forced labor issue from being raised in the Diet, fearing that its explosive implications could undermine the controversial revision of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, his administration’s central objective.[28] The suppression of the documentary record continued after Kishi left office in 1960. Over the following decades, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly informed the Diet that its 1946 report on forced labor no longer existed. NHK investigators uncovered the complete report in 1993; in 2003, the Ministry disclosed that approximately 20,000 pages of related site reports had been found in its basement storeroom.[29] Kishi’s administration thus worked to keep the forced labor system he had helped administer out of legislative debate, while later governments continued to deny the existence of records documenting it. This sustained erasure shows how the avoidance of accountability became embedded within the state, with consequences that continue to shape how Japan confronts, or refuses to confront, this history today.

Sources:
1. William Underwood, "Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for Redress," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 6, 2005, https://apjjf.org/william-underwood/1693/article.
2. Joseph Maiolo, Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (New York: Basic Books, 2010)
3. Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 221–245.
4. Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, 275.
5. Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan's War 1931–1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 125.
6. Delury, John. “The Kishi Effect: A Political Genealogy of Japan-ROK Relations.” Asian Perspective 39, no. 3 (2015): 445. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43738126.
7. Koichiro Osaka, "The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA)," e-flux Journal, no. 100 (May 2019), e-flux.com.
8. Richard Samuels, "Kishi and Corruption: An Anatomy of the 1955 System" (working paper no. 83, Japan Policy Research Institute, December 2001), archived February 5, 2012, archive.org.
9. Shinichi Kitaoka, "Kishi Nobusuke: Frustrated Ambition," in The Prime Ministers of Postwar Japan, 1945–1995, ed. Akio Watanabe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 106.
10. Saaler, Sven. "Demolition Men: The Unmaking of a Memorial Commemorating Wartime Forced Laborers in Gunma (Japan)." Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2022. https://apjjf.org/2022/16/saaler.
11. Ibid. 
12. Ibid.
13. Duró, Ágota, and David Palmer. "Japan's Forgotten Korean Forced Laborers: The Search for Hidden Wartime Graves in Hokkaido." International Labor and Working-Class History 106 (October 2024): 311–330. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547924000048.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Underwood, William. "Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan." Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 23, 2009. https://apjjf.org/William-Underwood/3256/article.
17. Ibid.
18. "Unit 731," EBSCO Research Starters, EBSCO Information Services, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/unit-731.
19. Altheide, Brandi. "Biohazard: Unit 731 and the American Cover-Up." Paper presented to University of Michigan-Flint. https://docplayer.net/79629566-Biohazard-unit-731-and-the-american-cover-up-brandi-altheide-faculty-mentor-sponsor-dr-roy-hanashiro-university-of-michigan-flint.html.
20. "The Horrifying Crimes and Brutal Experiments of the Secretive WWII Japanese 'Unit 731.'" History Skills. https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/year-10/unit-731/.
21. Lyles, Kevin. "Japan's Unit 731 Performed Ghastly Experiments on Human Guinea Pigs." Warfare History Network. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/japans-hellish-unit-731/.
22. Ibid.
23. United States Responses to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation after World War II: National Security and Wartime Exigency." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4487829/.
24. Ibid.
25.  Palmer, David. "Korean Hibakusha, Japan's Supreme Court and the International Community." Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2007. https://apjjf.org/David-Palmer/2670/article; Underwood, William. "Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress." Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 2005. https://apjjf.org/william-underwood/1823/article.
26. Brody, Howard, Sarah E. Leonard, Jing-Bao Nie, and Paul Weindling. "United States Responses to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation after World War II: National Security and Wartime Exigency." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 23, no. 2 (2014): 220–230. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4487829/.
27. Schaller, Michael. "America's Favorite War Criminal: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transformation of U.S.-Japan Relations." JPRI Working Paper No. 11 (July 1995). https://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp11.html.
28. Underwood, William. "Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for Redress." Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 6, 2005. https://apjjf.org/william-underwood/1693/article.
29. Ibid.

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