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 Pyrrhic Victory Over ‘Comfort Women’ Commemoration

Blocking comfort women documents from UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register could do Japan more harm than good.

By Edward Vickers, Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University, Japan. He is a member of the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP), funded by the Leverhulme Trust and coordinated by Mark Frost of Essex University. His latest book, Education and Society in Post-Mao China, was published by Routledge in 2017.

The Diplomat, November 25, 2017

October was a good month for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Following his crushing electoral victory came a further triumph highly prized by Japanese rightists: the stymieing of attempts to inscribe documents relating to “comfort women” — wartime sex slaves of the Japanese military — on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register.”

An international alliance had submitted an application, “Voices of the Comfort Women,” in May 2016. But on October 27, inscription was declared “postponed” pending “dialogue” between the applicants and the Japanese government.

This decision is portrayed by Abe’s supporters as endorsing his efforts to close the book on the wartime past, and restore Japan to a “normal” role in world affairs. But does Japan’s UNESCO diplomacy really serve this end? Or does it rather ensure that controversy over wartime atrocities continues to fester, imperiling Japan’s security by lending ammunition to anti-Japan nationalists?

Over many decades, Japan has invested heavily in UNESCO, which it joined in 1951, five years before becoming a full member of the UN itself. From 2011, following withdrawal of U.S. funding, it became the biggest contributor to the organisation’s budget. UNESCO has served as a rare arena for Japanese diplomatic leadership; it was largely at Japanese instigation, for example, that UNESCO declared 2004-2014 the “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.” Through such initiatives, Japan built up a reputation for responsible global citizenship.

But the Abe administration claims that in recent years other states — specifically China and South Korea — have sought to “politicize” the organisation, in particular its heritage listing process. In 2015, China secured “Memory of the World” inscription for documents relating to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. Shortly thereafter, Japan suspended its financial contribution to UNESCO in protest.

Japan also sought to buy South Korea’s silence over the “comfort women” issue. A bilateral agreement in December 2015 offered compensation to surviving victims, in return for the South Korean government’s defunding campaigns for further recognition — specifically the application to UNESCO. But far from resolving tensions, the agreement exacerbated them. This was due not least to the blatantly disingenuous nature of the Japanese stance: half-hearted contrition for foreign consumption, alongside intensifying revisionism within Japan itself. Under Abe, discussion of “comfort women” has all but disappeared from school textbooks.

This does not mean that the history of wartime sex slavery simply pits Japanese villainy against Korean or Chinese victimhood. As the South Korean scholar Park Yu-ha has controversially pointed out, Chinese and Korean gangs trafficked women for the Japanese military; some girls were sold into prostitution by their impoverished families; and while most were tricked or coerced, there were exceptions. Trafficking in women for sex is nothing new, and continues across Asia and beyond. For example, China’s skewed sex ratio — a by-product of the One Child Policy — is today fueling an upsurge in trafficking along its southern borders.

Nor were Japan’s imperial forces unique in deploying sexual violence. The Soviet advance into Germany at the end of World War II witnessed an orgy of rape and assault on women, as troops took revenge for suffering inflicted by the Germans on their compatriots. And as Japanese revisionists like to point out, American military bases in South Korea and Japan today are liberally serviced by local sex workers.

However, the “comfort women” system was a particularly coordinated, institutionalized, and brutal form of sexual exploitation. Moreover, for many campaigners, the continuing abuse of women today is precisely the point. The activists at the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, for example, see a failure to acknowledge the iniquity of the “comfort women” system as symptomatic of the entrenched chauvinism of Japanese society. For many, securing recognition for wartime sex slaves is partly about drawing attention to the widespread persistence of the kinds of attitudes toward women that underpinned that system. This aim would seem eminently consistent with UNESCO’s humanitarian mission.

But UNESCO is an organization in crisis. In parts of its decrepit Paris headquarters, rusty reinforcing rods can be seen poking through the crumbling concrete. A lack of UNESCO funding left the German government to cover my group’s travel costs when recently visiting to launch a UNESCO-commissioned report on education in Asia. One official whispered fears that Japan might follow the United States in withdrawing completely. Meanwhile, Chinese influence is rapidly filling the void, leaving many UNESCO insiders desperate somehow to restore political balance.

