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Japan and South Korea are covering up the darkness of Sado Island by misunderstanding the importance of world heritage, international relations, and UNESCO’s history.
A tunnel in the Sado gold mine.
Lately, the Aikawa Japanese Folk Museum, a small design made of cream-colored tablets and oven-baked tiles, has a familiar appeal among South Koreans. It is located on the island of Sado, the subject of great controversy following the designation of the gold mines on the island of Sado as a UNESCO World Heritage Site last July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, green topography are around 50 mines with a long history spanning Japan’s classical era, industrialization, and imperialism. Japan’s UNESCO candidacy for the Sado mines is solely due to its legacy from the Edo era (1603-1867).
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, after subduing his rival warlords, introduced a shogunate, necessarily a military dictatorship. The Tokugawa shoguns (samurai dictators) were wary of foreign influences; They have locked down Japan by banning Christianity and breaking relations with the West. From Edo, present-day Tokyo, the Tokugawa circle of relatives oversaw more than two and a half centuries of peace and isolation.
Close interactions with the outside world, the Pax Tokugawa, gave rise to the unique cultural and social landscape of early modern Japan. Japan’s unique orientalist belief and appeal derives largely from the practice and artifacts of this period: Kabuki actors clad in bright costumes. silk, floating their whitewashed faces and surreal voices, whose dreamlike performances definitely capture the audience beyond and present; woodcuts depicting scenes of hectic neighborhoods and dormant domestic life, whose disordered themes and hazy settings have captivated artists around the world since the 19th century; and Edo architecture reflecting the stratified degrees of grandeur and modesty of the other social classes, whose exquisite temples and houses carved and stacked in wooden and clay tiles never fail to attract tourists.
The Sado gold mines ran parallel and were an integral component of this entire Edo flourishing. In 1603, the same year that Tokugawa established his shogunate, he took over the mines of Sado and sent mining experts to the island to extract gold and silver. The mines of Sado have become the monetary lifeline of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the early part of the 17th century, one-tenth of the world’s total gold production came from Sado. The samurai regime sent most of its gold and silver to China to pay for imported manufactured goods.
Using artisanal methods, Sado miners in the Edo era achieved a gold purity of 99. 54%, something unprecedented in the world at the time. Unlike in Europe, no machinery or chemicals have facilitated the process of extraction, processing, smelting, refining, and minting. Ingenio Clásico “The pinnacle of the manual gold production system”.
Japan’s narrative, as presented to UNESCO, that the Sado mining heritage – the set of manual gold mining and refining techniques – reflected the sociotechnical sophistication of the Edo era, which played an invaluable role in the evolution sociocultural of Japan. Progression and global trade. For Tokyo, this heritage is a valuable legacy of an era that was “the last era of classical Japanese government, culture and society. ”
So far, this is smart enough to receive UNESCO’s blessing, but the story of the Sado mines didn’t end at the end of the Edo era. Rather, his story unfolds in two parts: and after the shogunate.
In 1854, the United States forced Japanese ports to open up to the West through international gunboat relations, threatening military action to gain publicity advantages. Believing that the isolated shogunate was no longer immune to the world, the young samurai overthrew their feudal society and instituted a new government inspired by the fashionable bureaucracy and technocracy in 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration, named after the Meiji Emperor who served as a figurehead.
Once again, the island of Sado financed some other bankruptcy in Japan’s history. In 1869, the Meiji government sent a Western technician to Sado Island and began drilling mining shafts with Western techniques. Just as Sado gold wove the social fabric of the Edo period, Sado silver now underpinned the Japanese currency, the yen, reinforcing the immediate industrialization and militarization of the new regime that helped Japan win the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan expelled Chinese influence from colonized Korea and Formosa, present-day Taiwan.
However, by the end of the 19th century, the price of silver had depreciated in global markets, making it more difficult for Japan to unload machinery and weapons from the West. In 1896, Mitsubishi Materials took over the Sado mines from the government. The following year, thanks to war reparations paid through China at its London depot, Japan pegged its yen to the foreign gold standard. With the yen’s less complicated convertibility and higher price in the foreign economy, Japan has pushed its heavy-duty industrialization systems that have fueled hostile militarism.
