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.

Why modern Japan’s founding moment still divides a nation

Omuta Mine's POW Slave Labor Camp
Mitsui's Miike Mine
UNESCO World Industrial Heritage Site

The Meiji restoration initiated not just modernisation, but also militarism

by Banyan, The Economist, January 11, 2018.

THE story of Japan’s modernisation began 150 years ago this month, when a band of young samurai and their allies overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and with it seven centuries of feudal rule. Under the shoguns (military rulers), merchant and cultural life—centred upon bustling Edo—had been far from stagnant, as the stunning woodblock prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige attest. But Japan had for more than two centuries been closed and inward-looking. Its stratified society was absurdly rigid.

Above all, the warrior class was ill-equipped to deal with the growing threat posed by the gunboats of America and other Western countries, which had been sailing into Edo Bay and forcing the shoguns to sign treaties opening the country to foreign trade. The contest was unequal. The West had ironclad vessels and the latest guns. The samurai had ceremonial armour with face masks designed to show off impressive false moustaches.

The leaders launched their coup with the slogan “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”. For the first part, they called on tradition. They put the imperial line, hitherto mere props in Kyoto, back at the centre of the polity. They brought the 12-year-old emperor, Mutsuhito, up to Edo (now renamed Tokyo, or Eastern Capital), affirmed his unbroken descent from the sun goddess and claimed to rule on his behalf. Mutsuhito died in 1912; posthumously he was given the title of Emperor Meiji. Hence the name for the coup: the Meiji restoration.

As for the second part, far from expelling the barbarians, the new leaders embraced them. In April 1868 a famous “Charter Oath” decreed that “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world” to strengthen imperial rule. Fifty high officials set off on a 22-month world tour to take in everything they could about American and European government, industry, trade, education and warfare. Back in Japan they launched a frenzy of industrial development, administrative reform and military modernisation not even matched by China’s more recent headlong growth. The Meiji restoration was actually a revolution.

For Shinzo Abe, Japan’s current prime minister, the restoration resonates. Mr Abe comes from Yamaguchi, known in feudal times as Choshu. Leaders from Choshu were at the head of the revolution. Mr Abe once told this columnist he identified with them because they did “not simply look inward, but looked…to the world’s wider horizons”. The Choshu men, he explained, saw the threat from Western imperialism. Japan’s harsh choice was either to be the meat served at a Western banquet or a guest at the table. By modernising, Japan became the only big country in Asia to safeguard its independence. It joined the Western high table.

Mr Abe sees lessons in all this, and since he came to office in 2012 he has appeared to be in a tearing hurry to implement them. At home Japan is imperilled by a weak economy, a risk-averse establishment and an ageing, shrinking population. Overseas, China threatens Japan not just in economic terms but, as it grows more assertive, militarily too. A revived economy (with more opportunities for women at work), a vigorous diplomacy and, notwithstanding the constraints of a pacifist post-war constitution, a stronger defence are to him the right responses. (They also help confront the threat posed by a nuclear North Korea.)

The government has gone all-out to promote the 150th anniversary, starting with a push in 2015 to acquire UNESCO “world heritage” status for various spots important in the ensuing industrial revolution. One striking site is Hashima, an island off the coast near Nagasaki that sits above a former coal mine, operated by the Mitsubishi conglomerate, that ran under the sea bed. It was once the most densely populated spot on Earth, housing miners and the families. (Today its post-apocalyptic ruins are best known as the lair of James Bond’s nemesis in “Skyfall”.)

The government website celebrating the Meiji restoration idealises the period as one of grass-roots change and human rights as much as innovation. Yet for ethnic groups whose territory was annexed and culture stifled, such as the Ainu in the north and Okinawans in the south, it was not much fun. The rank-and-file in the new conscript army were brutalised. Workers in the mines and mills led harsh lives. And women, points out Tomomi Yamaguchi of Montana State University, were kept down. They could not vote, divorce or own property. Most Japanese women find little appeal in the nostalgic push by Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party to return to the Meiji era’s “family values”.

Don’t mention the war

There is another problem. The Meiji restoration sowed the seeds of Japan’s 20th-century aggression. The first war dead whose souls were honoured at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, later controversial for honouring war criminals, were those who died fighting for the restoration (though even the losing side was supposedly fighting for the emperor). The authoritarian constitution of 1890, borrowed from that of Bismarck’s Germany, fostered emperor-worship and glorification of the armed forces—powerful features of Japan’s war machine.

