One of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s most notable achievements is the change of relationships between South Korea and Japan over the past two years. Nevertheless, there remain concerns over the strength of this success.
Uncertainty persists as to whether Japan’s colonial history will rekindle tensions with Korea. In recent weeks, Asian demands for historical justice and the ongoing conflict between the two nations have been prominent.
Silver me background and disagreement
On July 27, the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO )  , formally granted , the prized World Heritage Site status to the gold mines located on Japan’s Sado Island.
Japan had included the mine on a list of places that supported its technological revolution in a distribution to UNESCO in 2015. During the Tokugawa period, the Sado silver mine were developed, and they were crucial in modernizing Japan. Although the mining are no longer operating, they have been preserved as a historic site for visitors.
The controversy surrounding Japan’s program centers on the mine ‘ mining history during the war and how Korean workers were employed to carry out dangerous mine operations. The gold mine ‘ designation as World Heritage status was opposed by the South Korean government and municipal protesters.
Koreans, along with several European and Japanese , researchers, insist that many of the staff were brought to the mine against their will, through either force or fraud. The only thing Japan could do was make it clear that Korea engaged in forced labour at the page and in its standard accounts.
The South Korean government supported a settlement reached by Japan and reached through political negotiations, and the Sado decision reflected this. It included a Japanese commitment to provide the function of Asian workers and their harsh working conditions as well as to hold an annual festival honoring them.
More than 1,500 Asian laborers who worked there were given knowledge in an exhibit called “exhibit,” which is located near the site and includes details about how they were treated more harshly than their Japanese counterparts.
But, it avoided using the word “forced labor”, which the Chinese government has often opposed. Within Korea, this settlement has been assailed, especially by the opposition Democratic Party and , Asian internet criticism. The Yoon state is accused of intentionally and deceptively claiming that Japan had consented to fully accepting this story.
Past Asian Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo told this author in an email exchange that” the Chinese government had not acknowledged the concept of forced labor. It attempted to find language that avoided the term, even in the case of Battleship Island ( discussed below ). It appeared that the agreements did no effectively address this problem this time.
However, Shin believes that the settlement was justified. The former minister, who continues to work on relations with Japan, said,” My guess is that the Asian state strove to put more emphasis on the actual training of history to the visitors to the website than on language arguments.” Given the significant historical gap between the two parties,” we need to determine the output as a result of diplomatic compromise.”
Japan fails to complete out the record
At the time of the 2015 program, the Chinese government, next led by the late Shinzo Abe, denied the forced character of Asian workers and prejudice against Koreans at the websites. However, UNESCO insisted that Japan made it clear that” a large number of Koreans and others were brought against their will and forced to work under severe conditions at some of the sites in the 1940s.”
The coal plant that operated on Japan’s Hashima Island, also known as Battleship Island, was granted World Heritage status in 2015, but only after Japan agreed to include the “full story” that had “allow an knowing that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under severe conditions in the 1940s at some of the places.” Even then, a follow-up monitoring team found in 2021 that the information center failed to do this.
In the case of the Sado mine, historians have  , documented , that at least 1, 519 Koreans were forced to work from 1939 until the end of World War II. The local government’s initial request for the island’s tourism status did not mention the wartime era. In an effort to avoid this controversy, it confined itself to the history of the mines during the Tokugawa and Meiji eras (until 1912 ).
The Korean government opposed this application, as did UNESCO experts. A supplemental document was submitted in response to the request from UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites to deal with the Japanese applicants.
The , document , offers a description of three phases of labor “recruitment” that implies the Korean workers voluntarily agreed to work at the mines until 1944, when labor “requisition” was compulsory. Additionally, the Japanese official document claims that there was no discrimination against Korean and Japanese workers and that Koreans were paid wages.
The descriptions of the phases of “recruitment” in the document are “misleading”, Dr. Nikolai Johnsen, a British scholar at the University of London who has researched and written extensively on this history, told this writer.
The colonial government, who” compelled large groups of men from impoverished Korean villages to take up dangerous work in Japan under false pretenses,” supported the workers. During the second phase, which began in 1942, the colonial regime directly selected the workers, and opposition “often had dire consequences” in the form of “forced mobilization”, the scholar said.
Further, Johnsen explained that” claiming this system was non-discriminatory is simply historical denialism”. The funds held in Mitsubishi’s accounts but never released, and the wages and working conditions were not all equal. A significant portion of the wages never received paid.
Additionally, the Japanese account employs the phrase “workers from the Korean Peninsula,” which refers to Koreans as being under the control of the Japanese Empire and refuses to label them as foreign forced laborers.
In a paper published two years ago, Johnsen  wrote ,” Recognition of the true character of this history would greatly increase the universal value of the Sado mines as a UNESCO World Heritage site.” They” cannot be suppressed” in order to make the victims ‘ neglect known to future Japanese generations.
Lingering conflicts and the history’s shadow
This is not just the status of a World Heritage site. Suits filed by Korean workers and their descendants against Japanese companies that engaged in forced labor ( in the case of these mines, Mitsubishi Materials ) were a significant factor in the Korean-Japan relationship’s decline in 2018.
The successful rulings in favor of the workers, who demanded compensation for unpaid wages, remain an issue despite the Yoon administration’s decision last year to resolve the problem by , using a Korean-funded foundation , to settle the demands.
That is not how Mitsubishi Materials handled a lawsuit brought by Chinese forewarners that was settled in Chinese courts in 2016 with compensation and a company apology. The company also offered , similar apologies , to American POWs used as forced labor in their mines during the war. The contrast with Japan’s approach to Korea remains problematic, to say the least.
As noted, the Yoon administration’s drive to improve relations with Tokyo is a signal accomplishment. The most notable outcome of this improvement has been the strengthening of trilateral security cooperation with the United States and Japan, in terms of geopolitics.
However, improved bilateral ties with Japan and trilateral relations are still vulnerable to both the lingering and potentially explosive effects of unaddressed historical grievances as well as a change in political leadership.
At Stanford University, Daniel Sneider is a non-resident distinguished fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America and a lecturer on East Asian and international policy issues. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.
This article was originally published by KEIA’s The Peninsula. It is republished with permission.