Japan exchanged Mitsubishi gold from the Sado mines for Western warships and munitions, allowing it to triumph over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Japan has become the sole hegemon in the region, making Korea in his protectorate that same year. then its colony in 1905. 1910. Sado Island has financed Imperial Japan’s overseas military operations and military ventures thanks to the popularity of gold and gigantic gold reserves.
Mitsubishi’s intensification of gold and other mineral production further accelerated Japan’s inconsistent trade commitments. After Japan conquered Chinese Manchuria in 1931, the company built new facilities on the island of Sado to produce more gold and meet the army’s growing monetary needs. It began processing more than 50,000 tons of ore per month to aid the war efforts of the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. As Japan’s inconsistent military dream turned into the Pacific War (1941-1945), the mines at Sado began to generate copper. with, steel and zinc.
At the time, the mine relied on Korean labor.
In 1938, Mitsubishi was struggling to fulfill the Japanese government’s purpose of expanding mining production. Veteran miners had fallen ill due to poor operating conditions, and Japanese men had been called up for wartime conscription. Japan’s General Labor Mobilization Law, passed in 1938, allowed Mitsubishi to circulate forced laborers in Korea in early 1939.
The number of Korean forced laborers on Sado Island is estimated to have ranged from 1,200 to 1,500. According to the hard labor records of the Mitsubishi branch in Sado, 1,519 Koreans were brought to the island between 1940 and 1945. However, Hirose Teizo of Fukuoka University estimates that that number may be as high as 2,300.
Before the Sado mines were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, South Korea asked Japan to provide data on those Koreans so that visitors could get a sense of the mines’ darker history. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which evaluates UNESCO nominations, also asked whether Japan intends to “cover the entire history of mining on Sado Island and on the nominated property. “
That’s why Japan opened a small gallery on Korean staff at the Aikawa Folk Museum. However, the move angered South Koreans. First, the museum is within walking distance of the Sado mines, making it difficult for scale workers to recognize Korean forced laborers. when they stop at the now famous attraction. Second, no mention of “forced labor” was found. With regard to “civilian personnel on the Korea Peninsula”, the gallery uses only words such as “recruitment”, “location” and “requisition”. ” under which Koreans assumed responsibilities “based on legislation and regulations. “Meanwhile, the text of Japan’s application to UNESCO goes so far as to say that Mitsubishi “hired more miners” in reaction to the growing demands of the war.
In fact, the General Government of Chosun, the Japanese colonial headquarters for Korea, was actively involved in regrouping and protecting forced laborers, a practice that involved kidnappings and human trafficking. Employment agencies used colonial police to forcibly evict reluctant painters, who were locked up. The fact that 15% of Korean miners fled Sado Island between the early 1940s and mid-1943 is also a testament to the forced details of their presence and paintings on the island.
When asked through ICOMOS for more information on the employment situation of Koreans, Japan stated that “married workers can bring their family members with them,” that they are provided with comfortable housing and affordable costs for “food and basic necessities,” and that “the policy of non-discrimination in the actual operations at the Sado mines. “
The truth was different. Authorities have transferred staff families with them to discourage flights. Mitsubishi unilaterally cut the salaries of Korean staff and diverted part of its source of income to mandatory savings plans. They had to pay for mining tools, blankets and food. These were tactics aimed at depriving Koreans of money and preventing them from escaping. Records from the Niigata Prefectural Employment Agency show that their outstanding bills leaked into the coffers of the post-war Japanese government.
In addition, the Koreans carried out the most dangerous tasks deep in the mine shafts. Even healthy newcomers were short-lived on the island for three years due to lung disease and injury. Toward the end of the Pacific War in Japan, the few survivors who remained were taken into the military.
There are two reasons why Japan buried the role of the Sado mines as a source of water needed for Japan’s imperial dream and colonial repression. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has sought to provide “a nation-centered narrative” in an attempt to recapture the old interpretation by removing old non-Japanese contributions as “harmful to national pride and national identity. “Shinzo insisted in particular that Japan rejected “masochistic history” and “excuse weariness. ”
In 2012, Abe’s cabinet followed revisionist and nationalist principles of sanitizing Japanese history and selling narratives about “beautiful Japan. ” Japan’s national textbooks began erasing data on forced hard labor, as well as on “comfort women,” women from Korea and other Japanese colonial territories forced into sexual slavery (Abe and his government have consistently denied that such women were coerced).
