Lately, Japan’s Aikawa Folk Museum, a small structure of creamy clapboards and baked roof tiles, has become a household name among South Koreans. It is located on Sado Island, the subject of much controversy following Sado Island Gold Mines’ designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in late July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, leafy topography are some 50 mines whose long history traverses Japan’s traditional era, industrialization, and imperialism. Japan’s successful UNESCO application for the Sado mines is based solely on their legacy from the Edo period (1603-1867).
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, having subjugated his rival warlords, kickstarted a shogunate, essentially a military dictatorship. Tokugawa shoguns – samurai dictators – were quite wary of foreign influences; they cocooned Japan by banning Christianity and severing travel relations with the West. From Edo, current-day Tokyo, the Tokugawa family oversaw more than two-and-a-half centuries of peace and seclusion.
Crimped interactions with the outside world during the Pax Tokugawa gave rise to Japan’s distinct early modern cultural and social landscape. The quintessentially orientalist perception and appeal of Japan derived much from practice and artifacts from this period: Kabuki actors sheathed in shiny silks floating their whitewashed faces and surreal voices, whose dreamy shows positively haunt spectators of old and today; woodblock prints portraying scenes of pleasure quarters and dozy domestic life, whose disorderly subjects and nebulous backdrops have captivated artists around the world since the 19th century; and the Edo architecture reflecting the stratified degrees of grandeur and modesty of different social classes, whose exquisite temples and houses carved and stacked out of wood and clay tiles never fail to attract tourists.
Parallel and integral to all this Edo flourishing were the Sado gold mines. In 1603, the same year Tokugawa established his shogunate, he took direct control of the Sado mines and funneled mining experts into the island to extract gold and silver. The Sado mines became the Tokugawa Shogunate’s financial lifeline. In the first half of the 17th century, one-tenth of the total global gold output hailed from Sado. The samurai regime shipped most of its gold and silver to China to pay for imported manufactured goods.
Relying on handicraft methods, Sado miners from the Edo period achieved a gold purity of 99.54 percent – unparalleled anywhere in the world at the time. Unlike in Europe, no machines or chemicals aided the process of mining, dressing, smelting, refining, and minting. This traditional ingenuity constituted “the pinnacle of the manual gold production system.”
Japan’s narrative, as put to UNESCO, was that Sado’s gold-mining heritage – the whole smorgasbord of manual techniques of extracting and refining gold – reflected the socio-technical sophistication of the Edo period, which played an invaluable role in both Japan’s socio-cultural development and global trade. In Tokyo’s view, this legacy is a treasured heritage from a time that was “the final era of traditional Japanese government, culture and society.”
So far, fair enough for the UNESCO blessing – but the Sado mines’ history did not stop with the end of the Edo era. Rather, its history unfolds in two parts: during and after the shogunate.
In 1854, the United States pried Japanese ports open to Western access through gunboat diplomacy – threatening military actions to secure commercial advantages. Deeming the insulated shogunate no longer safe from the world, young samurais toppled their feudal society and instituted a new government modeled on modern bureaucracy and technocracy in 1868 – the year of the Meiji Restoration, named after Emperor Meiji who acted as a figurehead.
Again, Sado Island funded another chapter of Japan’s history. In 1869, the Meiji government sent a Western technician to Sado Island and started boring mine shafts using Western techniques. Just as Sado gold weaved social fabrics of the Edo period, Sado silver now backed Japan’s currency, the yen, thereby buttressing the new regime’s rapid industrialization and militarization, which allowed for Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. As a result, Japan nudged Chinese influence out of Korea and colonized Formosa, today’s Taiwan.
Toward the late 1800s, however, the value of silver had depreciated in global markets, making it harder for Japan to procure machinery and weaponry from the West. In 1896, Mitsubishi Materials took over the Sado mines from the government. The next year, thanks to the war indemnity paid by China out of its deposit in London, Japan pegged its yen to the international gold standard. With the yen’s easier convertibility and jacked-up value in the international economy, Japan spurred its heavy industrialization programs that fed into hostile militarism.
