뉴스레터

When the James Bond film Skyfall was released in Korea on October 26, 2012, the press produced many promotional articles with focus on the entertainment value of the film that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the series. But little was mentioned of the inconvenient fact about the film's location, Hashima Island (軍艦島) in Nagasaki, that Korean mine laborers employed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a representative war criminal company of Japan during the colonial era, suffered on this very island. Worse, the Japanese government is supporting the efforts to include this Hashima Island and other sites of Japan's Industrial Revolution on the World Heritage List in 2015.

Q : Why is Japan trying to include its Meiji Industrial Revolution sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, and where are these sites located?

Japan is promoting the inscription of "Modern Industrial Heritage Sites in Kyushu and Yamaguchi" on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Symposium on Modern Industrial Heritage in Kyushu held in 2005 led to the following year's decision of Kyushu Governors' Association to 'preserve and utilize Modern Industrial Heritage in Kyushu.' Accordingly, in 2008, the Agency for Cultural Affairs decided to add the heritage sites from the relevant prefectures to the tentative lists. In April 2013, the expert committee submitted the nomination letter to the government. And a tentative nomination will be submitted to the UNESCO within this year. The ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) will review the nomination for inscription and make the final decision in 2015. Theses heritage sites in Kyushu and Yamaguchi, it is explained, are a series of industrial sites that attest to the course of rapid industrialization in Japan's heavy industries (e.g. iron making, shipbuilding, coal mining) from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries along its time line. And they consist of 28 facilities and sites in 11 cities across eight prefectures, including facilities still in operation, such as Yahata (八幡) Steel Mill in Kitakyuhu, Fukuoka Prefecture and Nagasaki Shipyard in Nagasaki Prefecture, and Hashima Island with Mitsubishi's underwater coal mine.

Q : What kind of sites are eligible for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List? And are there any existing World Heritage sites that are comparable to the Industrial Revolution sites that Japan is promoting for inscription on the List?

The UNESCO World Heritage List includes cultural and natural heritage around the world that needs to be protected and preserved in recognition of its outstanding universal value to humanity. In 1972, the UNESCO adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in order to discover, protect, and preserve natural heritage and cultural heritage of universal value regardless of its location. A good example of UNESCO World Heritage sites designated to illustrate the problem with the modern Western civilization is the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp. Of a total of 1.3 million people sent to the Auschwitz Camp from across Nazi-occupied Europe, only 200,000 of them survived. On June 27, 2007, the UNESCO inscribed the three camps in Auschwitz on the World Heritage List.

Mitsubishi's Nagasaki Shipyard enjoying
a boom after WWII thanks to the Korean War
(photographed on October 9, 1955)

Q :Why is Korea against Japan's move to include their Meiji Industrial Revolution Heritage on the UNESCO World Heritage List?

The Japanese government's decision concerning the candidate heritage sites aroused controversy because they included the facilities where Korean workers had been brought into forced labor during Japan's war of aggression. The Korean government protested and demanded withdrawal of the decision, stressing that "the effort to register the facilities where the people of neighboring countries suffered as a World Heritage site does not serve the World Heritage List's purpose of honoring universal value to humanity." The Korean Prime Minister's Investigation Committee to Identify and Support the Korean Victims of Forced Labor during the Period of Resistance against Japan gathered information on the forced-labor camps and the status of forced labor in the areas that the Japanese government is promoting as a UNESCO World Heritage site, and submitted it to the Korean National Commission for UNESCO. According to the data, the Kyushu and Yamaguchi prefectures, which Japan is promoting to register on the UNESCO World Heritage List, include 845 forced-labor camps, of which up to 140 being war factories. The data also confirm that there were 37,393 victims of forced labor, 2,512 people who died locally, and 675 missing people. Many of the representative companies in this region responsible for forced labor, such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Mitsubish Materials Corporation, Nippon Steel, Sumitomo, and Hitachi, are on the "List of War Criminal Companies" confirmed by the Korean National Assembly, a list of Japanese companies to be restricted from bidding on Korean national or public projects. However, while coming to this decision, Japan not only deliberately concealed the facts related to their war of aggression, but also cancelled the 'Nagasaki Churches and Christianity-related Heritage' plan that had been promoted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and even changed the relevant law to rename it "Meiji Japan's Heritage of Industrial Revolution" so that the plan could be carried out by the Cabinet Office under the Office of Prime Minister. The purpose of this change is said to have been to maximize the effect of Shinzo Abe's economic policy. This has revealed Japan's lack of historical consciousness once again. Furthermore, Japan is reprehensible for violating the reciprocal and good-neighbor principle of diplomacy by ignoring the suffering of its neighboring countries.