In 2015, UNESCO designated Meiji-era Industrial Revolution sites in Japan, which operated at the expense of more than 30,000 Korean forced laborers, as World Heritage Sites, on the condition that Japan take “measures to allow the passage of giant numbers of Koreans. “and others brought against their will and forced to paint in difficult conditions. Japan’s current exhibition in Tokyo, far from UNESCO sites, still denies the details of coercion and discrimination.
Outgoing Prime Minister Kishida Fumio inherited and perpetuated this denial, founding a “historic war team” to convince “the foreign community” of Japan’s own “perception of history. “Sado Island is only the latest front in the LDP’s promotion of Japan’s “beautiful” and “clean” history. Last year, Japan’s foreign minister said that “we do not pay any diplomatic attention to South Korea” in relation to the historical disputes over the island of Sado. Last month, a conservative media outlet said that forced hard labor was a hoax and that the Aikawa Folk Museum’s exhibition on forced Korean laborers was unnecessary.
The other explanation for why the LDP denies the forced hard labor and atrocities committed in wartime is that Japanese conservatives sincerely believe that Korean personnel may not have been forced simply unforced. Imperial Japan clung to naisen ittai, a perception of Korea and Japan as one body, organizing extensive systems of indoctrination. schooling and participation of Koreans in the rites of the Japanese imperial government. The colonial government instilled kokutai in Koreans, a set of orthodox imperial ideologies of Japan that symbolize Japanese “national essence” and “racial confidence. “Citing “the cultural and ethnic closeness between the Japanese and the Koreans,” they believed that their kōminka, or task for the creation of imperial subjects, was actually to paint. In this grand narrative, Koreans were not forced to paint, but simply mobilized or volunteered out of loyalty to higher imperial callings.
Kishida’s leadership has found in South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol the best partner to whitewash Japan’s history. Yoon’s leadership has opted for the South Korean New Right movement, which justifies the Japanese profession of Korea as a source of modernity and enlightenment and ignores colonial atrocities and elite collaboration.
In March 2023, Yoon undermined the South Korean Supreme Court’s ruling that Japanese corporations will have to compensate Korean forced laborers by not insisting on the factor with Kishida and instead counterintuitively forcing South Korean charities to disburse money. Regarding Sado Island, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Seoul and Tokyo agreed that the latter not include the term “forced labor” in the description of the Sado mines. South Korea then voted in favor of the designation of Sado Island through UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee.
Yoon has already filled his administration with New Right figures determined to erase the legacy of independence activists from South Korea’s history and to emphasize the staunch anti-communism of colonial collaborators. All of this is aimed at making it difficult to understand the chronology of the South. The colonial complicity of the Korean elite and the post-independence government control, which today underpin the conservatism of South Korea, which rejects rapprochement with North Korea and advocates unilateral cooperation with the Japanese LDP.
However, three important lessons can be learned from the standoff on the island of Sado. First, it is the ideal time for the global network to reflect on UNESCO’s philosophy of building “the defenses of peace in the minds of women and men” and the World Heritage Convention’s goal to “publicize foreign solidarity and cooperation. “Let’s see how Sado’s UNESCO seal fits into those values. In the future, UNESCO and other countries would do well not to repeat the same suffering.
The second lesson has more to do with Yoon’s administration. Diplomacy, despite its means of cultivating mutual interests in foreign relations, should, as an end, seek to bring the maximum benefit to its own people. The day after Sado’s appointment to UNESCO, Japan jubilated, but South Koreans were torn apart and wounded. Similarly, in May 2023, Yoon, unlike most South Koreans, was indifferent to Japan’s release of irradiated water from Fukushima. Yoon believes that accepting Japan strengthens bilateral economic security and military collaboration. is silent on how to fix South Korea’s political rent.
The final lesson focuses on the Kishida and Yoon administrations. The story flows in a continuum that infuses supply and illuminates the future. Truncating and adapting the history of a position constitutes flagrant damage to the collective memory of humanity. Sado’s gold would possibly have been pure, but its history contains impurities; If we don’t want to forget the good, we will have to not forget the bad either. Amnesia and denial have no place in ancient monuments.
