UNESCO and Japan's rewriting of history

Baron Mitsui holding a dinner for newly released
senior POWs who were slave laborers
at his Miike Coal Mine

At UNESCO, Japan lays bare the difficulties of achieving shared values within the Quad.

By Mindy L. Kotler

Originally published in The Diplomat, July 23, 2021
This version is slightly revised for clarity

On July 22nd, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, comprising the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, faced its first test. Unexpectedly, it came at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The focus was on Japan, not China, and the result reveals how fragile the idea of shared, universal values is for this multilateral coalition. As things stand, Japan is a willful outlier.

At the World Heritage Committee’s 44th virtual session, there was a review of several previously designated Japanese UNESCO World Industrial Heritage sites that were the scene of war crimes in World War II. Americans, Australians, and Indians were among the thousands of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) brought to Japan during the war. They became slave laborers in various private mines, chemical factories, and steel mills, and on docks critical to support Imperial Japan’s war effort.

These very mines, foundries, and wharves were selected by Japan to represent its “Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining.” The Japanese, however, left out any mention of this forced labor and abuse, which was the substance of the hundreds of war crimes trials throughout the postwar Pacific.

UNESCO approved the designations in 2015 but conditioned the designations on a promise to provide a “full history” of these sites. Yet, six years later, Japan has not fulfilled this promise. Japan’s forced colonial workers from Korea are given slight mention, although Japan refuses to admit they were unwilling or unhappy. The POWs, which included soldiers, civilians, and mariners from Ireland, Egypt, Norway, Argentina, Jamaica, Portugal, Italy, and Arabia are unmentioned in any official publications, whether at the particular sites or at the Tokyo Industrial Heritage Information Center, which was opened in March 2020.

On July 12, 2021, a UNESCO draft decision noted that Japan still had to improve its interpretive strategy. The reprimand of Japan’s unwillingness to tell the “full history” of these properties was approved July 22. The Committee believes measures are still necessary to “allow an understanding of a large number of Koreans and others” who were forced or slave laborers. 

Unfortunately, UNESCO identifies POWs only as “others. This euphemism affirms Japan’s effort to censor its war crimes and rewrite the history of World War II. UNESCO members Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Norway, and the Netherlands need to insist that “others” means their veterans.

To satisfy UNESCO’s directive to include “others,” it is implied that Japan must acknowledge that five of the UNESCO industrial heritage sites — Hagi, Kamaishi, Miike, Nagasaki, and Yawata — held 26 POW camps during the war and provided more than 13,000 POW slave laborers from over 16 countries to Japan’s industrial giants, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Nippon Steel.

The Miike Coal Mine (Fukuoka #17) warrants particular attention. The mine, owned by the Mitsui conglomerate, was Japan’s largest. Nearly 2,000 Allied POWs suffered capricious brutality and starvation in deadly and primitive conditions. Hundreds died. American POWs were so desperate for a respite from the coal pits that they traded their meager rice bowls for someone to break their arms or legs.

Kamaishi’s industrial area (Sendai #4B and Sendai #5B) is also illustrative of missing war history. The site was the first to be bombed by U.S. Navy warships off Japan’s unguarded coastline. The iron works at this site, still owned by Nippon Steel, were among Japan’s largest. On July 14, 1945, more than 40 American, Dutch, New Zealand, and British POWs as well as hundreds of Japanese were killed in the bombardment.

Nippon Steel’s Yawata’s steel works (Fukuoka #3) was Japan’s most important armament manufacturer. The workforce was primarily composed of POWs who endured intense manual labor shoveling iron ore and tending the furnaces. Yawata was the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Cloud cover from aerial bombing on August 8, 1945, shifted the mission to Nagasaki, close to the Miike Coal Mine.

Japan’s unstated history of Allied slave labor at its UNESCO sites is part of a larger trend of the government’s rewriting history. The narratives presented at Japan’s industrial heritage sites also diminish the use of Korean forced labor and Chinese slave labor. This all dovetails with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s quest to retell Japan’s story in an uncritical, more glorious manner. So important was the UNESCO heritage designation to the former Abe administration that one cabinet adviser had the sole job of shepherding the application through UNESCO.

Highlighting the effort to annul history was last August’s 75th anniversary memorial address for the end of World War II. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, unlike his predecessors, did not mention, “learning from history” or having “remorse.” Instead, he said “we will never forget that the peace and prosperity we enjoy today was built atop the precious sacrifices of the war dead.”