Hashima Island (a.k.a. Battleship Island), Japan

Q : Of the heritage of Meiji Japan's Industrial Revolution, what are the places to which Korean conscripted workers were sent?

Japan's candidate sites for World Heritage include Hashima Island, which in 1890 the war criminal company Mitsubishi acquired at 100,000 yens. Also known as Battleship Island for its resemblance to a Japanese battleship, Hashima Island was notorious as a place of exploitation for Korean conscripted workers, to the extent of being called "Hell Island" or "Prison Island." According to the report on the Korean conscripted workers who died in the Hashima mines, released on October 4, 2013 by the Committee, between 1925 and 1945 a total of 800 Koreans were sent to Hashima Island and forced to work 12 hours a day in tunnels down up to 1,000 meters under the sea, and hard labor killed 122 of them. A survey report states that "of the 92 deaths of the Koreans over 17, twenty-eight (30%) were due to disease, such as pneumonia and asthma, thirteen (14%) to injury, such as contusion and fracture, and seventeen (18.5%) was either suffocated or crushed to death after being buried by accident." Especially the death rate of Koreans surged between 1943 and 1945, and this indicates that with the war approaching an end, the increase of the production of coal was pushed to extremes, and in the process primarily Korean workers were subjected to dangerous work and then discarded. Some of the survivors testified that "the work was so arduous that they even contemplated maiming themselves to get themselves out of the island." Some of the Korean conscripted workers in Hashima were even exposed to residual radioactivity as they were sent to Nagasaki to work on the restoration projects after the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb over the city in August 1945.
In addition, the Nagasaki Shipyard also had 4,700 Koreans under forced labor, and about 1,600 of them are known to have died during the atomic bombing. Also at the Yahata Steel Mill, beginning in 1942 and until Korea's liberation, about 10,000 Korean workers were conscripted, and about 483 cases were reviewed and confirmed that they were victims. As such, the Japanese companies during the Meiji Industrial Revolution, whose factories were maintained by conscripted workers from the Japanese colonies, generated an enormous amount of wealth, which, in turn, helped finance Japan's war.

Q : What should we do about it?

A In the Hashima tourism program run by the city of Nagasaki, there is no mention at all about the life of workers during wartime, the Koreans or the Chinese. The guidebook and other materials only describe the history of Hashima from 1945 onward, and the truth about Hashima before that is missing. If considered in terms of Japan's modern history of war of aggression and exploitation, militarism, emperor-system fascism, discrimination and exploitation, and Japan's modernization and prosperity that fed on the dark sides of all of the above, the memory about the lives of the Korean and Chinese laborers in the Hashima mines can be said to be a mirror of history that reflects what's beneath the modern and contemporary history of Japan and the epitome of Japanese society. One may ask what is wrong with the registration itself of Hashima and the Meiji Industrial Revolution heritage as a World Heritage site. True, but shouldn't we first make an effort to learn more about and reflect on the history of Hashima and the life and death of people who lived there? It is said that those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it. The souls of the conscripted workers are still not resting in peace. At least not to make them sadder than they always are, we should make continued efforts to fix Japan's distorted perception of history.