The changes in South Korea-Japan relations over the past two years have been one of the remarkable achievements of the Yoon Seok-youl administration, but questions remain about whether these gains will be sustainable.
Troubling questions remain about whether Japan's historical past of colonial rule of Korea will once again destabilize relations between the two countries, with ongoing divisions between the two countries over their colonial and wartime histories and South Korean demands for historical justice once again coming to the fore in recent weeks.
Gold Mining Background and Controversy
On July 27, the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formally awarded the prestigious World Heritage status to a gold mine on Japan's Sado Island.
In a 2015 application to UNESCO, Japan added the Sado Gold Mine to its list of sites that supported Japan's industrial revolution. Developed during the Tokugawa period, the mine played a key role in Japan's modernization. The mine is no longer in operation, but it is preserved as a historical site for tourists.
The controversy surrounding Japan's application has centered on the gold mine's wartime history and the use of Korean laborers to carry out dangerous mining operations. The South Korean government and civil society activists opposed the gold mine's World Heritage designation.
Korean, and many Western and Japanese historians, maintain that many of the workers were brought to the mines against their will, through force or deception. Opposition to the World Heritage listing was to force Japan to acknowledge in its official records the role of Korean forced labor at the mine sites.
Sado's decision reflects a compromise Japan reached in diplomatic negotiations with the support of the South Korean government, which also included Japan's agreement to present the role and harsh working conditions of Korean workers and hold an annual ceremony to honor them.
A museum near the site has opened exhibits providing information about the more than 1,500 Korean laborers who worked there and how they faced more dangerous conditions than their Japanese counterparts, as well as other harsh treatment.
“The Japanese government has always opposed the use of the term 'forced labour', but it avoided using the term 'forced labour', which has always been opposed by the Japanese government. The compromise has been criticised in South Korea, particularly by the opposition Democratic Party and commentary in the South Korean media. The Yoon administration has been accused of deliberately making misleading claims that Japan had agreed to fully accept this history.
“The Japanese government has never acknowledged the concept of forced labor,” Shin Kuk-soo, a former South Korean ambassador to Japan, told me in an email. In the case of Gunkanjima (discussed below), the Japanese government also sought wording that avoided the term. “This time, it appears they did not address the issue head-on in the negotiations.”
Still, Shin thinks the compromise was justified. “I think the South Korean government wanted to focus on actually teaching history to people visiting the ruins, rather than arguing about the wording,” said the former diplomat, who remains active in ties with Japan. “Given the huge gap between the two countries' views of history, this outcome needs to be seen as the product of a diplomatic compromise.”
Japan has not erased its history
At the time of the 2015 nomination, the Japanese government, under the leadership of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, denied that Korean labour at the sites was forced or discriminatory, but UNESCO insisted that Japan explicitly acknowledge that “large numbers of Koreans and other people were brought against their will in the 1940s and forced to work under harsh conditions at some of the sites.”
The coal mine, which operated on Japan's Hashima Island, popularly known as Gunkanjima, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2015, but only after Japan agreed to provide a “complete history” that would “make it clear that in some of the sites in the 1940s, large numbers of Koreans and others were brought against their will and forced to work in harsh conditions.” Yet in 2021, a follow-up monitoring team found that the information center had failed to do this.
In the case of the Sado mines, historians have documented that at least 1,519 Koreans were forced to work there from 1939 until the end of World War II. The local government's original application for inscription to promote tourism to the island made no mention of the wartime period, and limited itself to the mining history of the Tokugawa and Meiji periods (up to 1912) to avoid controversy.
Both the South Korean government and UNESCO experts opposed the application, and UNESCO's International Council on Monuments and Sites urged the Japanese applicant to address the wartime situation, and a supporting document was submitted addressing this issue.
The documents state that labor “recruitment” took place in three stages, suggesting that Korean laborers voluntarily agreed to work in the mines before being forced to “conscript” labor in 1944. Official Japanese documents also assert that there was no discrimination between Korean and Japanese laborers, and that Korean laborers were paid wages.
The document's description of the “recruitment” stage is “misleading”, Dr Nicolai Johnsen, a British academic at University College London who has researched and written extensively about this history, told me.
The registration of workers was carried out by agents supported by the colonial government, “who recruited large numbers of poor Korean village men to work in dangerous labor in Japan under false pretenses.” In the second phase, which began in 1942, the colonial administration directly selected workers, and opposition “often had disastrous consequences” in the form of “forced mobilization,” the scholar said.
Furthermore, Johnsen explained that “to claim that the system was not discriminatory is simply a denial of history.” Wages and working conditions were far from equal, most of the wages were not paid, and funds were kept in Mitsubishi accounts but were never paid.
Japanese reports also use the term “workers from the Korean Peninsula,” a term that treats Koreans as subjects of the Japanese Empire and refuses to recognize them as foreign forced laborers.
“The universal value of the Sado mines as a UNESCO World Heritage site would be greatly enhanced if the true nature of this history were recognized,” Johnsen wrote in a paper published two years ago. “This history cannot be suppressed in order to ignore the victims and instill pride in future Japanese generations.”
Protracted conflict and the shadow of history
This is not just about the issue of World Heritage status: lawsuits brought in South Korea by Korean workers and their descendants against Japanese companies (in this case Mitsubishi Materials) that used forced labor were a central factor in the deterioration of South Korea-Japan relations in 2018.
Court decisions in favor of workers seeking compensation for unpaid wages remain a problem, despite the Yoon administration's decision last year to use a South Korean-funded foundation to settle the claims.
This is quite different from Mitsubishi Materials' response to lawsuits by Chinese forced laborers, which it settled in a Chinese court in 2016 with compensation and an apology. The company also offered a similar apology to American prisoners of war who were forced to work in its mines during the war. The difference with Japan's response to South Korea remains troubling, to say the least.
As mentioned above, the Yun administration's efforts to improve relations with Japan have been a remarkable success. From a geopolitical perspective, the most notable outcome of this improvement has been the deepening of trilateral security cooperation with the United States and Japan.
However, improvements in trilateral relations and bilateral relations with Japan remain vulnerable not only to changes in political leadership but also to the potentially explosive effects of lingering unresolved historical grudges.
Daniel Snyder is a lecturer in international policy and East Asian studies at Stanford University and a nonresident fellow at the U.S.-Korea Economic Institute. Views expressed here are the author's own.
This article originally appeared on KEIA's The Peninsula and is republished with permission.
