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A video exhibit on Hashima (Gunkanjima), an island where hundreds of Koreans were mobilized for forced labor during the Pacific War, the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo. (provided by the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo)

“During the 1940s, Koreans were mobilized against their will for forced labor in harsh environments [on Hashima Island and at other industrial facilities]. [. . .] In memory of the victims, we will undertake measures such as the establishment of an information center.”

On June 15, the “Industrial Heritage Information Center” in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward is opening to the public as an exhibition facility on the “legacy of the industrial revolution in Meiji-era Japan” -- including Hashima (Gunkanjima), an island where hundreds of Koreans were mobilized to perform forced labor. The facility opened to members of the domestic and foreign press on June 14. Inside, a chronological timeline at the entrance summarizes the history leading up the registration of sites associated with Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2015. The above quote -- taken from remarks made by a Japanese government representative during a UNESCO meeting at the time -- is printed at the very bottom of the timeline. But apart from that quote, there was no other evidence of any attempt to remember the victims, as Tokyo promised when the UNESCO registration took place.

A message about “reading documents related to conscription” mentioned that Japan “imposed a citizen mobilization order during the Pacific War,” but it included no clear mention of the forced mobilization of Koreans. Indeed, a reference to the “working population frequently traveling back and forth between the Korean Peninsula and Japan” even gives the impression the Korean workers were free. Displayed next to it was the full text of the 1965 Claims Settlement Agreement between South Korea and Japan.

Occupying 1,078 square meters, the center included a number of exhibits that presented distorted views of history, including the claim that Koreans lived under good conditions on Hashima. An illustration could be found with a video and message including accounts from the late Fumio Suzuki, a second-generation Zainichi Korean who claimed to have lived on Hashima during the Pacific War. Suzuki recalls that his father worked in a Hashima coal mine. In the video, he replies in the negative when asked whether he suffered harassment or whether Koreans were whipped. “We’re there to work. Why would they beat us?” he answers.

Also on display was a pay stub for a Taiwanese worker who had been “conscripted” (forcibly mobilized) to work at a Nagasaki shipyard -- an apparent attempt to argue that forced mobilization victims received proper pay. A survey by the South Korean government-affiliated Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea found survivors stating that individuals had tried to escape -- sometimes drowning in the process -- because of the harsh working conditions, including dangerous seafloor mining projects. No such information was to be found at the exhibit, where displays focused uniformly on promoting Japan’s successful industrial revolution.

Kyodo News quoted an anonymous Japanese government official as saying that one of Tokyo’s aims with the exhibition was to refute the widely accepted notion that Korean workers on Hashima suffered inhumane treatment during the colonial occupation -- a position it regards as a “self-flagellating historical view.” Kyodo predicted that it may “come under fire for concealing past truths and encouraging historical revisionism.”

The sites named by the Japanese government as heritage from the Meiji Industrial Revolution are coal mines and steel mills built during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) -- a number of which, Hashima included, have histories of forced labor. Korean victims of forced labor were put to work at the Yahata Steel Works and Miike Coal Mine in Fukuoka Prefecture, and Koreans mobilized to work at a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard in Nagasaki were killed when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city.

After registering the Meiji Industrial Revolution sites on its World Heritage List, UNESCO received a “state of conservation report,” which amounted to an implementation report from the Japanese government. In the initial version of the report in 2017, the Japanese government did not make any reference to forced labor as it had promised to do during its 2015 registration application. Indeed, the text said that the display would be designed to “allow the understanding that individuals from the Korean Peninsula supported Japanese industries.”

At a July 2018 meeting in Bahrain, UNESCO recommended that Japan refer to international cases in terms of general historical interpretation, and a second report submitted last year included no mention at all of forced labor mobilization victims from the Korean Peninsula. Meanwhile, the Japanese government commissioned the National Congress of Industrial Heritage to operate the industrial heritage information center. The same group has been commissioned by the Japanese government in the past to conduct research on labor in connection with the “Meiji Industrial Revolution heritage” and published numerous independent reports either denying or downplaying claims of forced labor by Koreans.

By Cho Ki-weon, Tokyo correspondent

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