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Hashima Island (also known as Battleship Island in Korea) in Nagasaki Prefecture is pictured. (Hankyoreh photo archives)

Facilities from Japan’s industrial revolution registered on UNESCO’s World Heritage list are the subject of an ongoing diplomatic brawl between South Korea and Japan. This World Heritage site includes 23 facilities scattered across eight Japanese prefectures, including the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki, that were part of the industrial revolution that swept across Japan from the Meiji Restoration in the late 1860s until 1910.

These industrial facilities emerged as the focus of a sharp diplomatic dispute between the two countries when the Japanese government started attempting to register them as a UNESCO World Heritage site in January 2014. The issue erupted when Koreans learned that Hashima Island, also known as Battleship Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, was one of those facilities. Koreans had learned about Hashima Island through “The Crows,” a novel by Han Su-san published in 2003.

According to a 2012 report by a Korean committee that seeks to aid the victims of compulsory mobilization during the Japanese colonial occupation and investigate the harm they suffered, between 500 and 800 Korean forced laborers were employed at an underwater coal mine near the island in 1944. In addition, cremation permits located by Japanese civic groups confirmed that at least 122 Koreans died on the island between 1925 and 1945.

That naturally provoked strong opposition among Koreans against giving World Heritage status to Hashima Island, with its painful history of Koreans being pressed into forced labor. After much diplomatic wrangling, South Korea and Japan ultimately reached a compromise, with South Korea promising not to oppose the facilities’ addition to the World Heritage list as long as Japan acknowledged that Koreans had performed forced labor there.

Koreans accepted the argument that even sites with dark pasts — such as the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was registered with UNESCO in 1979 — deserve to be on the World Heritage list.

That prompted an acknowledgment by Kuni Sato, Japan’s ambassador to UNESCO at the time, that Koreans had been mobilized “against their will” and “forced to work” at some industrial facilities, including Hashima Island, in the 1940s. Sato made that acknowledgment during the 39th meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Bonn, Germany, on July 5, 2015, while also promising to remember the victims by building an information center.

But when the information center opened in Tokyo in June 2020, it turned out that the Japanese government hadn’t kept its promise, rekindling its diplomatic dispute with Korea.

Another issue that has prompted criticism more recently, though not when the industrial sites were first registered with UNESCO, is the inclusion of Shokasonjuku Academy, which serves as a shrine to Japanese intellectual Shoin Yoshida (1830-1859). The academy is located in Hagi, a city in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the birthplace of some of the leading figures in the Meiji Restoration.

The issue is that Shokasonjuku was registered with UNESCO even though it’s not really an industrial facility. Furthermore, Shoin’s fellow students at the academy include Hirobumi Ito, Aritomo Yamagata, and Masatake Terauchi, who played a leading role in Japan’s annexation of Korea and aggressive expansion into Asia.

In short, the desires of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other members of the Japanese right-wing to relive Japan’s “glory days” in the Meiji Restoration had a major influence on registering these facilities from Japan’s industrial revolution with UNESCO.

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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