By the time of Japan’s defeat in 1945 thousands of Koreans and Chinese had been forced to work the mines in Hashima, among many other sites. [Editor: this was a policy designed by PM Abe's grandfather Kishi.] Mr Abe’s government, after much resistance, promised UNESCO it would reflect this history. Yet on Hashima neither the guides nor the pamphlets and signs refer to it. Members of Mr Abe’s government, and at times the prime minister himself, seem to deny the existence of forced labour at all. [Editor: There was also extensive Allied POW slave labor at most of the UNESCO World Industrial Heritage sites of which there is no mention.]

You can see the conundrum without sympathising with it. Those, like Mr Abe, who are less than frank in acknowledging Japan’s wartime past, are worried about pulling on a thread. No clear event, no Reichstag fire, marked the moment when the country lurched into militarism. If aspects of what the Meiji restoration wrought come into question, what is there left to be proud about? The quest to find a modern identity for Japan continues.

Japan’s War Legacy

Dr. Tenney & PM Abe
April 29, 2015

The postwar generation may now be the majority in Japan, but they too must know the atrocities of war.

By LESTER TENNEY
Dr. Tenney served in the 192nd Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army and survived the Bataan Death March

Wall Street Journal, Sept. 1, 2015

Imperial Japan became history on Sept. 2, 1945. Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s unconditional surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending World War II. For me, nearly 600 miles south in a prisoner of war camp outside Nagasaki, unaware of these historic events, I simply remember the pure joy of liberation.

What was V-J Day like for POWs? For those of us in Fukuoka No. 17-B POW Camp, the war ended on Aug. 15, when our Mitsui company overseers, without explanation, stopped sending us down into their coal mine. We were returned to camp for an unusual midday meal of limitless rice and recognizable vegetables. We received our first full Red Cross boxes. And the camp guards said “hello” in English instead of striking us with their rifle butts for not bowing.

After lunch, the camp commander, flanked by trucks mounted with machine guns, gathered us on the camp’s parade ground. He curtly announced, “America and Japan now friends. War is over.”

There is no accurate way to describe how it feels to be a slave one moment—starved and abused, forced to work long hours in a treacherous mine, beaten daily for not working fast enough or not bowing low enough—and a free man the next.

After more than two years underground in the dark, narrow seams of a coal mine, it was glorious to be in the sun. American planes soon appeared overhead and with them came parachutes carrying 55-gallon drums of food, clothing, medicines and magazines. One parachute failed to open, its cargo of fruit salad spilling out onto the camp yard. We happily and immediately dined on the scattered remains.

Baron Mitsui, a 1915 Dartmouth graduate who owned our coal mine and many others, hosted a series of dinners for senior Allied commanding officers of our POW camp. The baron had often visited his captive village and was aware of the grim conditions. Over the meals, he reportedly asked the officers for their tolerance and thanked them for their efforts. Photos from the dinner series show a wary indulgence in the eyes of the American, Australian, British and Dutch guests.

Fast forward to last month, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the same word—tolerance—in his statement on the 70th anniversary of the war’s end. “How much emotional struggle must have existed and what great efforts must have been necessary . . . for the former POWs who experienced unbearable sufferings caused by the Japanese military in order for them to be so tolerant nevertheless?” Mr. Abe marveled.

While I welcome any step, however modest, the Japanese make in addressing war crimes committed against POWs, this word stops me short. It makes a war crime a matter of inconvenience. I can tolerate someone cutting me off in traffic. But being a POW was not a matter of tolerance. It was a matter of life or death—mostly death.

The denial of water and food on the Bataan Death March didn’t simply inconvenience us; it killed thousands of soldiers. My fellow prisoners and I didn’t tolerate nor have we forgotten the beatings and torture, the starvation and broken bones, or the filth and stench of dying men. What tolerance did I have watching my buddy tortured so viciously that he had to have both legs amputated?

And what of today? Our wait for Japan’s apology, offered officially in February 2009, wasn’t tolerance. It was patience. Patience for justice.

Still, Mr. Abe’s awkward statement on Aug. 15 suggests that our patience may not be in vain. His mention of POWs is the only reference in the statement that clearly matches a noun of wrongdoing to a verb of responsibility. He correctly points out that “unbearable suffering” was “caused” by Imperial Japan’s military. Acknowledging the perpetrator of a crime and the crime itself is the first step toward reconciliation.

For me, the war is hard to forget. But as Mr. Abe points out, the postwar generations are now the majority in Japan. Japanese today aren’t responsible for what happened more than 70 years ago. But they also cannot forget or distort the past.

