SADO, Nov 24 : Japan held a memorial ceremony on Sunday near the Sado Island Gold Mines, listed this summer as a UNESCO World Heritage site after the country moved past years of historical disputes with South Korea and reluctantly acknowledged the mines’ dark history. However, it has not offered an apology.
At these mines, hundreds of Koreans were forced to labour under abusive and brutal conditions during World War II, historians say. Japanese officials at Sunday’s ceremony paid tribute for the first time to “all workers” including Korean labourers who died at the mines, without acknowledging they were forced labourers — part of what critics call a persistent policy of whitewashing Japan’s history of sexual and labour exploitation before and during the war.
The ceremony, supposed to further mend wounds, renewed tensions between the two sides. South Korea boycotted Sunday’s memorial service citing unspecified disagreements with Tokyo over the event.
“As a resident, I must say (their absence) is very disappointing after all the preparations we made,” said Sado Mayor Ryugo Watanabe. “I wish we could have held the memorial with South Korean attendees.”
The Associated Press explains the Sado mines, their history and the controversy.
What are the Sado gold mines?
The 16th-century mines on the island of Sado, about the size of the Pacific island of Guam, off the western coast of Niigata prefecture, operated for nearly 400 years, beginning in 1601, and were once the world’s largest gold producer. They closed in 1989. During the Edo period, from 1603 to 1868, the mines supplied gold currency to the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate.
Today, the site has been developed into a tourist facility and hiking site where visitors can learn about the changes in mining technology and production methods while looking at the remains of mine shafts and ore dressing facilities.
Critics say the Japanese government only highlights the glory of the mines and covers up its use of Korean victims of forced labour and their ordeals. The mines were registered as a cultural heritage site in July after Japan agreed to include an exhibit on the conditions of Korean forced labourers and to hold a memorial service annually after repeated protests from the South Korean government.
A few signs have since been erected, indicating former sites of South Korean labourers’ dormitories. A city-operated museum in the area also added a section about Korean labourers, but a private museum attached to the main UNESCO site doesn’t mention them at all.
What’s the controversy?
At the UNESCO World Heritage Committee July meeting, the Japanese delegate said Tokyo had installed new exhibition material to explain the “severe conditions of (the Korean labourers’) work and to remember their hardship.”
Japan also acknowledged that Koreans were made to do more dangerous tasks in the mine shaft, which caused some to die. Those who survived also developed lung diseases and other health problems. Many of them were given meagre food rations and nearly no days off and were caught by police if they escaped, historians say. But the Japanese government has refused to admit they were “forced labour.”
South Korea had earlier opposed the listing of the site for UNESCO World Heritage on the grounds that the Korean forced labourers used at the mines were missing from the exhibition. South Korea eventually supported the listing after consultations with Japan and Tokyo’s pledge to improve the historical background of the exhibit and to hold a memorial that also includes Koreans.
Historians say Japan used hundreds of thousands of Korean labourers, including those forcibly brought from the Korean Peninsula, at Japanese mines and factories to make up for labour shortages because most working-age Japanese men had been sent to battlefronts across Asia and the Pacific. About 1,500 Koreans were forced to work at the Sado mines, according to Yasuto Takeuchi, an expert on Japan’s wartime history, citing wartime Japanese documents.
The South Korean government has said it expects Japan to keep its pledge to be truthful to history and to show both sides of the Sado mines.
“The controversy surrounding the Sado mines exhibit underscores a deeper problem” of Japan’s failure to face up to its wartime responsibility and its growing “denialism” of its wartime atrocities, Takeuchi said.
Who did the ceremony commemorate?
All workers who died at the Sado mines were honoured. That includes hundreds of Korean labourers who worked there during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonisation of the Korean Peninsula.
At Sunday’s ceremony, four Japanese representatives, including central and local government officials and the head of the organising group, thanked all mine workers for their sacrifice and mourned for those who died. None offered any apology to Korean forced labourers for the harsh treatment at the mines.
Attendants observed a moment of silence for the victims who died at the mines due to accidents and other causes.
The ceremony dredged up long-standing frustrations in South Korea.
About 100 people, including officials from Japan’s local and central government, as well as South Korean Foreign Ministry officials and the relatives of Korean wartime laborers, were supposed to attend. Because of South Korea’s last-minute boycott, more than 20 seats remained vacant.
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement Saturday it was impossible to settle the disagreements between both governments before the planned event on Sunday, without specifying what those disagreements were.
There has been speculation that the South Korean boycott might have been due to the presence of parliamentary vice minister Akiko Ikuina at Sunday’s ceremony. In August 2022, Ikuina reportedly visited Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine, weeks after she was elected as a lawmaker. Japan’s neighbours view Yasukuni, which commemorates 2.5 million war dead including war criminals, as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Her visit could have been seen as a sign of a lack of remorse.
Some South Koreans criticised the Seoul government for throwing its support behind an event without securing a clear Japanese commitment to highlight the plight of Korean labourers. There were also complaints over South Korea agreeing to pay for the travel expenses of Korean victims’ family members who were invited to attend the ceremony.
How has Japan faced up to its wartime atrocities?
Critics say Japan’s government has long been reluctant to discuss wartime atrocities. That includes what historians describe as the sexual abuse and enslavement of women across Asia, many of them Koreans who were deceived into providing sex to Japanese soldiers at frontline brothels and euphemistically called “comfort women,” and the Koreans who were mobilised and forced to work in Japan, especially in the final years of World War II.
Korean compensation demands for Japanese atrocities during its brutal colonial rule have strained relations between the two Asian neighbours, most recently after a 2018 South Korean Supreme Court ruling ordered Japanese companies to pay damages over their wartime forced labour.
Japan’s government has maintained that all wartime compensation issues between the two countries were resolved under the 1965 normalisation treaty. Ties between Tokyo and Seoul have improved recently after Washington said their disputes over historical issues hampered crucial security cooperation as China’s threat grows in the region.
South Korea’s conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol announced in March 2023 that his country would use a local corporate fund to compensate forced labour victims without demanding Japanese contributions. Japan’s then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida later expressed sympathy for their suffering during a Seoul visit. Security, business and other ties between the sides have since rapidly resumed.
Japan’s whitewashing of wartime atrocities has risen since the 2010s, particularly under the past government of revisionist leader Shinzo Abe. For instance, Japan says the terms “sex slavery” and “forced labour” are inaccurate and insists on the use of highly euphemistic terms such as “comfort women” and “civilian workers” instead.
Takeuchi, the historian, said listing Japan’s modern industrial historical sites as a UNESCO World Heritage is a government push to increase tourism. The government, he said, wants “to commercialise sites like the Sado mines by beautifying and justifying their history for Japan’s convenience.” (AP)
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