Issue:
January 2025 | Japan Media Review
The Japanese government again practices selective history for its latest World Cultural Heritage site
Kyodo News announced on December 5 that it would transfer or replace several editors and reporters due to inaccurate coverage of an alleged visit on August 15, 2022, to Yasukuni Shrine by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmaker Akiko Ikuina. The disciplinary action against the six employees will go into effect this month.
The move came after Ikuina told reporters on November 26 that she didn't visit Yasukuni on the date in question. Ikuina had represented the government on November 24 at a memorial ceremony for men who worked at the Sado Gold Mine, which was recently registered as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage (WCH) site. Since many Koreans worked at the mine during the Pacific War, representatives of the South Korean government and interested Korean citizens groups had been expected to attend the Japanese government's memorial ceremony, but did not. Japanese media reported the reason for their absence as being anger at the news that Ikuina had visited Yasukuni, which honors military war dead, including Class-A war criminals. During a regular news conference, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said that "the inaccurate reporting caused confusion about the memorial ceremony," thus implying that it was the reason for Korea's non-participation, even though a senior Foreign Ministry official told the Asahi Shimbun that the incident would "not have a significant impact on overall bilateral relations now that Seoul knows it was a misunderstanding". Korea held its own memorial at the Sado mine on November 25, separate from the one organized by local authorities the previous day.
On December 1, the Asahi elaborated on the Yasukuni faux pas based on Kyodo's explanation. Apparently, various media outlets had shown up on the morning of August 15, 2022, to see which LDP members would be paying their respects at Yasukuni on the 77th anniversary of Japan's surrender. The reporters decided to form a pool so that all the entrances to the shrine could be covered. They would communicate with one another over a shared account on the Line mobile messaging app. According to Kyodo's investigation, one unnamed reporter from a different media outlet said over the Line account that they had seen Ikuina enter the shrine with fellow LDP lawmaker Tomomi Inada. After Ikuina told reporters on November 24 that she didn't visit the shrine on that day, Kyodo verified that neither the reporter on the scene nor the reporter's editors called Ikuina to confirm that she was there.
On November 28, the web-based news discussion program No Hate TV went into more detail about the incident, saying that coverage of Kyodo's mistake obscured both the purpose of the memorial service and the real reason for South Korea's absence. The program's host, anti-discrimination activist Yasumichi Noma, said that the day after the memorial he did an internet search with the words "Sado Mine" and all the top results were about Kyodo's inaccurate report and its subsequent retraction. Investigative reporter Koichi Yasuda, who has covered the Sado Mine issue extensively, added that most major media neglected to provide any context. It was the left-leaning South Korean newspaper, Hankyoreh, that cited the 2022 Kyodo article when it condemned Ikuina's participation in the memorial after it was announced. Yasuda noted that the LDP is associated in the public mind with Yasukuni because the media always cover members' visits, and Ikuina is a party lawmaker. Whether Ikuina was actually at Yasukuni on the day in question is irrelevant from the perspective of Hankyoreh, which sees all LDP members as being beholden to the philosophy of Yasukuni. To many Koreans the purpose of the shrine is to justify Japanese aggression during the war, including its brutal colonization of the Korean peninsula. Yasuda said that the LDP was cynically using Kyodo's mistake as an excuse to explain why Korea didn't attend the Japanese memorial ceremony, whose real purpose was to publicize the Sado Mine's registration as a World Heritage site.
But the South Koreans had indicated that they would not participate in the memorial even before Hankyoreh brought up the Kyodo article. The rift actually began last summer after the Sado Mine was registered by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee (WHC).
The Japanese government first submitted a recommendation for registration in February 2022, but at the time the WHC did not forward it to the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for evaluation because it thought the proposal was "incomplete," according to a Kyodo News report published July 21. The following year, the government submitted a revised proposal and the WHC forwarded it to ICOMOS, which subsequently concluded that the mine was eligible for consideration but said that the official history of the mine for world asset purposes should include its entire history "at all levels". Japan's proposal limited the history to the mine's operations during the Edo period (1603-1868), when, at one point, it was the largest producer of gold in the world. According to Kyodo, ICOMOS's demand implied that the matter of Korean forced labor used in the mine during the Pacific War should be addressed.
In its own official history of Sado, Niigata Prefecture says that by 1942 there were 802 Koreans working for Mitsubishi Mining on the island, the largest group of mobilized Koreans employed by a single company in the prefecture. Although the workers were not charged rent for their company quarters and were taught Japanese by Mitsubishi, there were instances of labor unrest and worker escapes due to harsh working conditions and Mitsubishi's pay system, which compensated Koreans at lower rates than those afforded to Japanese. The use of the word "escape" suggested that the workers were confined and not able to move around freely or quit their jobs of their own volition. However, the mine authorities, not to mention the Japanese government, have denied that these workers were forced laborers. But even the annals of the town where the mine was located, Aikawa (now called Sado City), officially referred to these Koreans as forced labor, the last batch of which, numbering some 1,200 men, arrived in March 1945. The town's history goes on to describe the overly cramped living conditions of the Koreans and the fact that they were uniformly assigned to the most back-breaking tasks.