This is the context for the recent “Memory of the World” decision. In 2015, a related Chinese application was turned down, despite the fact that the International Advisory Committee adjudged the submitted documents to have “met the criteria” for registration. In light of the transnational nature of the issue, the committee recommended that groups in various affected countries (not just China) jointly submit a more comprehensive collection of documents. Hence the subsequent South Korean-led 14-country application, the documents submitted by which were described earlier this year by UNESCO’s Register Sub-Committee as “irreplaceable and unique.”

Japan was meanwhile fiercely pressing for revision of the criteria for inscription. It finally secured a commitment to pursue “dialogue” in cases where an application is contested — the principle cited in the recent “postponement” decision. However, as the alliance supporting registration noted in an October 31 press release, this potentially amounts to a perpetrator’s veto: “It means that documents related to colonial regimes should be negotiated with the colonizers, and the damage suffered by victims of war should be discussed with the perpetrators.”

UNESCO’s eagerness to placate Japan is apparent elsewhere, too. This July, the island of Okinoshima off the coast of Kyushu was declared a “World Heritage Site,” along with related shrines on the mainland. The island is a repository of thousands of ancient artifacts from South Korea, China and beyond, mysteriously deposited over the centuries. Intensive Japanese lobbying persuaded the UNESCO committee to override an expert recommendation to register only the island itself, and agree instead to inscribe the mainland sites as well. Moreover, the official description of the site notes neither a “traditional” ban on women landing on Okinoshima, nor the island’s association with nationalistic annual commemorations of a nearby 1905 naval battle.

Not all recent decisions have gone Japan’s way. An application to inscribe as “Memory of the World” documents relating to Sugihara Chiune, the wartime Japanese consul in Latvia who helped save several thousand Jews, was rejected. The reasons were not divulged, but celebrating an instance of wartime Japanese humanitarianism while denying inscription to “comfort women” documents was probably seen as politically unwise.

Given threats from a nuclearizing North Korea and an increasingly assertive China, the project of pursuing a more “normal” constitutional position for Japan’s armed forces has much to recommend it. However, to seek constitutional reform alongside historical revisionism is both ethically indefensible and strategically insane. It needlessly sullies Japan’s international reputation and awards easy propaganda points to nationalists elsewhere intent on portraying Japanese as unrepentant militarists.

And Japan’s actions threaten UNESCO’s reputation, too. In squandering much of the goodwill acquired over decades of involvement in UNESCO, it has exacerbated the very process of “politicization” it claims to lament. Denying inscription to records of wartime atrocities brings discredit both to Japan, for its bullying and mendacity, and to UNESCO, for buckling under pressure and subverting its own processes.

The international alliance has pledged to continue its campaign to inscribe “comfort women” documents, declaring its readiness to enter whatever form of dialogue UNESCO mandates. It remains to be seen whether Japan will approach such an exercise as more than a means of blocking and obfuscation. But for truly meaningful dialogue with its neighbors over this and other aspects of the wartime past, what Japan needs first of all is a long-overdue dialogue with itself.

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.

Japan World Heritage Island

Island of Horror: Gunkanjima and Japan’s Quest for UNESCO World Heritage Status

by Mark Siemons, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Introduction by William Underwood, Independent Scholar

First appeared in JapanFocus, June 22, 2015

Seventy years after the end of World War Two, Germany enjoys mostly excellent relations with the rest of Europe, where the history of wartime hostilities is largely a non-issue. The same cannot be said for Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee will begin meeting in Bonn on June 28 to consider this year’s nominations for World Heritage status, and a Tokyo-sponsored package called “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution” is attracting intense attention. Seven of the two dozen properties that make up Japan’s proposal, carefully defined as covering the years from 1850 to 1910, later became the scene of wartime forced labor by Koreans, Chinese and Allied POWs, a history unmentioned in the proposal. For this reason South Korea and China are urging that the UNESCO committee reject the Japanese nomination.