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Lately, the Aikawa Japanese Folk Museum, a small design made of cream-colored tablets and oven-baked tiles, has a familiar appeal among South Koreans. It is located on the island of Sado, the subject of much controversy following the designation of the gold mines on the island of Sado as a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the end of July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, green topography are around 50 mines with a long history spanning Japan’s classical era, industrialization, and imperialism. Japan’s UNESCO candidacy for the Sado mines is solely due to its legacy from the Edo era (1603-1867).
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, after subduing his rival warlords, introduced a shogunate, necessarily a military dictatorship. The Tokugawa shoguns (samurai dictators) were wary of foreign influences; they have locked Japan in the dark, banning Christianity and breaking relations with the West. From Edo, modern-day Tokyo, the circle of Tokugawa relatives oversaw more than two and a half centuries of peace and isolation.
Close interactions with the outside world, the Pax Tokugawa, gave rise to the unique cultural and social landscape of early modern Japan. Japan’s unique orientalist belief and appeal stem in large part from the practice and artifacts of this period: Kabuki actors sheathed in bright costumes. silk, floating their whitewashed faces and surreal voices, whose dreamlike performances definitely trap the audience beyond and present; woodcuts depicting scenes of hectic neighborhoods and sleeping domestic life, whose messy themes and hazy settings have captivated artists around the world since the nineteenth century; and Edo architecture that reflects the layered degrees of grandeur and modesty of the other social classes, whose exquisite temples and houses carved and stacked in wood and clay tiles never fail to attract tourists.
The Sado gold mines ran parallel to and were an integral component of this entire flourishing of Edo. In 1603, the same year that Tokugawa established his shogunate, he directly took over the Sado mines and sent mining experts to the island to extract gold and silver. The Sado mines have become the financial lifeline of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the early part of the 17th century, one-tenth of the world’s total gold production came from Sado. The samurai regime sent most of its gold and silver to China to pay for imported manufactured goods.
Using artisanal methods, Sado miners in the Edo era achieved a gold purity of 99. 54%, something unprecedented in the world at the time. Unlike in Europe, no machinery or chemicals have facilitated the process of extraction, processing, smelting, refining, and minting. Ingenio Clásico “The pinnacle of the manual gold production system”.
Japan’s narrative, as presented to UNESCO, that the Sado mining heritage – the set of manual gold mining and refining techniques – reflected the sociotechnical sophistication of the Edo era, which played an invaluable role in the evolution sociocultural of Japan. Progression and global trade. For Tokyo, this heritage is a valuable legacy of an era that was “the last era of classical Japanese government, culture and society. ”
So far, this is clever enough to receive UNESCO’s blessing, but the story of the Sado mines did not end at the end of the Edo era. Rather, its story unfolds in two parts: and after the shogunate.
In 1854, the United States forced Japanese ports to open up to the West through international gunboat relations, threatening military action to gain publicity advantages. Believing that the isolated shogunate was no longer immune to the world, the young samurai overthrew their feudal society and instituted a new government inspired by the fashionable bureaucracy and technocracy in 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration, named after the Meiji Emperor who served as a figurehead.
Once again, the island of Sado financed some other bankruptcy in Japan’s history. In 1869, the Meiji government sent a Western technician to Sado Island and began drilling mining shafts with Western techniques. Just as Sado gold wove the social fabric of the Edo period, Sado silver now underpinned the Japanese currency, the yen, reinforcing the immediate industrialization and militarization of the new regime that helped Japan win the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan expelled Chinese influence from colonized Korea and Formosa, present-day Taiwan.
However, towards the end of the 19th century, the price of silver depreciated in global markets, making it more difficult for Japan to unload machinery and weapons from the West. In 1896, Mitsubishi Materials took over the Sado mines from the government. The following year, thanks to war reparations paid through China from its depot in London, Japan adjusted its yen to the foreign gold standard. With a less complicated convertibility of the yen and a higher price on the foreign economy, Japan boosted its heavy industrialization systems, fueling hostile militarism.
Japan exchanged Mitsubishi gold from the Sado mines for Western warships and munitions, allowing it to triumph over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Japan has become the sole hegemon of the region, making Korea its protectorate that same year. and then its colony in 1905. 1910. Sado Island has financed Imperial Japan’s military operations and overseas military ventures through the large and popular gold reserves.
