hankyoreh

Gunkanjima (Hashima) Island, off the coast of Nagasaki, where hundreds of Koreans were mobilized to perform forced labor during the Pacific War. (Hankyoreh archives)

“Our country [Japan] has taken the [UNESCO] World Heritage Committee’s recommendations seriously to date, and we have faithfully carried out the pledged measures. As promised, the industrial heritage information center has been opened to the public today within the 2019 accounting year [with an opening date in March 2020]. The statement that we promise to the international community in 2015 has been displayed on a signboard within the center.”

On June 15, an industrial heritage information center was opened to the public in Japan as an institution displaying information related to Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution heritage -- including the island of Hashima (Gunkanjima), which is notorious as a site where Koreans were mobilized for forced labor. In a regular press conference that afternoon, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Naoki Okada fielded a question about the center’s content including exhibits stating that there had been “no discrimination” between Japanese and Koreans.

“We kept our promise,” Okada insisted in his reply, adding that there were no plans to add or change the content at the center.

Let’s turn the clock back now to July 2015. Sites associated with Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution had been registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Kuni Sato, the Japanese ambassador to UNESCO at the time, acknowledged at a meeting in Bonn that “Koreans and others were mobilized against their will to perform labor under harsh environments [at Hashima and other industrial sites] during the 1940s.”

“We will undertake measures such as the establishment of an information center to remember the victims,” she promised. The South Korean government was critical at the time, noting that some of the sites included in Japan’s World Heritage application had been settings for forced labor by Koreans, such as Hashima in Nagasaki Prefecture and the Yahata Steel Works and Miike coal mine in Fukuoka Prefecture. In response, Japan pledged -- not just to South Korea but to the international community -- that it would undertake measures to commemorate the Korean forced laborers and other victims.

As a facility created by the Japanese government to “commemorate the victims,” the industrial heritage information center should not simply be a venue for promoting the heritage of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution. But Okada was playing with semantics when he claimed that the printing of Sato’s 2015 remarks on a signboard consisted “honoring the promise.” The remarks in question were only listed at the very bottom under the board, which provided an account of the registration of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution heritage within the information center.

The Japanese government’s persistently strained logic has been enabled by UNESCO’s tepid attitude. The US originally paid 22% of the total UNESCO budget, but it stopped paying that share in 2011 to criticize the inclusion of Palestine as a member state; in 2019, it pulled out altogether. As of 2019, Japan has been assigned 11.05% of UNESCO costs, representing the second largest share after China (15.49%).

For this reason, UNESCO has long faced accusations of being too concerned with ruffling Japan’s feathers. In 2016, an international solidarity committee consisting of 14 groups from eight countries (including South Korea, China, and Japan) for the joint registration of archival materials related to Japanese military comfort women as part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World applied for the registration of 2,744 materials under the name “Voices of the Japanese military comfort women.” The Japanese government pressured UNESCO by refusing to pay its share. UNESCO finally moved in 2017 to postpone the comfort women materials’ registration, after which Japan agreed to pay its share again. UNESCO has also remained silent amid the debate over whether Japan honored its pledge with the industrial heritage information center.

“Keep your promises” has been the Shinzo Abe administration’s go-to phrase with Seoul regarding requests for compensation for forced labor mobilization. Tokyo has spoken as though its paramount value lies in the law and promises. But when a promise is based on the use of power to interpret things in a way that benefits yourself -- and when an international institution is too intimidated by your power to question whether you’ve honored it -- then the international community would see that not as a promise, but as deception.

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

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