The article below appeared in German in the May 17, 2015, issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, as the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (or FAZ) is known. The FAZ is said to have the widest overseas circulation of any German newspaper, and Berlin-based reporter Mark Siemons formerly served as an East Asia correspondent. The Asia-Pacific Journal is providing this English translation of the article, which explores why Japan’s World Heritage bid has become so divisive. The piece focuses on the undersea coal mine beneath Nagasaki’s Hashima Island, popularly known as Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) due to its distinctive shape.

Three days after the FAZ article was published, the German government announced it plans to pay a total of 10 million euros (about $11 million) in symbolic compensation to some 4,000 surviving soldiers of the Soviet Union who became prisoners of war under Nazi Germany. Each survivor is set to receive 2,500 euros (about $2,800) for his suffering. Postwar Germany has reportedly paid out more than 72 billion euros (roughly $80 billion) in total damages for Nazi wrongdoing, with much of the compensation going directly to individuals. Indeed, in recent years it has seemed as if Germany is running out of victim groups to compensate. Japan, on the other hand, has largely evaded facing up to the legacy of the Asia Pacific War. Not surprisingly there is much less warmth in the neighborhood. –William Underwood

Japanese government photo of Gunkanjima in Nagasaki Bay included in “Evaluations of Nominations of Cultural and Mixed Properties to the World Heritage List” (ICOMOS Report for the World Heritage Committee,” 39th ordinary session, Bonn, June - July 2015). During the war hundreds of Koreans and Chinese were forced to work, with either partial payment or no payment at all, at depths of up to 600 meters.

World War II ended in 1945, but there is a place where it still continues.

The South Korean and Japanese governments are engaged in disputes over the proposed inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List of a place where Koreans were exploited in forced labor during World War II. Japan emphasized that the site is a memorial of its industrialization.

UNESCO is to make a decision on this matter at the end of this coming June in Bonn, Germany.

There is a legitimate reason that Hashima Island was described as the "Island of Horror" in the James Bond film, Skyfall. These ruins soaring from the sea served as an inspiration for the lair of the villain, Raoul Silva, in the film. It is a perfect location to represent an enigmatic place that harbors all kinds of scary secrets. It is no wonder that many companies have found this forgotten island off the coast of the Japanese mainland suitable for their purposes. When filming for Street View, Google showed footage of a lone Google employee wearing a camera on his head and groping his way out of the ruins, which could collapse at any time. Sony chose this island as a location to show how well its aerial drone could function even in an extremely hazardous place.

The Japanese government actually intends to use Hashima Island for a different purpose: a cultural project. It wants to list 22 industrial facilities from the 19th century as UNESCO World Heritage sites. These include the island as well as coal mines operated by Mitsubishi from 1890 to 1974. The final decision on whether to accept them as World Heritage sites will be made in a UNESCO Committee meeting in late June in Bonn, Germany. About 15 km from the coast of Nagasaki, the island is now deserted as it had been before industrial facilities were built here. In its heyday, it was inhabited by more than 5,000 workers who lived in the high-rises constructed in 1916. They were the first high-rise buildings built in Japan. The Japanese government is pressing for the island's designation as a World Heritage site because this and other such industrial facilities provide excellent evidence of the industrial revolution achieved by Japan during the Meiji period. Japan was the first non-Western nation to introduce European technology, economy, and social principles. It achieved the most rapid modernization in the 19th century and emerged as a leader in East Asia.

Nevertheless the tragic fact remains that Hashima Island has a completely different significance to some East Asian nations. On Hashima and at six other facilities proposed for World Heritage listing, Korean and Chinese laborers [as well as Allied POWs] were brought in and forced into labor under deplorable conditions. Many of them did not survive World War II, which is why the South Korean government officially opposes Japan’s proposal.

The South Korean government takes the position that, “designating such a place as a World Heritage site violates the dignity of the survivors of forced labor as well as the spirit and principles of the UNESCO Convention. World Heritage sites should be of outstanding universal value and be acceptable by all peoples across the globe.”