This ahistorical take on Japan’s disastrous war is not a reassurance to UNESCO that Japan will correct the histories of its industrial heritage sites. Nor does it comfort the Quad allies that their shared history will not be recognized and reflected upon. Upholding historical facts is a value of democracy now being undermined by Japan as rapidly as in authoritarian China or Hungary. Japan’s defiance of UNESCO’s recommendations to explain the “full history” of its cultural properties shows how fragile the Quad’s so-called unifying principles are.

Mindy L. Kotler is director and founder of Asia Policy Point, a Washington think tank focused on Northeast Asia. She is also an adviser to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society that represents the American POWs of Japan and their families.

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A Leadership Vacuum

On Japan–South Korea cooperation

East Asia Forum, 11 July 2021

by Daniel Sneider, Lecturer in International Policy and East Asian Studies at Stanford University and APP member

The dysfunctionality of Japan–South Korea relations led many to despair about whether the two Northeast Asian neighbours can l ever get along. Efforts by US officials to create trilateral opportunities on security, climate or cybersecurity have largely foundered.

History provides two lessons, which point in contradictory directions

The first is that the tensions are deeply rooted and fundamental to national identity in both countries. The other is that progress is possible, but requires political leadership and the help of the United States. While historical enmity remains, strategic and even tactical conditions can create opportunities.

Specifically, two moments in Japan–South Korea relations provide relevant lessons: the 1965 treaty to normalise relations and the 2015 agreement on so-called ‘comfort women’*.

Post-war efforts to establish relations began in 1951 amid fierce fighting in Korea and with Japan on the verge of restoring sovereignty. The United States was eager to bind its two allies together, but neither South Korean leader Syngman Rhee nor Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida were enthusiastic about dealing with thorny issues, such as the treatment of the Koreans living in Japan and compensation for Japanese colonial rule.

Successful talks on a treaty to normalise relations and settle post-war claims finally took place in 1965. Despite strong opposition in both countries to the compromises needed to reach a deal, the treaty became the legal foundation for post-war Japan–South Korea ties.

A change in leadership was needed to make that possible, particularly in South Korea, where the military-led regime of Park Chung-hee had taken power in 1962. A Japanese-trained officer in the wartime Imperial Army, Park was determined to follow the Japanese model of export-led industrialisation and needed Japan as a source of aid, investment and technology. The Japanese government of Eisaku Sato understood that this was the best partner they could hope for and saw economic opportunity.

The strategic situation also pushed them together. China tested nuclear weapons in 1964 and 1965, the Vietnam War was in full swing and North Korea was emboldened. The United States saw a Japan–South Korea partnership as crucial to meeting the communist threat. Washington made normalisation a priority in every meeting with South Korean and Japanese leadership, pushed for the treaty and intervened when talks hit snags.

A similar convergence led to the 2015 comfort women agreement, which created a Japanese-funded foundation to provide compensation to survivors and affirmed Japan’s responsibility for wartime acts. The then South Korean president Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late military dictator, held a strong personal concern for the women but wasn’t wedded to the progressive narrative of victimisation. Then Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe advocated a conservative revisionist narrative, but was also pragmatic and not vulnerable to criticism from the Japanese right.

Strategic realities also played a key role then. The Chinese challenge was manifest. North Korea’s nuclear program was progressing rapidly and efforts at negotiation had stalled.

Japan–South Korea relations dived after Abe’s December 2013 visit to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan’s war dead, but once Japanese and South Korean officials began talking to each other again, the United States combined direct pressure from the President and behind-the-scenes mediation to help facilitate a deal.

Renewed cooperation seems unlikely today, but this could change. The South Korean government of Moon Jae-in, reflecting long-held views of South Korean progressives, and prompted by court decisions, has challenged both the legitimacy of the 1965 treaty and moved to effectively dismantle the 2015 agreement. From this perspective, the deals were unequal bargains, compounded by Japan’s ongoing denial of its war crimes.

For the Japanese right, this gives credence to their insistence that South Koreans are unreliable partners, unable to hold an agreement. They dismiss the progressive government in Seoul as de facto partners of China.

The strategic situation, however, lends weight to those who argue that the threat from China and North Korea should bind them together. In Washington, the broad effort to encircle China requires close ties to allies and between them. Both Tokyo and Seoul nominally support trilateral cooperation.