Mitsubishi’s intensification of gold and other mineral production further accelerated Japan’s inconsistent trade commitments. After Japan conquered Chinese Manchuria in 1931, the company built new facilities on the island of Sado to produce more gold and meet the army’s growing monetary needs. It began processing more than 50,000 tons of ore per month to aid the war efforts of the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. As Japan’s inconsistent military dream turned into the Pacific War (1941-1945), the mines at Sado began to generate copper. with, steel and zinc.
At the time, the mine relied on Korean labor.
In 1938, Mitsubishi was struggling to fulfill the Japanese government’s purpose of expanding mining production. Veteran miners had fallen ill due to poor operating conditions, and Japanese men had been called up for wartime conscription. Japan’s General Labor Mobilization Law, passed in 1938, allowed Mitsubishi to circulate forced laborers in Korea in early 1939.
The number of Korean forced laborers on Sado Island is estimated to have ranged from 1,200 to 1,500. According to the records of hard work from the Mitsubishi branch in Sado, 1,519 Koreans were brought to the island between 1940 and 1945. However, Hirose Teizo of Fukuoka University estimates that number may be as high as 2,300.
Before the Sado Mines were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, South Korea asked Japan to provide data on those Koreans so that visitors could perceive the mines’ darker history. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which evaluates UNESCO’s nominations, also asked whether Japan intended to “cover the entire history of mining on Sado Island and on the proposed property. “
That is why Japan opened a small gallery about Korean personnel in the Aikawa Folk Museum. However, this measure angered South Koreans. Firstly, the museum is located a short distance from the Sado Mines, making it difficult for visitors to notice Korean forced laborers when visiting the now famous attraction. Secondly, no mention of “forced labor” was found. Regarding “civilian personnel on the Korean Peninsula,” the gallery only uses words like “recruitment,” “placement,” and “requisition,” in which Koreans took on responsibilities “based on laws and regulations. ” Meanwhile, Japan’s application text to UNESCO goes so far as to say that Mitsubishi “hired more miners” in reaction to the growing demands of the war.
In fact, the General Government of Chosun, the Japanese colonial seat for Korea, was actively involved in the regrouping and protection of forced laborers, a practice that involved kidnapping and human trafficking. Employment agencies used the colonial police to forcibly evict reluctant painters, who were locked up. The fact that 15% of Korean miners fled Sado Island between the early 1940s and mid-1943 is also a testament to the forced details of their presence and paintings on the island.
When asked through ICOMOS for more information on the employment situation of Koreans, Japan stated that “married workers can bring their family members with them,” that they are provided with comfortable housing and affordable costs for “food and basic necessities,” and that “the policy of non-discrimination in the actual operations at the Sado mines. “
The truth was different. Authorities have transferred staff families with them to discourage flights. Mitsubishi unilaterally cut the salaries of Korean staff and diverted part of its source of income into mandatory savings plans. They had to pay for mining tools, blankets and food. These were tactics aimed at depriving Koreans of money and preventing them from escaping. Records from the Niigata Prefectural Employment Agency show that his outstanding bills leaked into the coffers of the post-war Japanese government.
In addition, the Koreans carried out the most dangerous tasks deep in the mine shafts. Even healthy newcomers were short-lived on the island for three years due to lung disease and injury. Toward the end of the Pacific War in Japan, the few survivors who remained were taken into the military.
There are two reasons why Japan buried the role of the Sado mines as a supplier of the water needed for the imperial dream and Japanese colonial repression. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has worked to provide “a nation-centered narrative” in an effort to revive the old interpretation by removing old non-Japanese contributions as “harmful to national pride and national identity. “Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo insisted that Japan rejected the “masochistic history” and “apology fatigue. ”
In 2012, Abe’s cabinet followed revisionist and nationalist principles of sanitizing Japanese history and selling narratives about “beautiful Japan. “Japan’s national textbooks began to erase data on forced hard labor, as well as on “comfort women,” women from Korea and other Japanese colonial territories forced into sexual slavery (Abe and his government have consistently denied that those women were coerced).
In 2015, UNESCO designated the sites of Japan’s Meiji-era Industrial Revolution, which operated at the expense of more than 30,000 Korean forced laborers, as World Heritage Sites, on the condition that Japan take “measures to allow the passage of a huge number of Koreans. and others brought against their will and forced to paint in difficult conditions. Japan’s current exhibition in Tokyo, far from UNESCO sites, still denies details of coercion and discrimination.