This incident is much more than a matter of academic discussion among historians. It represents the ever-intensifying conservative shift and historical revisionism that have occurred in Japan since the inauguration of the Abe administration as well as the vigilance of the nations once ruled by Japan. Japanese Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet insist on paying respects to Japan's war dead at the Yasukuni Shrine, where a number of Class A war criminals of World War II are enshrined. They are publicly declaring a “new Japan,” according to which view, “Japan should dismiss a historical viewpoint that ideologically torments it.” The Abe government is also attempting to strip its Constitution of the peace clause that was required of Japan after 1945.

Vague, contradictory arguments are ongoing in Japan over the criminal acts by Japan against Korea, China, and other nations starting in the late 19th century. During his visit to the US in late April this year, Abe was unable to offer anything more than uncertain "feelings of deep remorse” over Japan’s role during the Second World War. Just a short time before the US visit, he criticized the description in US textbooks of the comfort women of the Japanese military, namely, the Korean women who were forced into prostitution within the military during the war. It seems that historical revisionism is now widely accepted in Japanese society.

Under undisguised pressure, one Japanese prefecture has already removed a memorial stone that honored Korean forced laborers who died. The stone had been erected in 2004 by a civilian human rights organization and bore the following inscription: “We solemnly pledge that we will not repeat this kind of mistake and remember and deeply ponder the fact that our nation inflicted horrible pain on Koreans in the past.” Apparently, such determination and views are now retreating. In no other country in the world does the Second World War remain an ongoing issue and disputes over the war are yet to be resolved.

A Chinese survivor of forced labor at Mitsubishi’s Hashima coal mine tosses flowers into Nagasaki Bay in 2004, during a shipboard memorial ceremony for fellow Chinese workers who died at the site that Japan wants to see recognized as a world cultural landmark. The prefectural government rejected the mourners’ request to hold the service on Hashima Island. (Photo by Nagasaki Support Group for Chinese Forced Labor Lawsuits)

The latest front of these disputes is, of all places, an organization that symbolizes solidarity among nations and upholding of mankind’s universal values: UNESCO. On this past May 8 when all of Europe commemorated the end of the war, on this day when it seemed that the war could not assume any more significance, an envoy presented in Berlin South Korea’s position on one of the unresolved disputes from the war. The true measure of the great significance the South Korean government places on this issue can be discerned from the fact that Choi Jong-mun, former ambassador and presently a special aid to the South Korean Foreign Affairs Minister, has handled all matters involving UNESCO since March.

He has travelled around the world to meet politicians, diplomats, and members of the press to let them know about the Korean forced laborers. The Committee session in late June will be attended by 19 nations in addition to Japan and South Korea. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which offers advice to UNESCO on World Heritage sites, already made a recommendation last week to accept Japan’s proposal. Thus, the South Korean government still has much persuasion to do. This is why not only Ambassador Choi but also an appropriate Foreign Affairs Ministry official, and a councilor and two staff members of the South Korean Embassy in Germany, came to an interview with just one German journalist to fully explain the issue. This testifies to the importance of the issue to South Korea.

Ambassador Choi emphasized the case of Germany. The Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex (German Zeche Zollverein) in Essen was listed as a World Heritage site in 2001. There, many people were forced into labor during the war. According to Choi, however, there is a difference between Germany and Japan. Germany has squarely faced the injustices it had committed during the war and strived to compensate the victims for their sufferings. Ambassador Choi's intent in mentioning this difference is to show that Japan’s proposal is being called into question not merely because of historial truths. This is related to South Korea’s criticism of Japan: that is, if Japan does not use the island only as an instrument of propaganda about its past glory as it does now and instead recognizes its complex history, the name of Hashima Island will be cleared.

In 2012, the South Korean Supreme Court found invalid the argument by Japanese companies that the right to claim compensation by Korean forced laborers had been rescinded through the South Korea-Japan treaty in 1965, which normalized bilateral diplomatic relations. Since this ruling, many Koreans have claimed damages from Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel and South Korean courts have already ruled in favor of some of them.

The South Korean government said in a statement that these compensations for Korean forced laborers are “not related” to Japan’s World Heritage proposal but reveal an aspect of Japan’s attitude toward its history.