The US role has also shifted back toward bringing Tokyo and Seoul together. When relations took their latest nosedive, the Trump administration was notably disengaged. But the Biden administration is emphasising the role of allies and actively encouraging trilateral meetings.

Perhaps partly in response, the Moon administration has signalled, but not manifested, a desire to step back from its opposition to the 1965 treaty and the 2015 agreement. But Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, confident in his alignment with Washington on China policy, has so far not reciprocated.

The missing element to bilateral cooperation then is political leadership. Moon is deeply committed to the progressive agenda and his party faces a serious challenge in next year’s presidential election. Suga is weakened, facing challenges both from within his ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party and from the liberal opposition. Neither man seems personally inclined to take on the risks of compromise.

The Biden administration may have concluded that any breakthrough will have to wait until next year and a change of leadership, perhaps in both countries.

Yet officials in Tokyo and Seoul are quietly working to lay the groundwork for a potential deal on wartime history issues and it is essential that the United States makes clear, from the highest level, the imperative to repair relations. The coming Summer Olympic Games, which Moon is planning to attend, could provide a moment to set relations on a different path. History shows that progress is possible with leadership and patience.

*This is only an agreement to Westerners. Neither country describes it as such. There is no one, signed document approved by the legislature. There are two different summaries of a discussion. 

Does Biden have a North Korea Policy?

Not Really

By Daniel Sneider : Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP member

Toyo Keizai, June 29,2021

Speculation about a resumption of negotiations between North Korea and the United States is once again in the air. While senior American officials talk about “interesting signals” from Pyongyang, the North Koreans rush to say, not so fast, let’s see what you have to offer. The newly appointed American North Korea special envoy, Sung Kim, was received like visiting royalty in Seoul.

Is this the beginning of the much-awaited North Korea policy of the Biden administration, a prelude to talks, or perhaps to provocations designed to up the pressure for concessions?

Reading between the lines, and based on recent conversations with senior South Korean and U.S. officials, it is clear that in reality, there is no North Korea policy in Washington. There is a China policy, and the priority is to strengthen alliances to build a broad front against China.

When it comes to the Korean peninsula, the Biden administration is focused on keeping South Korea inside the alliance camp. Senior administration officials ended their review concluding there is little to be gained from negotiations with Pyongyang.

They assess that the North Koreans are only prepared to offer what they put on the table at the failed Hanoi summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un – an exchange of a limited freeze of some nuclear facilities in exchange for lifting the sanctions which continue to undermine the regime’s survival.

“The Americans are probably not that interested in talking to the North,” Andrei Lankov, a leading authority on North Korea based on Kookmin University, told Toyo Keizai.

“The only result such talks are going to produce might be some refined version of the ‘Hanoi compromise’, and such a deal is not going to sell well with the U.S. Congress, U.S. public and U.S. media. So, President Biden, fully understanding that no spectacular victory is possible in dealing with North Korea, seemingly prefers to concentrate on more important issues –above all, China.”

Veteran American policy makers on North Korea share that understanding, and see mainly efforts to offer the progressive South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in nominal support for its almost desperate pursuit of a progress toward the goal of engagement with the North.

“The essence of the Biden policy approach is to maximize your options,” says Evans Revere, former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific and a veteran of talks with North Korea.

“That requires them to talk about the goal of denuclearization, to beat their breast about sanctions, but also to tell the North Koreans that we are prepared to talk. It also explains why they are working so hard to keep the South Koreans on board and happy.” Meanwhile, however, “we have bigger fish to fry – the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians.”

From that perspective, the summit meeting in late May in Washington between Moon and Biden was a great success. In the negotiations on the joint statement issued by the two leaders, led on the U.S. side by White House Indo-Pacific director Kurt Campbell, the U.S. was mainly concerned with getting Seoul to line up on the China issues.

South Korean senior officials acknowledge there was heavy pressure to get them to echo the language of the joint statement with Japan on Taiwan and human rights issues, though they point to some softening of the wording and their insistence not to name China in the document.

President Moon went into the summit eager to shore up his sagging domestic standing, following tough local election losses and increasing fears that conservatives could mount a comeback victory in next year’s presidential vote.

According to senior American officials, the Blue House priority going into Washington was not to discuss North Korea policy but to get help on the supply of vaccines to counter rising Covid-19 infection rates. And Washington delivered in the form of half a million doses, targeted at the South Korean military.

