Burma's independence hero set out for China and ended up in Tokyo
In 1940, with a price of 500 rupees on his head, Aung San slipped out of Burma on a Norwegian cargo ship under a false name, hoping to reach communist contacts in China. He drifted around Xiamen for weeks with little money until Japanese secret police steered him to Tokyo, where he donned a kimono and took a Japanese name.
Born on 13 February 1915 in Natmauk, the youngest of nine children, Aung San barely spoke before the age of eight and grew into a solitary teenager absorbed in reading. At Rangoon University from 1933 he became a student leader and edited the union magazine. In February 1936 he and his friend U Nu were expelled for refusing to name the author of an article attacking a senior official, and the three-month strike that followed made him famous across the country. Both were reinstated.
He soon abandoned law studies for revolution. Joining the We Burmans Association, he took the title Thakin, meaning master, a term usually applied to Westerners, which members used to assert that Burmese were the true masters of their own land. He helped organise a wave of strikes, was jailed briefly for conspiracy, and in 1939 became the first secretary general of Burma's Communist Party, though he quit after bitter disputes. Peers praised his work ethic but found him prickly; he lived mostly in poverty, never drank and steered clear of romance. In 1940 he met Gandhi, Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose at a congress in India.
In Tokyo he learned Japanese and wrote admiringly of a state with one party and one leader. When Japan occupied Burma, he served as war minister in the Japan-backed government of Ba Maw. As the war turned, he switched sides and joined his forces to the Allies against Japan.
After the war he negotiated independence with Britain's prime minister Clement Attlee, served as premier of the colony from 1946, and in 1947 his Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League won the general election. On 19 July 1947 he and most of his cabinet were assassinated, about six months before independence. Burmese still call him the Father of the Nation, and his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi later became a Nobel Peace laureate.
Source: Aung San