Not only disregarding these claims by Koreans, Japan argues that the criticism against its proposal is logically flawed. Several ministers of the Japanese government attribute the blame for the criticism to South Korea and they nonchalantly put a “political spin” on it. They argue that the proposal for Hashima only concerns the time period until 1910, not what happened afterwards. Like China, South Korea also has made efforts to normalize relations with Japan over the last few months. Thus, a polite suggestion was made to Japan to have a bilateral dialogue about the World Heritage proposal. “We hope Japan will appropriately respond to our flexible suggestion,” remarked Ambassador Choi.

Western nations also have a role in the dispute between South Korea and Japan on this issue. The success of Japan in the 19th century was attributable to its acceptance of European technology and modernity. Initially defeated by the Western powers, Japan vigorously pushed forward under the banner of national prosperity and military power. China ventured along the same path as Japan only decades later. Some time later, after having learned from European imperialism, Japan proceeded to expand its sphere of influence by annexing other nations. Now, in 2015, Japan is only inclined to talk about its history of modernization in a very selective way; negative aspects are swept under the rug. Furthermore, Japan argues that others do not properly understand it. Consequently, Hashima Island, also called Gunkanjima (“Battleship Island”), remains a dismal place.

This article originally appeared in German as “Insel des Grauens” (Island of Horror) in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (www.faz.net) on May 17, 2015. English translation posted at The Asia-Pacific Journal on June XX, 2015. The original German article is available here.

Mark Siemons is a Berlin-based reporter for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. William Underwood is a California-based independent researcher of reparations movements for forced labor in wartime Japan.

Prime Minister of Japan’s Schedule July 21-27, 2014

Monday, July 21, 2014

AM
12:00 At private residence (no visitors)
05:58 Depart from private residence in Tomigaya, Tokyo
07:02 Arrive at Three Hundred Golf Club, play golf with friends and secretaries. When asked “What is your mood while playing golf?” Mr. Abe answers “I’m enjoying myself, because spending time this way is the best.”

PM
12:42 Depart from golf course
02:05 Arrive at private residence

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

AM
12:00 At private residence (no visitors)
08:00 At private residence in Tomigaya, Tokyo (no morning visitors)
08:53 Depart from private residence
09:08 Arrive at LDP Party Headquarters
09:23 Meet with Head of LDP Ehime Chapter Shiozaki Yasuhisa, Governor of Ehime Prefecture Nakamura Tokihiro and colleagues
10:00 End meeting with Mr. Shiozaki, Mr. Nakamura and colleagues
10:01 Depart from LDP Party Headquarters
10:03 Arrive at office
10:05 Headquarters for Healthcare and Medical Strategy Promotion meeting
10:14 Meeting ends
10:22 Cabinet Meeting begins
10:31 Cabinet Meeting ends
10:41 Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy meeting
11:49 Meeting ends
11:50 Meet with former Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Matoba Junzo

