hankyoreh

The sleeping quarters of Korean laborers who were forcibly mobilized to the island of Hashima, also called Battleship Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture. (provided by photographer Lee Jae-gab)

Sources say that an organization that the Japanese government has commissioned to carry out research for a report on Japan’s Meiji industrial revolution sites, which is supposed to be submitted to UNESCO by Dec. 1, has published previous reports that deny or downplay the conscription of Koreans for forced labor during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. This is aggravating concerns that a substantial amount of research by this organization, called the National Congress of Industrial Heritage, could appear in the “conservation status report,” a progress report that the Japanese government is submitting to UNESCO.

On Nov. 27, the Hankyoreh reviewed three years of reports (2016-2018) by the National Congress of Industrial heritage that a Japanese NGO (the Network for Learning the Truth about Compulsory Mobilization) acquired through a freedom of information request. These reports contain quite a few passages that refuse to acknowledge the suffering of Korean forced laborers.

In 2015, the Japanese government managed to inscribe sites from its industrial revolution in the Meiji era on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The 23 coal mines and iron and steel works on the list include the island of Hashima, also called Battleship Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, which is notorious as a site where hundreds of Koreans were mobilized for forced labor. In 2016, the Japanese government hired the National Congress to perform historical research in the area of industrial labor, paying the organization 360 million yen (US$3.29 million) over three years.

A report published by the National Congress in 2016 includes a South Korean paper titled “Ethnic Disparities in the Wages of Korean Coal Miners Mobilized for Wartime Work in Japan.” “This paper shows that the wages paid to miners mobilized to Japan during the war were adequate to allow the miners to choose whether to remit their earnings to families in Korea or to use them for various purposes in Japan. There is not a large disparity between the wages paid to Korean workers and those paid to the Japanese, and the ethnic disparity in wages cannot be regarded as ethnic discrimination,” this paper said. While the author of this paper isn’t listed in the National Congress’s report, a review of the proceedings of the South Korean journal quoted therein suggests that the paper was written by Lee Woo-yeon, a researcher at the Nakseongdae Economic Institute. Similar papers by Lee also appear in the recently published book “Anti-Japan Tribalism.”

The National Congress’s 2017 report quotes the content of a lecture by a foreign expert on industrial labor. A substantial portion of the lecture is about the expert’s countrymen who were drafted for work in mines by the UK during World War II. The lecturer said that the UK’s mobilization procedure was “very fair.” The inclusion of this lecture reflects the National Congress’s desire to claim that such wartime conscription was also carried out by other countries. The same report also includes a reference to the coal mines at Hashima and other sites by an individual identified as a labor activist. While this individual admits that “looking back now, it’s clear that labor management was inhumane,” he said he’d “never heard that Koreans were particularly mistreated at Hashima.”

The National Congress is even more blatant in its 2018 report, which prints an interview with an individual identified as a supervisor of “Chinese prisoners” (that is, Chinese labor conscripts) at the Miike coal mine in Fukuoka Prefecture. When asked whether Koreans had been conscripted there, the supervisor said, “What are you talking about? It was group employment.” The supervisor responded to a question about whether there had been beatings or other mistreatment by saying, “The Chinese and the whites rioted. If [the Koreans] had complaints, wouldn’t they have rioted, too?” The report doesn’t include any interviews with the Koreans who actually performed the forced labor.

The website of National Congress also includes a video called “The Truth about Battleship Island,” which contains several interviews with Japanese who deny that Koreans took part in forced labor at Hashima.

When Japan registered its Meiji industrial sites on the UNESCO list in 2015, UNESCO recommended that Japan take steps to promote an understanding of the “total history” of the sites in question. The implication was to include coverage of the history of forced labor by Koreans in the 1940s, after the Meiji period.

But the Japanese government ignored this recommendation in its 2017 conservation status report, which avoided terms such as “forced labor” and announced instead that “exhibitions would aid the understanding that people from the Korean Peninsula made contributions at Japan’s industrial sites.” During a meeting in Bahrain in July 2018, UNESCO reminded Japan once more of its previous recommendation and instructed Japan to submit a conservation status report by Dec. 1.

With less than a week remaining before the report is due, it appears unlikely that the report will adequately reflect the fact of Koreans’ forced labor. The Network for Learning the Truth about Compulsory Mobilization asked the Japanese government at the beginning of this month to conduct another investigation, but the government recently received the following verbal response from a Japanese government official: “The current investigation is adequate, and there’s no need to conduct another one. That’s the opinion of the Japanese government.”

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

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