UN Fans Korea-Japan Embers With Heritage Site Move

However, it avoided using the term“forced labor,” which the Japanese government has always opposed. Within Korea, this compromise has been assailed, particularly by the opposition Democratic Party and
Korean media commentary . The Yoon government has been accused of deliberately and misleadingly claiming that Japan had agreed to fully accept this history.

“The Japanese government had never acknowledged the concept of forced labor,” former Korean Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo told this writer in an email exchange. Even in the case of Battleship Island (discussed below), it tried to find language that avoided the term.“This time, it seemed the negotiations did not squarely address this issue.”

Nonetheless, Shin believes that the compromise was justified.“My hunch is that the Korean government strove to put more emphasis on the real teaching of history to the visitors to the site than arguments on the wording,” the former diplomat, who remains active on relations with Japan, said.“We need to assess the outcome as a product of diplomatic compromise, given the big gap between the two sides on their historical views.”

At the time of the 2015 application, the Japanese government, then led by the late Shinzo Abe, denied the forced nature of Korean labor and discrimination against Koreans at the sites. But UNESCO
insisted
that Japan clearly admit that“a large number of Koreans and others ... were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.”

The coal mine operated on Japan's Hashima Island, popularly known as Battleship Island, was granted World Heritage status in 2015, but only after Japan
agreed
to include the“full history” that would“allow an understanding that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.” Even then, a follow-up monitoring team found in 2021 that the information center failed to do this.

In the case of the Sado mine, historians have
documented
that at least 1,519 Koreans were forced to work from 1939 until the end of World War II. The initial application filed by the local government, which sought the status to promote tourism to the island, made no mention of the wartime era. It confined itself to the history of the mines during the Tokugawa and Meiji era (until 1912), seeking to avoid this controversy.

The Korean government opposed this application, as did UNESCO experts. UNESCO's International Council on Monuments and Sites requested that the Japanese applicants deal with the wartime period, and a supplemental document was submitted to respond to this issue.

The document offers a description of three phases of labor“recruitment” that implies the Korean workers voluntarily agreed to work at the mines until 1944, when labor“requisition” was compulsory. The Japanese official document also asserts that there was no discrimination between Korean and Japanese workers and that the Koreans were paid wages.

The descriptions of the phases of“recruitment” in the document are“misleading,” Dr. Nikolai Johnsen, a British scholar at the University of London who has researched and written extensively on this history, told this writer.

The workers were signed up by agents supported by the colonial government“who compelled large groups of men from impoverished Korean villages to take up dangerous work in Japan under false pretenses.” During the second phase, which began in 1942, the colonial regime directly selected the workers, and opposition“often had dire consequences” in the form of“forced mobilization,” the scholar said.

Further, Johnsen explained that“claiming this system was non-discriminatory is simply historical denialism.” Wages and working conditions were far from equal, and a large proportion of the wages never got paid, the funds held in accounts by Mitsubishi but never released.

The Japanese account also uses the term“workers from the Korean Peninsula,” a formulation that treats Koreans as subjects of the Japanese Empire and refuses to recognize them as foreign forced laborers.

“Recognition of the true character of this history would greatly elevate the universal value of the Sado mines as a UNESCO World Heritage site,” Johnsen
wrote
in a paper published two years ago.“They cannot be suppressed for the sake of instilling pride in future Japanese generations to the neglect of the victims.”

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Lingering disputes and the shadow of history

This is not an issue confined to the question of World Heritage status.
Suits filed
in Korea by Korean workers and their descendants against Japanese companies who used forced labor – in the case of these mines, Mitsubishi Materials – were a central part of the downturn in Korea-Japan relations in 2018.

The successful rulings in favor of the workers, who demanded compensation for unpaid wages, remain an issue despite the Yoon administration's decision last year to resolve the problem by
using a Korean-funded foundation
to settle the demands.

That is quite distinct from the way Mitsubishi Materials dealt with a suit filed by Chinese forced laborers that was settled in Chinese courts in 2016 with compensation payments and an apology from the
company . The company also offered
similar apologies
to American POWs used as forced labor in their mines during the war. The contrast with Japan's approach to Korea remains problematic, to say the least.

As noted, the Yoon administration's drive to improve relations with Tokyo is a signal accomplishment. From the standpoint of geopolitics, the most notable consequence of this improvement has been the deepening of trilateral security cooperation with the United States and Japan.

However, both trilateral ties and improved bilateral relations with Japan remain vulnerable not only to a change in political leadership but also to the lingering and potentially explosive effects of unaddressed historical grievances.

Daniel Sneider is a lecturer on international policy and East Asian studies at Stanford University and a non-resident distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author's alone.

This article was originally published by KEIA's The Peninsula. It is republished with permission.

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