PM
12:06 End meeting with Mr. Matoba
12:07 Lunch meeting with Chief of Staff for Joint Staff Council Iwasaki Shigeru, Ministry of Defense (MOD)’s Vice-Chief of Joint Staff Iwata Kiyofumi, Chief of Maritime Staff Kawano Katsutoshi, and Chief of Staff for Air Self-Defense Force Saito Harukazu
01:02 Lunch meeting ends
01:03 Speak with incoming Vice-Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Oishi Toshio and outgoing Vice-Minister Okazaki Hiromi
01:09 Finish speaking with Mr. Oishi and Mr. Okazaki
02:13 Certificate of Appreciation Presentation Ceremony for Komura Masahiko and his colleagues in recognition of their assistance in saving another’s life
02:24 Ceremony closes
02:25 Ambassador to China Kitera Masato, Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Saiki Akitaka and Administrative Vice-Minster for Foreign Affairs Sugiyama Shinsuke enter
02:49 Mr. Sugiyama leaves
03:05 Mr. Kitera and Mr. Saiki leave
03:14 Speak with Kanto Region Chairman of the National Association of Postmasters [Zentoku] Osawa Makoto. LDP Upper House member Tsuge Yoshifumi also attends
03:24 Finish speaking with Mr. Osawa
03:42 Meet with Minister for Foreign Affairs Kishida Fumio, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)’s Mr. Saiki, and Director-General of European Affairs Bureau Hayashi Hajime
04:15 End meeting with Mr. Kishida, Mr. Saiki and Mr. Hayashi
04:16 Meet with Ministry of Finance (MOF)’s Director-General of Budget Bureau Kagawa Shunsuke, Vice-Minister of Finance for International Affairs Yamasaki Tatsuo, and Director-General of International Bureau Asakawa Masatsugu
04:39 End meeting with Mr. Kagawa, Mr. Yamasaki, and Mr. Asakawa
05:00 Speak with MOFA’s Mr. Saiki and Director-General of Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau Ihara Junichi
05:09 Finish speaking with Mr. Saiki and Mr. Ihara
05:45 Phone Conference with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu
06:15 Phone Conference ends
06:33 Summit Conference with President of Mongolia Tsakhia Elbegdorj
07:03 Summit Conference ends
07:06 Press release with Kyodo News
07:16 Press release ends
07:18 Depart from office
07:19 Arrive at official residence. Dinner meeting hosted by Prime Minister Abe Shinzo
08:33 See off President Elbegdorj
08:34 Finish seeing off Mr. Elbegdorj
08:35 Meet with Minister in Charge of the Abduction Issue Furuya Keiji, Advisor to Cabinet Office Mitani Hideshi, and Secretary-General of Headquarters for the Abduction Issue Ishikawa Shoichiro
09:35 End meeting with Mr. Furuya, Mr. Mitani and Mr. Ishikawa

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

AM
12:00 At official residence (no visitors)
08:00 At official residence (no morning visitors)
08:57 Depart from official residence
09:09 Arrive at JR Tokyo Station
09:20 Depart from station on Asama no. 511
10:09 Arrive at JR Takasaki Station
10:15 Depart from station
10:51 Arrive at Tomioka Silk Mill in Tomioka City, Gunma Prefecture. Reception by Commissioner of Agency for Cultural Affairs Aoyagi Masanori, Governor of Gunma Prefecture Osawa Masaaki, and Mayor of Tomioka City Iwai Kentaro. Try spinning silk, view workers’ lodgings. Informal talk with local volunteers
11:31 Depart from Tomioka Silk Mill
11:47 Arrive at plantation on an organic farm started by Kanra Town Organic Agriculture Association [甘楽町有機農業研究会 : Kanramachi Yukinogyo Kenkyukai] in Kanra Town, Gunma Prefecture. Reception by Mayor of Kanra Town Shigehara Shoichi. Sample tomatoes, try harvesting.

PM
12:08 Interview open to all media: When asked “What were your thoughts while viewing [the organic farm]?” Mr. Abe answers “I want regions to make the best of their own agricultural assets and continue moving toward recovery.”
12:12 Interview ends
12:13 Depart from organic farm
12:52 Arrive at JR Takasaki Station
01:06 Depart from station of Asama no. 524
01:55 Arrive at JR Tokyo Station
02:00 Depart from station
02:13 Arrive at office
02:15 Speak with Lower House member Aisawa Ichiro
02:29 Finish speaking with Mr. Aisawa
02:30 Meet with Senior Advisor to Komatsu, Ltd. Sakane Masahiro
02:59 End meeting with Mr. Sakane
04:30 Interview for NHK program
04:41 Interview ends
04:42 Minister for Foreign Affairs Kishida Fumio, Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Saiki Akitaka, MOFA’s Director-General of Foreign Policy Bureau Hiramatsu Kenji and Director-General of European Affairs Bureau Hayashi Hajime enter
05:07 Mr. Saiki, Mr. Hiramatsu, and Mr. Hayashi leave
05:12 Mr. Kishida leaves
05:13 Speak with Director-General of Bureau of Defense Policy Tokuchi Hideshi
05:17 Finish speaking with Mr. Tokuchi
05:18 Speak with incoming Attorney General of Japan Ono Kurao and outgoing Attorney General Ozu Hiroshi
05:33 Finish speaking with Mr. Ono and Mr. Ozu
05:36 Director of Cabinet Intelligence Kitamura Shigeru, Director of National Security Council (NSC) Yachi Shotaro, and Director of Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Shimohira Koji enter
05:54 Mr. Yachi and Mr. Shimohira leave
06:06 Mr. Kitamura leaves
06:07 Speak with MOD’s Director-General of Bureau of Operational Policy Nakajima Akihiko and Chief of Staff for Maritime Self-Defense Force Kawano Katsutoshi
06:17 Finish speaking with Mr. Nakajima and Mr. Kawano
06:35 Phone Conference with President-Elect of Indonesia Joko Widodo
06:45 Phone Conference ends
06:52 Depart from office
06:53 Arrive at official residence. Dinner meeting with LDP Vice-President Komura Masahiko and members of Ruling Coalition on the Development of Security Legislation. Chief Representative of New Komeito Yamaguchi Natsuo and Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide also attend
09:02 Everyone leaves