Japan owes me, the descendants of its victims and its own citizens the truth. As Mr. Abe said, “We Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past. We have the responsibility to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future.”

Imperial Japan tormented, enslaved and defiled many people. This is a grave legacy to pass on and to teach future generations. But it is vital to keep memories like mine alive. It’s one thing to remember great deeds done by great men, like Gen. MacArthur in Tokyo Bay. But World War II’s history is composed of the suffering of many individuals in different circumstances. This, too, should not be forgotten, or else the lessons of the war will be incomplete.

UNESCO and Japan’s Act of Forgetting

Baron Mitsui hosting a dinner for senior POW officers from Fukuoka #17,
the Miike Omuta Mine, after the war

Designation of Japan’s Meiji-era sites overlooks some important history.

By Mindy Kotler, APP Director
The Diplomat, July 3, 2015

For more on the American POW experience with Imperial Japan see the APP blog American POWs of Japan

This is Karel Aster’s year. In April, the Czech Republic granted the 95-year-old Florida resident the nation’s highest honor, the Gratias Agit, for his valor and bravery during World War II. Aster had volunteered to fight with the Americans in 1941 to defend the Philippines against the Japanese invasion. He survived the battle, the Bataan Death March*, a hell ship to Japan, and years as a slave laborer at a Mitsui coal mine at Omuta, Kyushu Island.

Also at the Mitsui site were American Lester Tenney and Australian Tom Uren. Tenney, another survivor of the Bataan Death March, persuaded the Japanese government in 2009 to apologize to the American POWs of Japan. Uren, who died last January, was a leading Labor Party politician who secured supplementary payment to Australia’s 900 surviving prisoners from World War II and the Korean War.

Account by a Scottish POW
of Mitsui's Miike coal mine
click to order

This coming weekend, UNESCO will designate the Mitsui Miike coal mine as a World Heritage site of Japan’s early modernization. The Japanese nomination, however, makes no mention of the history of any WWII POWs or of the thousands of Asian slave laborers at this site.

UNESCO is expected to approve 23 similar Japanese-nominated sites. Absent will be any accounting of the dark histories associated with these mines, foundries, and shipyards. Silence about the full history of these would-be global landmarks undermines UNESCO’s international goals and the U.S.-Japan alliance.

Lester Tenney's account of
being a  POW at
Mitsui's Miike coal mine

Currently there are 1,007 sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List. They are to serve as “instruments of international understanding and international cooperation.” The World Heritage accolade brings prestige and international attention to unique cultural accomplishments.

World Heritage sites often become tourist attractions and many nations view the designation as a path to reviving fading regions and cities. That is one motive behind Japan’s nomination of its sites. But the selective telling of their history is part of the Abe administration’s broader policy of restoring Japanese pride in their past.

Dr. Thomas Hewlett
Mitsui Omuta POW
Camp doctor
click to read
his account of conditions

The regions of Japan’s UNESCO nominations are in search of tourist dollars as they are among the hardest hit by the country’s economic downturn. Tourism is a growth industry in Japan with visitors from China nearly doubling and Korea not far behind. Many of the nominated sites are also located in the home districts of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Taro Aso, and Agriculture Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi.

The family companies of Aso and Hayashi, The Aso Group and Ube Industries respectively, used Allied POW slave labor at company sites included among the nominations. Of the eight industrial areas nominated, five held 26 POW camps with nearly 13,000 Allied POWs providing slave labor to Japan’s industrial giants, including Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Aso Group, Ube Industries, Tokai Carbon, Nippon Coke & Engineering, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation, Furukawa Company Group, and Denka. The POWs came from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, New Zealand, Norway, Jamaica, Portugal, South Africa, Malaya, Arabia, and Czechoslovakia.

In addition, the nominated ports at Kitakyushu, then called Moji, and Nagasaki, were the entry points for nearly 35,000 Allied POWs, of which approximately 11,000 were American. Over 7,000 American and Allied POWs died traveling to Japan aboard the aptly called “hell ships,” and 3,500 more perished in Japan, 25 percent within the first 30 days of arrival.

Slave labor in Japan did not begin with World War II. Forced and conscripted labor was a critical part of the mining and manufacturing industries in nineteenth-century Meiji Japan. From late Meiji (1868-1912) onward, Japan used “industrial prisons” to supply labor to factories and mills at private companies. Up until the 1930s, the majority of the miners were convicts with the rest being peasants made landless by Meiji land reforms and “outcastes.” One-third were women. Cheap Chinese and Korean labor became important in Japan’s mines and factories, and on the docks.