Japan exchanged Mitsubishi’s gold from the Sado mines for Western warships and munitions, which enabled Japan to prevail over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Japan became the region’s sole hegemon, turning Korea into its protectorate the same year and then its colony in 1910. All along, Sado Island bankrolled Imperial Japan’s military functions and enterprises abroad with the gold standard and large gold reserves.
Mitsubishi’s ramped-up production of gold and other minerals further expedited Japan’s imperial undertakings. After Japan grabbed China’s Manchuria in 1931, the company constructed new facilities on Sado Island to produce more gold to fulfill the military’s increasing financial needs. One of the plants started to process over 50,000 tons of ore per month to support war efforts for the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. As Japan’s imperial dream metastasized into the Pacific War (1941-1945), the Sado mines shifted to producing copper, steel, and zinc.
By then, the mine was reliant on forced labor from Koreans.
By 1938, Mitsubishi had been struggling to meet the Japanese government’s increased mineral production target. Veteran miners had fallen sick from deleterious working conditions and Japanese men were called up for wartime conscription. Japan’s National General Labor Mobilization Law, passed in 1938, enabled Mitsubishi to collect forced laborers from Korea in early 1939.
It is estimated that the number of Korean forced laborers on Sado Island ranged from 1,200 to 1,500. According to the labor records from Mitsubishi’s Sado branch, 1,519 Koreans were brought to the island between 1940 and 1945. However, Hirose Teizo of Fukuoka University reckons that the number could be up to 2,300.
Prior to the Sado mines’ registration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, South Korea requested Japan to present information on these Koreans for visitors to understand the mines’ darker history. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which assesses nominations for UNESCO, also inquired as to whether Japan intends to “cover the entire history of mining on Sado Island and in the nominated property.”
Therefore, Japan opened a small gallery on Korean laborers in the Aikawa Folk Museum. However, this measure enraged South Koreans. First, the museum is out of walking distance from the Sado mines, hardly allowing for visitors’ understanding of Korean forced laborers as they tour the now-famed attraction. Second, no mention of “forced labor” can be found. Regarding “civilian workers from the Korean Peninsula,” the gallery only uses such words as “recruitment,” “placement,” and “requisition,” under which Koreans engaged in tasks “based on laws and regulations.” Meanwhile, Japan’s Nomination Text to UNESCO goes only so far as to say that Mitsubishi “hired more mine workers” in response to increased war demands.
In fact, the Government-General of Chosun, Japan’s colonial headquarters for Korea, actively engaged in rounding up and securing forced laborers, a practice that often entailed outright kidnapping and human trafficking. Employment agencies resorted to the colonial police to forcibly expatriate reluctant laborers, who were locked up and surveilled in transit. That 15 percent of Korean miners fled from Sado Island between early 1940 and mid-1943 also attests to the forced element in their presence and labor on the island.
When pressed by ICOMOS for more information on Koreans’ working conditions, Japan asserted that “married workers were allowed to bring their family members with them,” that they enjoyed free housing and affordable prices for “food and daily necessities,” and that “non-discrimination was the policy in the actual operations in Sado mines.”
The reality was quite different. The authorities relocated laborers’ families with them to discourage escapes. Mitsubishi unilaterally slashed Korean laborers’ pay and diverted part of their earnings to mandatory saving schemes. They had to pay for mining tools, blankets, and food. These were tactics to deprive the Koreans of cash and thwart their escape. Records from Niigata prefecture’s labor agency show that their pending payments seeped into the post-war Japanese government’s coffer.
Moreover, Koreans conducted the most perilous tasks deep inside the mine shafts. Even new arrivals in tip-top shape barely lasted three years on the island due to lung diseases and accidents. Toward the end of Japan’s Pacific War, what few survivors left were carted off to the military.
There are two reasons for Japan’s burial of the Sado mines’ role in providing grist for Japan’s imperial dream and colonial repression. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has taken pains to field “a nation-centered narrative” in an effort to take back control over historical interpretation by swatting away non-Japanese historical inputs as “injurious to national pride and national identity.” Notably, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo insisted Japan reject “masochistic history” and “apology fatigue.”
In 2012, Abe’s Cabinet adopted revisionist, nationalist tenets of sanitizing Japan’s history and peddling “beautiful Japan” narratives. Japan’s national textbooks started to blot out information on forced labor as well as “comfort women,” women from Korea and other Japanese colonial territories forced into sexual slavery (Abe and his government consistently denied such women were coerced).