Moon also wanted badly to convey the optics of a close and friendly relationship with the new administration, which is popular back home. South Korean senior officials emerged almost gushing about the Moon-Biden relationship, marked by more than 5 hours of talks and personal chemistry.

They contrast that to the last meeting between Moon and Trump, in September 2019, described as “simply awful.” Trump apparently spent the entire time complaining about the level of South Korean contribution to shared defense costs, berating Moon for not yielding to his outrageous demands for a five-fold increase in South Korea’s contribution.

South Korean officials insist there was significant dialogue and understanding reached on how to handle North Korea. Largely that was a matter of the White House bending over backwards to at least convey their readiness to talk to Pyongyang, while retaining the familiar stance of seeking denuclearization and maintaining sactions pressure until there are real concessions. The decision to appoint Amb Sung Kim as the new special representative for North Korea was made only days before the White House summit, a response to pleading from Seoul.

Kim, who notably will retain his ‘day job’ as the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, is a tough, seasoned Korea expert. He served as Amb to South Korea, ran North Korea policy in the last years of the Obama administration, and led the working level talks with the North Koreans leading up the Singapore Summit.

He has few illusions about the prospects for negotiations with Pyongyang, and that view is shared by his deputy, Jung Pak, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who came over from the Brookings Institution think tank.

The Moon administration is pressing for Washington to approve steps to ease sanctions against the North, hoping that will bring Pyongang to the table. Unification Minister Lee In-young is the voice for this in Seoul, calling for a “flexible application of sanctions.” His views, however, are not shared by the Foreign Ministry, which tends to mirror the American position.

The visit of Kim and Pak to Seoul provided a glimpse into the power struggles within the Moon administration on North Korea policy. The Unification Ministry demanded and won direct meetings with the Americans and the dissolution of a joint working group that had enforced tough sanctions, to the dismay of the progressives in Seoul and the North Korean regime.

The South Koreans have one open channel to the North, well informed sources say, and claim to be receiving encouraging messages from Pyongyang about resuming talks.

“Moon would like to have talks with North Korea, but only as long as these talks do not annoy the U.S. too much and do not constitute an open violation of the sanctions regime,” says Lankov, who is a Russian-educated North Korea expert.

For now, agrees Revere, the South Korean government is content. “As long as Washington is making positive noises about dialogue and engagement with North Korea, as long as Washington continues to do things that underscore Washington’s interest in dialogue, then South Korea can remain hopeful during the remaining months of Moon’s administration there is some hope for resumption of dialogue,” the former senior official told Toyo Keizai.

North Korea and China in the game

In Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un seems to have read these tea leaves quite well. He too very deliberately keeps the door open to dialogue but makes it clear that there must be something substantial in it for him.

He let loose his somewhat unconventional sister, Kim Yo Jong, to rudely brush off the vague talk from U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan about ‘interesting signals’ from the North, followed up by the North Korean Foreign Minister’s statement that they have no interest in talks “which would get us nowhere, only taking up precious time.”

The regime meanwhile is admitting serious internal problems, such as food shortages, reflected in unusual inflationary spikes for basic goods on the country’s semi-free markets.

There remains a deep fear of potential spread of Covid in the North, leading the regime to continue tight border controls, despite the severe economic impact. Some analysts suggest that this might make Kim Jong Un ready for an elusive deal to significantly rollback the nuclear and missile program in exchange for economic assistance.

Despite unease over dependency on China, Kim Jong Un can still rely on his powerful neighbor and treaty ally as a safety valve if things get worse.

“If the North Koreans are willing to accept Chinese food aid, they can easily get it,” says Lankov. “As long as the North Koreans decide to relax their irrationally tough quarantine regime and start getting Chinese aid, China will give them as much as they need.”

Relations between North Korea and China are now in an upswing, manifested in a flood of effusive propaganda celebrating their alliance and the Chinese role in the Korean war.

Lately, the Chinese have put a priority on that partnership over the goals of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. With the Biden administration’s focus on confronting China, there is even more incentive for Beijing to keep North Korea alive and well.

The price, for now, may be that North Korea not raise tensions with Washington by carrying out missile or nuclear tests designed to force talks on its terms.

But the Chinese will also have little interest in resolving the underlying security issues or in enforcing tight sanctions. The Biden administration’s new version of ‘strategic patience,’ as the Obama administration’s policy was labeled, is always subject to North Korea’s own readiness to maintain the status quo. Certainly, in Pyongyang, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, but no one in Washington, or in Seoul or Tokyo, can sleep well either.