Japan is planning to arrange bilateral talks with South Korea over its attempts to have a number of its wartime historical sites listed by UNESCO, officials here said Thursday, following South Korea slamming the move by Japan as a" distortion of history."
Prior to the World Heritage Committee's official meeting in Germany in July to decide on Japan's push to have 23 of its industrial sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution, spanning facilities used in both the 19th and 20th century, listed by UNESCO, Japanese officials said they would try to hold talks with their South Korean counterparts to explain their rationale.
According to Japan's Cultural Affairs Agency, which falls under the auspices of the Japanese Ministry of Education and backed by the foreign ministry, Japan intends to list industrial sites including coal mines, shipyards and steel mills, which date back as far as the 1850s, as UN world heritage sites, claiming their"historic value."
Japanese sources have said the historic sites are evidence of the nation's industrial modernization and progress and is angling for UNESCO to list the sites for their relevance to Japan's industrial development in their use prior to World War II.
But the move has angered South Korea and drawn harsh condemnation from its foreign ministry Thursday, as the 23 sites were used as forced labor camps where around 60,000 Koreans were held captive and made to work during Japan's colonization of the Korean Peninsula, with the severity of labor causing the deaths of 94 workers at the sites.
South Korea has urged Japan to fully admit its use of Koreans as forced laborers during its brutal military occupation and divulge the sites' connections to the wartime labor camps.
The latest dispute between Japan and South Korea adds to legitimate claims by the latter, and other countries occupied by Japan during WWII, such as China -- also brutalized by Japan's militarism -- that Japan is once again attempting to gloss over its wartime atrocities and put a positive slant on its Imperial Army's heinous wartime acts on its captives.
Along with the"comfort women" issue, pertaining to Japan's forcible kidnapping, enslavement and rape of sex slaves during the war, the latest issue of slave labor at the 23 industrial sites is another contention that has severely impacted diplomatic ties between Tokyo and Seoul, with Seoul believing, along with some of Japan's other closest neighbors, that Japan has yet to face its wartime atrocities squarely and show adequate repentance to the countries it brutalized.
Japan is increasingly under the spotlight following two highly publicized speeches by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the latest of which took place last week before the U.S. Congress, during which the prime minister skirted key issues such as Japan's wartime sexual slavery and semantically dodged the nation's historically proven culpability and the chance to offer an apology.
Abe's failure thus far to adequately atone for Japan's wartime brutality on global forums where he has been granted the world's ear, has, whilst further drawing the ire of the likes of South Korea and China, has also led to 190 international historians issuing a joint statement calling for Tokyo to face history squarely, with a separate demand also being made by members of the American Historical Association earlier this year.
The Japanese prime minister will deliver a war statement in August on the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, where he has been urged by the international community, his own party members, opposition party members, former leaders and members of the royal family, to adhere to former administrations'landmark admissions of wartime aggression and brutality and declarations of remorse.
South Korea's foreign ministry, at a bare minimum, is calling for Japan to drop seven of the sites that employed Korean forced labor, or, alternatively, applying to list the sites with UNESCO in a similar way Auschwitz-Birkenau has been listed as a Nazi concentration camp.