Tokyo’s World Heritage nominations fail to address the full historical significance of these sites. Japan’s industrialization included Japanese and foreigners, nobles and outcasts, POW slaves and conscripted Koreans, as well as women and children. Without taking these into account, the story Japan wants to tell fails to meet UNESCO criteria of “universal value and meaning.”

Japan and UNESCO should look to the perhaps surprisingly positive experience of other World Heritage sites that do acknowledge their darker histories. The Liverpool-Maritime Merchant City site is a striking case in point. The Liverpool port served a key role in the triangular transatlantic slave trade of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Liverpool has acknowledged its substantial role in a deplorable (and what would today be a criminal) business. Liverpool opened in 2007 the International Slavery Museum on the dock and, in 2006, a Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool. Identical memorials to the victims of slavery stand on the docks of Liverpool, Richmond, Virginia, and Cotonou, Benin, linking this shared memory among them. These resources have drawn scholars and others and have in fact bolstered Liverpool’s reputation has a place where history – both good and bad – can be studied and understood.

Of the 21 nations represented on today’s UNESCO World Heritage committee, nationals from six were World War II POWs held on mainland Japan. These are: India, Malaysia, Jamaica, Finland, Poland, and Portugal. A seventh, South Korea, had hundreds of thousands of its men and women conscripted to work in near slavery conditions.

The U.S. does not have a vote in UNESCO. But Washington can speak to its Japanese ally to remind them of the debt they owe American veterans for defending their freedom.

On the morning of August 9, 1945, all the POWs in Omuta saw the red cloud rise from Nagasaki across the bay. Although a very modern weapon ended their ordeal at the Miike mine, they had experienced labor in Japan that had changed little since Meiji times. They would not want such forced labor to be repeated and certainly none would want it forgotten.

As it stands, Japan’s nomination of Meiji industrial sites is an act of forgetting. It omits the full history of Japan’s industrialization. For UNESCO to accept this is a disservice to its charter and to the memory of the thousands that slaved for Imperial Japan.

*Correction: Mr. Aster avoided the Bataan Death March by escaping to Corregidor. He was forced to participate in a "Victory March" of POWs six miles down Manila's Dewey Boulevard to Bilibid Prison. The Corregidor POWs stayed there until they were packed on freight trains for the 90-mile trip to Cabanatuan Prison Camp. Mr. Aster was a POW in the Philippines until October 1944 and did not arrive in Japan until March 1945. Thus, he was less than six months at the Miike Coal mine,  unlike Dr. Tenney who was there nearly three years. Czech government biographies, from which this article drew, are incorrect.

Grammatical corrections made July 7, 2015.

Unesco and the story of Japan's Meiji Era

Front Gate Fukuoka #2 POW Camp - Mitsubishi Shipyards Nagasaki

If badly handled, the World Heritage listing could serve to recouple the impressive Meiji industrial revolution to the slumbering concept of Japan as the glorious "light of Asia".

BY WILLIAM UNDERWOOD

Independent scholar and APP member who completed his PhD at Kyushu University on reparations movements for forced labour in wartime Japan.

THE STRAITS TIMES, June 29, 2015

THE Unesco World Heritage Committee yesterday began considering this year's nominations to the World Heritage List. The 10-day session is normally quiet, and acceptance of the proposals - already vetted by an advisory body called the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos) - is considered routine.

The 500-page Icomos advisory report provides a flavour of the 40-plus nominations slated for approval: rock art sites in Saudi Arabia and Uganda, Viking sites in northern Europe, a bridge in Britain, Spanish missions in the United States, an aqueduct in Mexico, a monastery in Georgia and the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

Then there is Japan's ambitious - even audacious - Unesco bid.

"Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution" seek World Heritage status for two dozen mines, factories, ports and shipyards located mainly in the nation's south-west. The Icomos report released last month notes the properties represent the "first successful transfer of industrialisation from the West to a non-Western nation".

The governments of South Korea and China, however, have expressed opposition to the listing, and vigorous lobbying campaigns on both sides of the issue have injected international politics into the upcoming discussion about cultural landmarks.

Critics of the Japanese package view Meiji Era (1868-1912) nation-building as inseparable from 20th-century empire-building, which led inexorably to Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War. History is never easy in North-east Asia.

Resistance to Japan's plan stems from the fact that some 700,000 Koreans, 40,000 Chinese and 35,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) performed forced labour for private industry in wartime Japan.

But there have been almost no corporate acknowledgments, no apologies and no compensation to individual victims.

