► Prime Minister Kishida reaches for former Prime Minister Abe’s history-denying baton with which to goad the South Korean government and people into yet another diplomatic morass.

► Kishida’s Japanese only gamble makes clear this ruse is central to his administration’s vision for Japan in the world, and the hardliners behind it will not pull back unless a broad-based challenge is raised.

► Washington should urge Tokyo to recognize the humanity of all people who suffered at the Sado Island gold mines: Japanese, Korean, and maybe others.

A lot of history happened at Sado Island’s gold mines. We can get to that later or not because the Kishida administration’s current UNESCO World Heritage push for them has nothing to do with history. Instead, with this effort, Prime Minister Kishida reaches for former Prime Minister Abe’s history-denying baton with which to goad the South Korean government and people into yet another diplomatic morass. Online warfare is already well underway.  

Japan’s UNESCO application would recognize and honor Japanese only industriousness at the Sado mines. The attempt lays bare the politics of weaponizing the past for present political gain, picking at shards of things that happened a long time ago to fit a preferred contemporary memory narrative. By definition, this fantastical version of history must erase and/or deny elements that complicate its pure lines. In this instance, it makes vanish the well-documented existence and use of roughly 1200 Korean slave laborers at Sado’s Mitsubishi-owned mines between 1939-1945 as well as its record year of production (1940).  

The issue is not new and is among the myriad well-known points of friction guaranteed to rend not mend Japan-Korea relations. Tokyo’s desire to give global brand to the mines this way dares Seoul to respond, which begs the question of why now? Above all, Kishida’s Japanese only gamble makes clear this ruse is central to his administration’s vision for Japan in the world, and the hardliners behind it will not pull back unless a broad-based challenge is raised. What makes Tokyo confident it can ignore established histories let alone digitized archives on the Internet?  

The fog of COVID blurs so much, yet just before the pandemic began Japan’s relations with South Korea were described as their “worst ever” (as likely most people who read this essay know). South Korea’s Supreme Court decision in 2018 about a separate historical slave labor issue with Japan at other Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Sumitomo, and Nissan sites prompted Tokyo to retaliate economically which prompted Seoul to threaten to withdraw from a trilateral military pact between Japan, South Korea, and the US. Three years later the mood is still in the gutter.  

American policy practitioners and planners intone the importance of trilateral camaraderie among the three countries to focus on Asian security matters and are unresponsive to the reality that history itself has become a security threat in the region through its repeated weaponization. In Washington, we hear that Koreans are “emotional” and that Americans are "fatigued" by all of it. Yet this view fails to consider that Japan’s state-sponsored denial of its national history belies an emotion as powerful as Korea’s collective national frustration with it. The two emotions feed off of one another, making it imperative to confront this dynamic beyond the Tokyo-Seoul vortex.  

Successive recent Japanese administrations have denied, whitewashed, and/or avoided well-known histories of atrocity that took place during Japan’s occupation of Korea in the first half of the twentieth century (the use of colonized Korean subjects as slave labor being primary). This practice is not unique to Japan. Russian observers of recent attempts to sanitize their nation’s Soviet past refer to it as "Memory Vertical" in which the state does not erase events but controls the “repression narrative.” Most toxic in Japan-Korea relations is the history of state-sponsored militarized sexual slavery in the 1930s and 40s known by the cruel euphemism, “comfort women.” The current Japanese government does not deny existence of this history yet now would explain away the issue of state-responsibility which was a matter so well-documented by 1992 that it agreed then that the state was involved through its own investigation. (Just so we all are on the same page, Japanese historians have done the initial research into all these topics, including the Sado gold mines).  

Underappreciated in the mix now, Japanese government denialist efforts use the term “Korea” as a "dog whistle" not as a place or people with history (think of how “immigrant” works in certain American circles). In other words, does Tokyo even need to engage Seoul anymore? The Twittersphere anticipates results, and Tokyo’s explanations are so formulaic that even Google translator apps must be tired of rendering them into English. 

Heightened denialism hardened in 2012 with the advent of Abe Shinzo Version 2 which unapologetically brought with it into the Cabinet Secretariat core tenets of the revanchist lobbying group, Nippon Kaigi, as definitional to Japan’s future (former Prime Minister Abe is a “special adviser” (特別顧問); current Prime Minister Kishida is a member). Today, the impulse extends to the push for Sado’s gold mines as UNESCO World Heritage to cement this group’s sanitized views of Japan’s past within Japan as Japanese history for Japanese. Therefore, the Sado UNESCO attempt reveals a Japan versus Japan struggle more than a Japan versus Korea fight, with the Abe-Suga-now-Kishida administration’s "beautiful Japan" myopia so over-the-top that Japanese citizens who question it are branded “anti-Japanese” first and foremost. Never mind the rest of us, and that’s the entire point. 

Notwithstanding, denialism is a short-term bet, and the Kishida administration’s UNESCO fiasco demonstrates more than merely a waste of Japanese taxpayer money. Tokyo’s Sado application measures just how much Washington will let it get away with, again testing the US on so-called “history issues” while right now multiple countries’ warships, planes, and missiles precariously crisscross throughout the region, and launchpads gear up. 

So, let’s think for a second about the Sado mines as world history (which is the aim of the UNESCO program after all). When has a gold mine anywhere recorded a “beautiful” history? In Sado’s case, the pre-modern and modern records are clear: the Tokugawa and Meiji era governments rounded up homeless people, convicts, and heretics among others and sent them to these mines, often to their deaths. Mitsubishi took over in 1896, yet labor conditions remained abysmal. Ironically, displays at these mines have long explained this fact as have local Niigata prefecture officials who initiated the UNESCO campaign in 2010 to boost tourism. Jumping ahead to the Showa era wartime moment, Korean slave labor replaced Japanese men who had been sent to war. Why not be honest? Angkor Wat is a UNESCO site, and we know slaves died building it.  

Taking seriously the history of the Sado mines would, moreover, raise related issues that get no consideration anywhere in the “beautiful Japan” approach to them. Mitsubishi’s Sado enterprises were of a piece with wartime Japan’s widespread use of American and other Allied POWs at industrial sites throughout Japan. To be clear: there is zero credible evidence of Allied POWs in the Sado mines, yet abundant evidence exists of Japan’s brutal use of POW labor in related enterprises elsewhere: a 30% death rate defines Japan’s treatment of POW slave labor compared with Germany’s 3% record. Documents pertaining to Allied POWs are far from perfect, yet, more distressingly, historians will never have firm numbers for enslaved colonial laborers because so much evidence was made to disappear, like the laborers themselves.  

Today, the POW-MIA flag flies over the White House just under the American flag. This flag addresses a different war and different POW history, yet the movement is committed to belief that “our nation will be there for them.” If the Biden administration takes this to heart and resonates it, moreover, with its commitment to human rights writ large, then the US government needs to make clear now to the Japanese government that attempts to glorify a history of brutality is not in Japan’s interests in terms of alliance relations let alone its position in the world.   

Secretary of State Blinken suggested that the February 12 US-Japan-South Korea trilateral meeting in Honolulu offered “another opportunity to drive (collaboration) forward.” To make good on this, Washington should urge Tokyo to recognize the humanity of all people who suffered at the Sado Island gold mines: Japanese, Korean, and maybe others. Failure to do so erases the laborers’ collective humanity and also that their experiences tie them to others who endured similar fates.