In 1995, a Korean citizens group identified 14 former Sado Mine workers through documents recorded by commercial enterprises in Aikawa that served the workers. Of the 14, two were still alive and both testified that Koreans were treated differently from Japanese workers and given the most difficult jobs. In his testimony one recounted how he was "ordered" by the local authority in his Korean hometown, which was under the control of the Japanese, to go and work in Japan. Refusal meant being sent to the front lines of battle. In Sado, he said all Koreans had to start each day by saluting the emperor. Those who "didn't obey properly" were beaten. He also said that many of his co-workers died on the job. Later, local officials in Sado met with the two men and apologized for their treatment.
In fact, the term "forced labor" was used in Japan to describe wartime Korean workers until 2012, which marked the beginning of the second administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Since then, it has been difficult to obtain documents that provide evidence of forced labor in Japan. Yasuto Takeuchi, who runs the Network for Research into Forced Labor Mobilization, is trying to secure compensation for Koreans who worked for Japanese companies during the war but weren't properly paid. He has written that when he asks these companies or local governments for lists of Korean workers, they refuse to provide them. Takeuchi has subsequently brought lawsuits against the former employers. The head of the archives attached to Sado Mine told Kyodo that it had been informed by the mine's owners not to cooperate with researchers who asked for names of workers. Officially, the Japanese government insists that all compensation matters were resolved when Japan and Korean concluded an agreement for reparations in 1965, and starting in 2018 its official stance is that there were no forced Korean laborers in Japan, which is why the government has told Japanese companies not to pay compensation when ordered to do so by Korean courts, even if they are willing to pay such compensation. The current administration of Yoon Suk Yeol has agreed to this policy by creating a Korean foundation to compensate the Korean workers in question, a policy that Hankyoreh has condemned.
There is plenty of documentation showing that Koreans were conscripted to work against their will for the war effort and that the Japanese government has chosen to simply ignore it. The same happened when the government put forth Hashima Island off the coast of Nagasaki for registration as a World Heritage site. UNESCO demanded that mention of the forced Korean labor used in Hashima's coal mine be incorporated into the exhibit, a demand to which the proposal committee initially agreed. However, the resulting exhibit includes no indication that the mine's Korean workers were forced labor; and while the same thing essentially happened with Sado, the difference is that South Korea is currently one of the revolving members of ICOMOS, whose recommendations must by unanimous, so the Japanese proposal had to take that into consideration. According to the Asahi Shimbun, the Japanese proposal committee agreed in its revision to "talk about all the workers" at Sado Mine, which the Koreans accepted as meaning that the exhibit would mention forced labor, but in the end the exhibit lumped Koreans and Japanese into the same classification: laborers who worked under harsh conditions. Without distinguishing the situation of Korean forced labor, the Korean side has since labelled the WCH registration as an example of historical denial.
Most major Japanese media have not covered this aspect in their reporting on the Sado Mine registration, although the Asahi and the Mainichi Shimbun have said in passing that the Korean side wanted forced labor to be mentioned in the exhibit and at the ceremony.
Japan's refusal to acknowledge what the Koreans claim was the actual situation at Sado Mine extends to the treatment of Japanese people associated with the enterprise. Last summer, the Asahi ran a feature about the head archivist at the Aikawa Museum, who has studied the mine's operations for decades. When putting together the exhibit for the newly registered world asset, she followed the parameters set by ICOMOS and covered the mine's entire history. During its most productive time in the Edo period, there were no Korean workers, but there were Japanese laborers called mushukunin, essentially derelict men picked up by police in the capital Edo and shipped off to Sado as slave labor. The mining town also had an extensive network of brothels to serve the workers, and the women who worked at the brothels were, for the most part, forced laborers as well, since they were not allowed to leave the pleasure quarters without permission from the authorities. Some were minors. However, the official exhibit about the mine that opened in May contains none of this history, even though the head archivist included it all when she originally put it together.
During the Japanese memorial ceremony, Ikuina's scripted remarks expressed "appreciation" for the mine's workers as a whole, but did not mention that Koreans were among these workers. To No Hate TV's Noma, the remarks "went against" the whole concept of a "memorial." Ikuina did not make an apology during her remarks, and did not utter the term "forced labor".
As Takeuchi points out, Japan's "denial of history" when it comes to Korean forced labor became systematic after the second Abe administration took power. Previously, any WCH registration that involved wartime Korean labor included the idea that many of these Koreans were mobilized against their will and "made to work" under harsh conditions. After 2012 these references were either removed or redefined, a policy that Takeuchi describes as "playing with words". In 2021, the cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga decided to remove the terms "forced mobilization" and "forced labor" from school textbooks. A side effect of these official moves is that local governments are now removing public monuments that mention the contributions of Korean laborers to their communities, lest it provoke the ire of right-wing activists, who have successfully intimidated local governments into striking acknowledgement of forced labor from all public documents and histories.
The forced labor controversy in Japan would seem to be a function of Japan's push for more WCH site registrations, but many WCH sites throughout the world cover enterprises that have so-called negative histories. The Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, as is the Pulacayo silver mine of Bolivia, which also employed oppressive labor practices. That Korean forced labor was used at Sado should have no bearing on its qualification for registration. If anything, the world needs to remember what was done there, because the purpose of history is edification. Japan, however, is selective about the mine's history, because it sees its primary benefit as being economic.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