Thursday, July 24, 2014

AM
12:00 At official residence (no visitors)
08:00 At official residence (no morning visitors)
08:57 Depart from official residence
08:59 Enter Lower House 1st Diet Members’ Meeting Hall, receive dental examination at dentist’s office
09:27 Depart from the hall
09:29 Arrive at office
09:46 Filming for diplomatic relations video message
09:59 Filming ends
10:00 Meet with MOFA’s Director-General of Foreign Policy Bureau Hiramatsu Kenji
10:20 End meeting with Mr. Hiramatsu
10:22 Meet with Administrative Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Sugiyama Shinsuke; Director-General of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs Bureau Yamada Akira; Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries’ Administrative Vice-Minister Harihara Hisao; Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Administrative Vice-Minister Ishiguro Norihiko; MOF’s Director-General of International Bureau Asakawa Masatsugu; and Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism’s Director-General for International Affairs Inaba Kazuo. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seko Hiroshige, Senior Vice-Minister of Cabinet Office Nishimura Yasutoshi, and Special Advisor to the Prime Minister Kimura Taro also attend
11:50 End meeting with Mr. Sugiyama, Mr. Yamada, Mr. Harihara, Mr. Ishiguro, Mr. Asakawa, and Mr. Inaba

PM
12:04 Meet with LDP Secretary-General Ishiba Shigeru
01:00 End meeting with Mr. Ishiba
01:01 Government Ruling Parties meeting
01:12 Meeting ends
01:43 Depart from office
01:58 Arrive at United Nations University in Jingumae, Tokyo
01:59 Speak with President of UN Development Programme Helen Clark
02:12 Finish speaking with Ms. Clark
02:13 Attend the international announcement for UNDP Human Development Report, deliver address. Report Presentation Ceremony
02:27 Ceremony ends
02:28 Depart from United Nations University
02:41 Arrive at office
02:45 Minister in charge of Economic Revitalization Amari Akira, Vice-Minister of Cabinet Office Matsuyama Kenji, and Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s Director-General of Economic and Industrial Policy Bureau Sugahara Ikuro enter
02:52 Mr. Matsuyama leaves
03:04 Mr. Amari and Mr. Sugahara leave
03:11 Receive courtesy call from Nemoto City Ritsu Habomai Junior High School 3rd-year student Nakajima Kyosuke and other junior high school students with Northern Territories Youth Cultural Exchange Service [北方少年交流事業: Hoppo Shonen Koryu Jigyo]
03:20 Courtesy call ends
03:31 Presentation of Fukushima Prefecture-Grown Vegetables with Governor of Fukushima Prefecture Sato Yuhei
03:36 Presentation ends
03:45 Meet with Director of Cabinet Intelligence Kitamura Shigeru
04:15 End meeting with Mr. Kitamura
05:07 NSC meeting, attended by Minister of Economy Trade and Industry Motegi Toshimitsu
05:29 NSC meeting ends
05:30 Meet with former Lower House Vice-Speaker Eto Seishiro
05:53 Finish speaking with Mr. Eto
05:55 Speak with LDP Headquarters for North Korean Abductions Chairman Yamatani Eriko and Secretary-General Tsukada Ichiro
06:08 Finish speaking with Ms. Yamatani and Mr. Tsukada
06:20 Depart from office
06:31 Arrive at Keidanren (Federation of Economic Organizations) Assembly Hall in Otemachi, Tokyo. Attend Keidanren Summer Forum, deliver address
07:03 Depart from assembly hall
07:13 Arrive at LDP Party Headquarters. Attend National Women Diet Members’ Political Investigative Committee [全国女性議員政策研究会の懇親会: Zenkoku Josei Giin Seisaku Kenkyukai no Konshinkai], give address. Take commemorative photo
07:35 Depart from party headquarters
07:38 Arrive at The Capitol Hotel Tokyu in Nagata-cho, Tokyo. Have dinner with secretaries at restaurant ORIGAMI in hotel
08:43 Depart from hotel
09:01 Arrive at private residence in Tomigaya, Tokyo