Fully one-third of Japan's would-be Unesco sites can be directly connected to forced labour, and groups representing US and British former POWs are also sceptical about Tokyo's application.

These nominated venues include port facilities at Moji in Fukuoka prefecture, through which tens of thousands of workers bound for the Kyushu coal mines involuntarily passed. Their toil produced profits for companies like Mitsui and Mitsubishi, the zaibatsu twin pillars of wartime production that owned - or still own - several of the properties slated for Unesco's imprimatur. In fact, Mitsubishi has operated the Nagasaki shipbuilding yard - where hundreds of forced labourers perished in the American atomic bombing that ended the war - for the past 128 years.

Yawata (or Yahata) Steel Works, originally known as Imperial Steel Works, was built by the central government using hefty indemnity payments extracted from China following the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. The mills were later taken over by Nippon Steel, which ran the enterprise using forced labourers during the war and runs it today as Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. The inclusion in a World Heritage application of working sites belonging to private firms is considered atypical.

Japan's initiative to showcase the remarkable industrial achievements of the Meiji Era represents a focused, sustained public-relations effort. Its stated theme being "From a small Asian nation to world economic power", the Kagoshima-based official website for the global push (with an English version at www. kyuyama.jp/e) recounts the rise of modern Japan beginning with the Opium Wars, which presaged a regional geopolitical upheaval that rightly alarmed the foundering Tokugawa shogunate.

"Emergence of Industrial Japan: Kyushu-Yamaguchi" is a 20-page summary of the original Unesco proposal prepared by Japan in 2009. Japan at the dawn of the Meiji Restoration, according to the promotional piece, "chose rapid industrialisation as a strategy to preserve national independence, free from foreign political and economic subordination. Japan was determined to join the modern world economy on its terms rather than those of a colonial power. It was to become the master of change rather than its victim".

The World Heritage submission bookends the histories of the proposed sites at 1850 and 1910, with the latter year marking (perhaps coincidentally) the start of Japan's formal annexation of Korea. Since the Meiji emperor reigned until 1912, this bracketing may seek to sidestep the contentious history of colonialism on the Korean peninsula, which set the stage for the annexation of Manchuria in 1931 and eventually for total war with China and the West.

To some observers, the nature of Japan's unusual "serial nomination" of 23 sites spread across eight prefectures, intended to highlight 60 years of relatively recent national emergence, suggests an ulterior motive. So does the pending listing of Shokasonjuku Academy in Yamaguchi prefecture. This property, according to the Icomos report, was "one of the bases of the respected royalist teacher, Shoin Yoshida, who aspired to progressive ideas based on Western education, science and industry but with respect to Japanese traditions".

Yoshida himself was executed for his revolutionary activities by the Tokugawa regime in 1859, but he provided the philosophical compass for the core of young samurai leaders who engineered the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Later, however, ideas first expounded at Shokasonjuku Academy morphed into a wellspring of motivation and justification for Japanese militarism and expansion on the Asian mainland - and beyond. Yoshida and his followers were held up as a dynamic contrast to the "backwardness" of other Asians who had not successfully responded to the challenge of Western domination.

There may be a mismatch between the Icomos finding that Japan's package meets the Unesco requirement for "outstanding universal value" and the portrayal in Japan's own pitch of a "unique and exceptional affirmation of the cutting-edge, living, industrial cultural tradition of this small Asian nation".

Similarly, the Japanese website's headline for the boosterish section on Imperial Steel Works reads: "Mighty national enterprise remains testimony to dauntless Meiji spirit."

Unesco is set to confirm the Meiji industrial sites at a moment when historical revisionism related to the Asia-Pacific War is increasing under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has challenged interpretations of Japan's imperialism, colonialism and prosecution of the war that have been accepted as mainstream since 1945.

The World Heritage application was originally submitted during the premiership of Mr Taro Aso, the current Cabinet member who wrote a 2007 book called Japan The Tremendous. In the book, Mr Aso contends Japan is a "fount of moral lessons" for Asia.

The Icomos advisory report, while urging approval of the Japanese bid, also calls on Japan to prepare an interpretive strategy that "allows an understanding of the full history of each site".

By holistically depicting the forced labour-linked sites and adopting best practices for inclusive historical narration, Tokyo's Unesco project could potentially become a model for transnational exchange, understanding and reconciliation.

If badly handled, the World Heritage listing could serve to recouple the impressive Meiji industrial revolution to the slumbering concept of Japan as the glorious "light of Asia". The story of modern Japan might then degenerate into a nationalistic narrative about Imperial Japan's overseas aims and actions. That's the last thing the region needs now.