It remains worrying whether the ancient past of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea will further disrupt relations. The persistent divergence between the two countries over colonial and war history, as well as Korean demands for ancestral justice, have been on the horizon in recent weeks.
On 27 July, the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) officially awarded the valuable prestige of World Heritage to the gold mines on the Japanese island of Sado.
In a 2015 submission to UNESCO, Japan included mines in a list of sites that supported its Industrial Revolution. The Sado gold mines evolved in the Tokugawa era and played a vital role in the modernization of Japan. Although the mines are no longer operational, they have been preserved as an ancient site for tourists.
The controversy surrounding Japan’s application revolves around the history of mines, warfare, and the use of Korean personnel to conduct harmful mining operations. The South Korean government and civic activists have opposed awarding World Heritage status to gold mines.
The Koreans, as well as many Western and Japanese historians, insist that many personnel were taken to the mines against their will, either through coercion or deception. Objections to granting World Heritage prestige included forcing Japan to recognize the role of forced Koreans. work on himself and on his official accounts.
The Sado decision reflected a compromise by Japan that was supported by the South Korean government and reached through diplomatic negotiations. It included an agreement by Japan to present the role of Korean workers and their harsh working conditions, as well as hold an annual ceremony to pay respect to them.
An exhibit at a museum near the site created to provide data on the more than 1,500 Korean employees who worked there, adding how they faced more damaging situations than their Japanese counterparts and other harsh measures.
However, it has avoided using the term “forced labour”, which the Japanese government opposes. In Korea, this commitment has been criticized, especially through the opposition Democratic Party and through comments in the Korean media. The Yoon government has been accused of intentionally and misleadingly claiming that Japan has agreed to be completely satisfied with this story.
“The Japanese government has never identified the concept of forced labor,” former Korea’s ambassador to Japan, Shin Kak-so, told the author of an email exchange. Even in the case of Battleship Island (discussed below), he tried to locate language that shunned the term. ” This time, it seemed that the negotiations had not directly addressed this issue. “
However, Shin believes that the commitment was justified. ” My downfall is that the Korean government has tried to put more emphasis on teaching history to site visitors than on arguing about the wording,” said the former diplomat, who remains active in relations with Japan. “We will have to assess the final results as the product of diplomatic engagement, given the huge gap between the two sides in terms of their longstanding views. »
At the time of the application in 2015, the Japanese government, then led through the past due Shinzo Abe, denied the forced nature of Korean hard work and discrimination opposed to Koreans at the sites. But UNESCO has insisted that Japan obviously recognize that “a giant number of Koreans and others. . . were brought in opposed to their will and forced to paintings in tricky situations in the 1940s at sure sites. “
The coal mine operating on Japan’s Hashima Island, commonly known as Battleship Island, was granted world heritage status in 2015, but only after Japan agreed to present the “full story” that would “make it imaginable to perceive that there were a giant number of Koreans and others. “who were taken against their will and forced to paint in difficult situations in the 1940s in some places. Even then, a monitoring team found in 2021 that the data center hadn’t.
In the case of the Sado mine, historians have documented that at least 1,519 Koreans were forced to paint from 1939 until the end of World War II. The initial application submitted through the local government, which sought prestige to promote tourism on the island, made no mention of the war era. He limited himself to the history of mines from the Tokugawa and Meiji periods (until 1912), trying to avoid this controversy.
The Korean government opposed the request, as did UNESCO experts. UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites requested that Japanese applicants address the war period, and submitted a supplementary document to answer this question.
The document gives a three-stage description of hard labor “requisition”, implying that Korean personnel voluntarily agreed to work in the mines until 1944, when hard labor “requisition” was mandatory. The official Japanese document also states that there is no discrimination between Korean and Japanese personnel and that the Koreans earned a salary.
The paper’s descriptions of the stages of “recruitment” are “misleading,” Dr. Nikolai Johnsen, a British professor at the University of London who has researched and written extensively about the story, told the author.
The staff was recruited through agents supported by the colonial government “who forced giant groups of men from poor Korean villages to accept harmful paintings in Japan under false pretenses. “In the second phase, which began in 1942, the colonial government decided directly on personnel, and opposition “often had disastrous consequences” in the form of “forced mobilization,” the educator said.
In addition, Johnsen explained that “to claim that this formula is not discriminatory is just an old denial. “Salaries and operating situations were equal, and much of the salaries were never paid, with the budget held in Mitsubishi’s accounts but never released.
The Japanese narrative also uses the term “workers from the Korea Peninsula,” a formula that treats Koreans as subjects of the Japanese Empire and rejects them as forced foreign laborers.
“Recognition of the true character of this story would greatly raise the universal price of the Sado Mines as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” Johnsen wrote in an article published two years ago. “They cannot be suppressed for the sole purpose of instilling pride in Japanese generations in the long term, rather than neglecting the victims.
This is a challenge limited to the factor of World Heritage status. Lawsuits brought in Korea by Korean personnel and their descendants opposing Japanese corporations that used hard and forced labor (in the case of those mines, Mitsubishi Materials) played a central role in the economy. Recession. Relations between Korea and Japan in 2018.
Decisions in favor of the workers, who demanded reimbursement of unpaid wages, remain a challenge despite the Yoon administration’s ruling last year on the factor using a Korean-funded basis to resolve claims.
This is very different from how Mitsubishi Materials treated a complaint filed by Chinese forced laborers that was resolved in Chinese courts in 2016 with a refund and apology from the company. The company also issued a similar apology to American prisoners of war used as forced hard labor in its wartime mines. The contrast with Japan’s technique vis-à-vis Korea remains problematic, to say the least.
As noted, the Yoon administration’s push toward relations with Tokyo is a remarkable achievement. From a geopolitical perspective, the most notable result of this agreement has been the deepening of trilateral security cooperation with the United States and Japan.
However, trilateral and bilateral relations with Japan remain vulnerable only to a replacement in political leadership, but also to the lingering and potentially explosive effects of old unresolved grievances.
Daniel Sneider is a senior professor of International Politics and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and a non-resident distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The reviews expressed here are those of the author.
This article was originally published through KEIA’s The Peninsula and is republished with permission.
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