In 2015, UNESCO nominated Japan’s Meiji-era sites of industrial revolution, which operated off the backs of more than 30,000 Korean forced laborers, as World Heritage sites, with the condition that Japan take “measures to allow an understanding of a large number of Koreans and others brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions.” Japan’s pertinent exhibition in Tokyo, far from the UNESCO sites, still denies the element of coercion and discrimination.
Incumbent Prime Minister Kishida Fumio inherited and perpetuated this denialism, founding a “history war team” to persuade “the international community” of Japan’s own “perception of history.” Sado Island is merely the latest front in the LDP’s advancement of Japan’s “beautiful” and “clean” history. Last year, Japan’s foreign minister said that “we are not giving any diplomatic consideration to South Korea” regarding historical spats over Sado Island. Last month, a conservative outlet held that forced labor was a hoax and that the Aikawa Folk Museum exhibition on Korean forced laborers was unnecessary.
The other reason for the LDP’s negation of wartime forced labor and atrocities is that Japan’s conservatives genuinely believe that Korean laborers couldn’t have possibly been forced. Imperial Japan cleaved to naisen ittai, a notion of Korea and Japan as a single body, staging intensive indoctrination programs of education and participation of Koreans in the rites of Japanese imperial rule. The colonial authorities inculcated Koreans with kokutai, a set of Japan’s orthodox imperial ideologies symbolizing the Japanese “national essence” and “racial confidence.” Citing “cultural and ethnic proximity between the Japanese and Koreans,” they believed their kōminka, or project to create imperial subjects, was truly working. In this grand narrative, Koreans weren’t forced into labor but simply mobilized or they volunteered out of fealty to the higher imperial callings.
The Kishida administration has found a perfect accomplice in South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol in laundering Japan’s history. The Yoon administration has plumped for South Korea’s New Right movement, which justifies Japan’s occupation of Korea as a source of modernity and enlightenment and glosses over colonial atrocities and the elite’s collaboration.
In March 2023, Yoon undermined the South Korean Supreme Court’s ruling that Japanese companies must compensate Korean forced laborers by not pressing the issue with Kishida but rather making – counterintuitively – South Korean charities cough up the money. As for Sado Island, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Seoul and Tokyo agreed for the latter not to include the expression “forced labor” in describing the Sado mines. South Korea then cast a consenting vote at the World Heritage Committee for Sado Island’s UNESCO designation.
Yoon has already filled his administration with New Right personalities intent on culling South Korean history of independence activists’ legacy and underlining colonial collaborators’ avid anti-communism. It’s all to obscure the chronology of the South Korean elite’s colonial complicity and post-independence control of the government, which underpins South Korea’s conservatism today that rejects rapprochement with North Korea and espouses one-sided cooperation with Japan’s LDP.
Still, three important lessons can be gleaned from the row over Sado Island. First, it’s high time that the global community looked back on UNESCO’s ethos of constructing “the defenses of peace in the minds of women and men” and the World Heritage Convention’s objective “to promote international solidarity and cooperation.” It’s hard to see how Sado’s UNESCO cachet conforms to these values. In the future, UNESCO and other countries had better remember not to repeat the same hurt.
The second lesson pertains more to the Yoon administration. Diplomacy, despite its means of cultivating mutual interests in international relations, should, as an end, strive toward bringing about the maximum benefit for one’s own people. In the aftermath of Sado’s UNESCO nomination, Japan is jubilant, but South Koreans are riven and hurt. Similarly, in May 2023 Yoon, as opposed to most South Koreans, was breezy about Japan’s release of irradiated water from Fukushima. Yoon believes acquiescing to Japan boosts bilateral economic security and military collaboration. Yet he’s silent on how to mend the rent South Korean polity.
The last lesson concerns both the Kishida and Yoon administrations. History streams in a continuum that breathes into the present and informs the future. Truncating and tailoring a place’s history are an egregious wrong to humanity’s collective memory. Sado’s gold may have been pure, but its history contains impurities; if we are to remember the good, we have also to remember the bad. Amnesia and denial have no place in historical memorials.