The Sado Gold Mine Decision

General Masaharu Homma
"Beast of Bataan"
Sado Island was family fiefdom

Is Compromise Over History Possible?

First published on the Korea Economic Institute website, August 14, 2024

BY Daniel Sneider, APP Member, is a Lecturer of International Policy and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Distinguished Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

The transformation of relations between South Korea and Japan during the past two-plus years is one of the signal accomplishments of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. However, there remain doubts over the durability of this achievement. A troubling question remains whether the historical past of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea will again roil relations. The ongoing division between the two countries over colonial and wartime history, alongside Korean demands for historical justice, is again on display in recent weeks.

Background and Controversy Surrounding the Sado Gold Mine

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. Submitted to UNESCO in 2015, Japan had included the mines on a list of sites that supported its industrial revolution. The Sado gold mines were developed during the Tokugawa era and played an important role in Japan’s modernization. Although the mines are no longer operational, they have been preserved as a historical site for tourists.

The controversy surrounding Japan’s application centers on the wartime history of the mines and the use of Korean workers to carry out dangerous mining operations. The South Korean government and civic activists opposed the granting of World Heritage status to the gold mines. Koreans, along with numerous Western and Japanese historians, insist that many of the workers were brought to the mines against their will, either through coercion or deception. The objections to the granting of World Heritage status rested on compelling Japan to acknowledge the role of Korean forced labor at the site itself and in its official accounts.

The Sado decision reflected a compromise by Japan that was supported by the South Korean government and reached through diplomatic negotiations. It included an agreement by Japan to present the role of Korean workers and their harsh working conditions, as well as hold an annual ceremony to pay respect to them. An exhibit at a museum near the site was created to provide information on the more than 1,500 Korean laborers who worked there, including the fact that they faced more dangerous conditions than their Japanese counterparts and other harsh measures.

However, it avoided using the term “forced labor,” which the Japanese government has always opposed. Within Korea, this compromise has been assailed, particularly by the opposition Democratic Party and Korean media commentary. The Yoon government has been accused of deliberately and misleadingly claiming that Japan had agreed to fully accept this history.

“The Japanese government had never acknowledged the concept of forced labor,” former Korean Ambassador to Japan Shin Kak-soo told this writer in an email exchange. Even in the case of Battleship Island (discussed below), it tried to find language that avoided the term. “This time, it seemed the negotiations did not squarely address this issue.”

Nonetheless, Ambassador Shin believes that the compromise was justified. “My hunch is that the Korean government strove to put more emphasis on the real teaching of history to the visitors to the site than arguments on the wording,” the former diplomat, who remains active on relations with Japan, said. “We need to assess the outcome as a product of diplomatic compromise, given the big gap between the two sides on their historical views.”

Japan Fails to Fill Out the History

At the time of the 2015 application, the Japanese government, then led by the late Abe Shinzo, denied the forced nature of Korean labor and discrimination against Koreans at the sites. But UNESCO insisted that Japan clearly admit that “a large number of Koreans and others…were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.”

The coal mine operated on Japan’s Hashima Island, popularly known as Battleship Island, was granted World Heritage status in 2015, but only after Japan agreed to include the “full history” that would “allow an understanding that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites.” 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 initial application filed by the local government, which sought the status to promote tourism to the island, made no mention of the wartime era. It confined itself to the history of the mines during the Tokugawa and Meiji era (until 1912), seeking to avoid this controversy.

The Korean government opposed this application, as did UNESCO experts. UNESCO’s International Council on Monuments and Sites requested that the Japanese applicants deal with the wartime period, and a supplemental document was submitted to respond to this issue. 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. The Japanese official document also asserts that there was no discrimination between Korean and Japanese workers and that the 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 workers were signed up by agents supported by the colonial government “who compelled large groups of men from impoverished Korean villages to take up dangerous work in Japan under false pretenses.” 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.” Wages and working conditions were far from equal, and much of the wages were never paid, held in accounts by Mitsubishi but never released.

The Japanese account also uses the term “workers from the Korean Peninsula,” a formulation that treats Koreans as subjects of the Japanese Empire and refuses to recognize them as foreign forced laborers. “Recognition of the true character of this history would greatly elevate the universal value of the Sado mines as a UNESCO World Heritage site,” Johnsen wrote in a paper published two years ago. “They cannot be suppressed for the sake of instilling pride in future Japanese generations to the neglect of the victims.”

Lingering Disputes and the Shadow of History

This is not an issue confined to the question of World Heritage status. Suits filed in Korea by Korean workers and their descendants against Japanese companies who used forced labor – and in the case of these mines, Mitsubishi Materials – were a central part of the downturn in Korea-Japan relations 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 quite distinct from the way Mitsubishi Materials dealt with a suit filed by Chinese forced laborers that was settled in Chinese courts in 2016 with compensation payments and an apology from the company. The company also offered similar apologies [sic, there was only one apology] 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. From the standpoint of geopolitics, the most notable consequence of this improvement has been the deepening of trilateral security cooperation with the United States and Japan. However, both trilateral ties and improved bilateral relations with Japan remain vulnerable not only to a change in political leadership but also to the lingering and potentially explosive effects of unaddressed historical grievances.