Friday, July 25, 2014

AM
12:00 At private residence (no visitors)
08:00 At private residence in Tomigaya, Tokyo (no morning visitors)
08:37 Depart from private residence
08:53 Arrive at office
08:54 Speak with Minister of State for Gender Equality Mori Masako
09:06 Finish speaking with Ms. Mori
09:11 Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy meeting
09:32 Meeting ends
09:46 Headquarters for Japan’s Economic Revitalization meeting
09:57 Meeting ends
10:01 Cabinet Meeting begins
10:25 Cabinet Meeting ends
10:32 Speak with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Aso Taro
10:41 Finish speaking with Mr. Aso
10:56 Interview open to all media: When asked “What is the goal of your tour to Central and South America?” Mr. Abe answers “I want to move toward strengthening Japan’s relationship with Central and South America, tapping into the limitless potential [for the relationship] that has remained hidden.”
10:59 Interview ends
11:00 Depart from office
11:19 Arrive at Haneda Airport
11:41 Depart from airport on private government aircraft with wife Akie for tour of 5 Central and South American countries including Mexico

PM
01:00 Phone Conference with Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott while aboard aircraft
01:15 Phone Conference ends

AM
(Local time in Mexico)
Arrive at Mexico City Benito Juárez International Airport
Summit Conference with President of United Mexican States Enrique Peña Nieto

PM
(Local time in Mexico)
Agreement Signing Ceremony with President Peña Nieto at the National Palace [Palacio Nacional], and Joint Press Conference
Lunch meeting hosted by President Peña Nieto and his wife
Attend Japan-Mexico Economic Commission at Marriott Hotel and deliver address. Mr. Peña Nieto also attends

Saturday, July 26, 2014

AM
(Local time in Mexico)
View National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City with wife Akie
Travel by helicopter to ruins of Teotihuacán on the outskirts of Mexico City, view ruins with President Peña Nieto and his wife
When asked “This is where former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro spoke of postal privatization, but today, of what have you spoken?” Mr. Abe answers “I have spoken of ridding [Japan] of deflation and of [pursing] regional restoration. If we wish to reach the top [of the pyramid] it will come to be, so I want to make [these things of which I have spoken] certain.”

PM
(Local time in Mexico)
Informal talk with leaders of Japanese-Mexicans’ group Japan-Mexico Association at Nichiboku Kaikan [日墨会館] in Mexico City
Attend Reception Commemorating Prime Minister Abe’s Visit, and deliver address

Sunday, July 27, 2014

AM
(Local time in Mexico)
Depart from Mexico City Benito Juárez International Airport

PM
(Local time in Trinidad and Tobago)
Arrive at Piarco International Airport in Trinidad and Tobago
Conference with Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Kamla Persad-Bissessar at Diplomatic Center in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Conference with Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne at Hilton Hotel
Continue conference with addition of Prime Minister of Jamaica Portia Simpson-Miller
Reception dinner hosted by Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar at Diplomatic Center

Provisional Translation by: Erin M. Jones