HE TOILED in a coal mine, under the lash of brutal guards to profit the family of Japan's current prime minister.
Now, almost seven decades after Patrick James McAnulty was abused as a prisoner of war, his son has launched a one-man campaign to seek an apology and compensation from the head of the Japanese government.
James McAnulty, 62, from Wishaw in Lanark
shire, said that his father never fully recovered from more than three years of captivity in Japan. He and his fellow inmates were beaten mercilessly by camp guards. Officers used the prisoners for judo practice, served them barely enough food to survive and demanded a punishing work regime in the mines.
Until his death in 1971, Patrick James McAnulty would either remain stonily silent or go and potter in his garden whenever Japan or the Japanese were mentioned.
Now his son has written "a polite letter" to the Japanese premier Taro Aso and another to his brother, Yutaka Aso, president of what is now Lafarge Aso Cement Co where his father was forced to toil, but has received no replies to date.
Mr McAnulty is seeking an apology and compensation of a symbolic £800 – the annual pay for a Scottish mine worker in 1942 – for his father's labour.
Mr McAnulty, who sent the letter late last month, said: "It's not easy when you're one man to run a campaign seeking an apology from the prime minister of a country but, as I wrote in my letters, I'm going to keep it up and write a letter to them every month.
"The company motto for the Aso mines is 'We deliver the best' – and my theme is that my father helped them deliver the best, never received any sort of pay for it and he deserves recognition."
Until January, Mr Aso had flatly refused to confirm that his company had employed slave labourers during the Second World War. But then new evidence unearthed by opposition politicians in the archives of the health and welfare ministry proved that 101 British, 197 Australian and two Dutch prisoners were held at the mine, along with several thousand Korean and Chinese forced labourers.
Historians say the mines were notorious for their brutal treatment of prisoners.
Questioned in the Diet, Japan's parliament, Mr Aso said: "Research by the welfare ministry last year has newly revealed that Aso Mining made Allied PoWs work".
He had said previously: "I was only five years old when the war ended, so I honestly have no personal recollection of that time."
But Mr McAnulty has no intention of letting the experiences of his father, a Royal Navy stoker, be forgotten. He said: "A lot of these survivors are very old now and they are getting fewer and further between, but I'm going to continue the fight for this recognition and my children and grandchildren will do it if I don't get a result in my lifetime."
Patrick McAnulty was a stoker aboard the cruiser Exeter when it was sunk in the Java Sea on 1 March, 1942. After being picked up by a Japanese warship, he spent time in a camp on Celebes island before being shipped to Japan. He worked in a shipyard in Nagasaki before being transferred to Fukuoka Camp 26 in June 1945 and toiling at the Yoshikuma Coal Mine.
After being repatriated, he returned to his trade as a shoemaker, but felt the need to unburden himself and chose his son to share his experiences.
Mr McAnulty said: "He was never well after he got back and in my wedding photos he was the smallest and the thinnest person. He tried so hard to make a life for himself, and his family, but what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder must have been horrendous for him."
