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President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea (right) points Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan to his seat for their summit held in Seoul on May 26, 2024. (Yonhap)

The Korean government has admitted that while it was negotiating Japan’s push to have the Sado mines registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Japanese government rejected a request to use the term “forced” to stress the compulsory nature of the mobilization of Koreans at the mines, in an exhibition scheduled to be held at the Aikawa History Museum.

Since this means that Korea basically approved the Sado mines’ UNESCO registration despite Japan’s rejection of a key demand, it’s likely to fuel the debate over Korea’s spineless handling of the negotiations.

In a written response submitted Tuesday to Democratic Party lawmaker Lee Jae-jung, a member of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Korea had asked Japan during deliberations over the Sado mines exhibition to use the term “forced” or “forcibly” in exhibition descriptions and materials, but that Japan had ultimately rejected that request.

That clashes with the Korean government’s previous claim that it had asked Japan to communicate the forcible nature of Korean workers’ mobilization and that the Japanese government had accepted that request.

An official from the Foreign Ministry said on July 30 that “when our two countries were deliberating on the actual content of the exhibition at the Aikawa History Museum, we asked for more content that would make clear the forcible nature [of the mobilization], which Japan ultimately accepted. That’s what we see in the current exhibition.”

The room in the Aikawa History Museum, located in the vicinity of the Sado mine complex, that houses the exhibition on the lives of Korean workers. (courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

As the ministry said, an exhibit at the Aikawa History Museum does include the following information: “In the Korean Peninsula, ‘Open Recruitment’ was introduced in September 1939, ‘Official Placement’ in February 1942, and then ‘Requisition’ in September 1944. [. . .] ‘Requisition’ obliged workers to engage in tasks based on laws and regulations, and imprisonment or fines was imposed against its violation.”

But the exhibit doesn’t explicitly say that Koreans were subject to forcible mobilization — in other words, that they were “forced” to work.

As the controversy grew, the Korean government played up the fact that Japan had agreed during the negotiations over UNESCO registration of the Sado mines to use language reflecting the compulsory nature of Korean workers’ mobilization. But Korean officials didn’t specify which demands Japan had refused to accept during the negotiations.

Whenever reporters asked whether Korea had asked Japan to specifically use the phrase “forced (to work),” Korean officials evasively responded that “we weren’t negotiating phraseology with Japan.”

The disclosure of the Foreign Ministry’s response to Lee’s inquiry raises questions about whether the government was trying to avoid criticism about failed negotiations when it deliberately concealed the fact that Japan had refused its request to use the phrase “forced to work.”

A look inside one of the tunnels of the Sado gold and silver mines in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture, which has been modified to a tourist course known as the “Doyu” mine course. (from Golden Sado website)

“It’s baffling why the government would have capitulated so easily when it had the upper hand in the negotiations. I have my suspicions that the government had already decided to allow [the mines] to be registered as a World Heritage site before entering the negotiations,” said Yang Kee-ho, a professor of Japanese studies at Sungkonghoe University.

“The government needs to disclose the details of the negotiating process,” said Lee Jae-jung, the lawmaker.

The Sado mines, where Koreans were forcibly mobilized during Japan’s colonial rule over the country, was registered as a World Heritage site with the unanimous consent of Korea and the rest of the World Heritage Committee in its 46th session, in New Delhi, India, on July 27.

By Shin Hyeong-cheol, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]