Outgoing Prime Minister Kishida Fumio inherited and perpetuated this denial, founding a “historic war team” to convince “the foreign community” of Japan’s own “perception of history. “Sado Island is just the newest front in the LDP’s promotion of Japan’s “beauty. “and “clean” history. Last year, Japan’s foreign minister said that “we do not pay any diplomatic attention to South Korea” in relation to the historical disputes over the island of Sado. Last month, a conservative media outlet said that forced hard labor was a hoax and that the Aikawa Folk Museum’s exhibit on Korean workers forced unnecessary workers.
The other explanation for why the LDP denies forced hard labor and wartime atrocities is that Japanese conservatives sincerely believe that the Korean personnel may simply not have been forced. Imperial Japan adhered to naisen ittai, a perception of Korea and Japan as one body, organizing extensive systems of educational indoctrination and participation of Koreans in the rites of imperial Japanese rule. The colonial government instilled in Koreans kokutai, a set of orthodox imperial ideologies of Japan that symbolize Japanese “national essence” and “racial confidence. ” Citing “the cultural and ethnic proximity between the Japanese and Koreans,” they made their kōminka, or task of creating imperial subjects, truly a painting. In this grand narrative, Koreans were not forced to work, but simply mobilized or volunteered out of loyalty to higher imperial callings.
Kishida’s leadership has found in South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol the best partner to whitewash Japan’s history. Yoon’s leadership has opted for the South Korean New Right movement, which justifies Korea’s Japanese profession as a source of modernity and enlightenment and overlooks colonial atrocities and collaboration. elite.
In March 2023, Yoon undermined the South Korea Supreme Court’s ruling that Japanese corporations will have to compensate Korean forced laborers by failing to insist on the factor with Kishida and instead counterintuitively forcing South Korean charities to shell out money. Regarding Sado Island, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Seoul and Tokyo agreed that the latter will not include the term “forced labor” in the description of the Sado mines. South Korea then voted in favor of the designation of Sado Island through UNESCO in the World Heritage Committee.
Yoon has already filled his administration with New Right figures determined to erase the legacy of independence activists from South Korean history and highlight the staunch anti-communism of colonial collaborators. All of this is intended to make it difficult to understand the chronology of the colonial complicity of the South Korean elite and the post-independence government that underpins today’s South Korean conservatism, which rejects rapprochement with North Korea and advocates unilateral cooperation. with the Japanese LDP.
However, three vital lessons can be learned from the confrontation over the island of Sado. First, it is the best time for the global network to confront UNESCO’s philosophy of building “the defenses of peace in the minds of women and men” and the recommendations of the World Heritage Convention. objective of “promoting solidarity and external cooperation”. It’s hard to see how Sado’s UNESCO seal fits those values. In the future, UNESCO and other countries would do more to avoid repeating the same suffering.
The second lesson is more about Yoon’s administration. Diplomacy, despite its means of cultivating mutual interests in foreign relations, should, as an end, seek to bring the maximum advantages to its own people. The day after Sado’s appointment as a member of UNESCO, Japan was jubilant, but South Koreans were torn and wounded. Similarly, in May 2023, Yoon, unlike most South Koreans, seemed indifferent to Japan’s release of irradiated water from Fukushima. Yoon believes that accepting Japan strengthens bilateral economic security and military collaboration. However, he is silent on how to fix South Korea’s political fortunes.
The final lesson focuses on the Kishida and Yoon administrations. The story flows in a continuum that infuses supply and illuminates the future. Truncating and adapting the history of a position constitutes flagrant damage to the collective memory of humanity. Sado’s gold would possibly have been pure, but its history contains impurities; If we don’t want to forget the good, we will have to not forget the bad either. Amnesia and denial have no place in ancient monuments.
Lately, the Aikawa Japanese Folk Museum, a small design made of cream-colored clapboards and kiln-fired tiles, has a familiar appeal among South Koreans. It is located on Sado Island, the subject of much controversy following the designation of the Sado Island gold mines as a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the end of July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, verdant topography are around 50 mines with a long history spanning the classical era, industrialization and imperialism of Japan. Japan’s UNESCO candidacy for the Sado Mines is solely due to its legacy from the Edo era (1603-1867).
Eunwoo Lee writes about politics, society, and the politics of Europe and East Asia.