Read The Diplomat, get to know Asia-Pacific
Japan and South Korea are hiding the dark side of Sado Island by misinterpreting UNESCO World Heritage, international relations, and history.
A tunnel in the Sado gold mine.
Lately, the Aikawa Japanese Folk Museum, a small design made of cream-colored tablets and oven-baked tiles, has a familiar appeal among South Koreans. It is located on the island of Sado, the subject of much controversy following the designation of the gold mines on the island of Sado as a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the end of July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, green topography are around 50 mines with a long history spanning Japan’s classical era, industrialization, and imperialism. Japan’s UNESCO candidacy for the Sado mines is solely due to its legacy from the Edo era (1603-1867).
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, after subduing his rival warlords, introduced a shogunate, necessarily a military dictatorship. The Tokugawa shoguns (samurai dictators) were wary of foreign influences; They blocked Japan by banning Christianity and breaking relations with the West. From Edo, present-day Tokyo, the Tokugawa family oversaw more than two and a half centuries of peace and isolation.
Closer interactions with the outside world during Pax Tokugawa gave rise to the unique cultural and social landscape of early fashion Japan. Japan’s distinctly Orientalist belief and appeal derive in large part from the practice and artifacts of this period: Kabuki actors dressed in shiny silk, floating with their whitewashed faces and surreal voices, whose dream shows definitely haunt today’s spectators; woodcuts depicting scenes of hectic neighborhoods and sleepy domestic life, whose messy themes and hazy settings have captivated artists around the world since the nineteenth century; and Edo architecture that reflects the layered degrees of grandeur and modesty of other social classes, whose exquisite temples and houses carved and stacked in wood and clay tiles never fail to attract tourists.
The Sado gold mines ran parallel to and were an integral component of this entire flourishing of Edo. In 1603, the same year that Tokugawa established his shogunate, he directly took over the Sado mines and sent mining experts to the island to extract gold and silver. The Sado mines have become the financial lifeline of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the early part of the 17th century, one-tenth of the world’s total gold production came from Sado. The samurai regime sent most of its gold and silver to China to pay for imported manufactured goods.
Using artisanal methods, Sado miners in the Edo era achieved a gold purity of 99. 54%, something unprecedented in the world at the time. Unlike in Europe, no machinery or chemicals have facilitated the process of extraction, processing, smelting, refining, and minting. Ingenio Clásico “The pinnacle of the manual gold production system”.
Japan’s narrative, as presented to UNESCO, that Sado’s mining heritage – the set of manual techniques for extracting and refining gold – reflected the socio-technical sophistication of the Edo period, which played an invaluable role in the socio-cultural evolution of Japan. Development and World Trade. For Tokyo, this legacy is a valuable legacy of an era that was “the last era of classical Japanese government, culture, and society. “
So far, this is clever enough to receive the blessing of UNESCO, but the story of the Sado mines did not end at the end of the Edo era. Rather, its story unfolds in two parts: and after the shogunate.
In 1854, the United States forced Japanese ports to open to the West through international gunboat relations, threatening military action for publicity advantage. Believing that the isolated shogunate was no longer immune to the world, the young samurai overthrew their feudal society and instituted a new government inspired by bureaucracy and fashionable technocracy in 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration, named after Emperor Meiji. which served as a decorative figure.
Once again, the island of Sado has financed some other bankruptcy in Japan’s history. In 1869, the Meiji government sent a Western technician to Sado Island and began drilling mining shafts with Western techniques. Just as Sado gold wove the social fabric of the Edo period, Sado silver now backs the Japanese currency, the yen, reinforcing the immediate industrialization and militarization of the new regime, which helped Japan win the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Japan expelled Chinese influence from Korea and colonized Formosa, which is now Taiwan.
However, towards the end of the 19th century, the price of silver depreciated in global markets, making it more difficult for Japan to unload machinery and weapons from the West. In 1896, Mitsubishi Materials took over the Sado mines from the government. The following year, thanks to war reparations paid through China from its depot in London, Japan adjusted its yen to the foreign gold standard. With a less complicated convertibility of the yen and a higher price on the foreign economy, Japan boosted its heavy industrialization systems, fueling hostile militarism.
Japan exchanged Mitsubishi gold from the Sado mines for Western warships and munitions, allowing it to triumph over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Japan has become the sole hegemon of the region, making Korea its protectorate that same year. and then its colony in 1905. 1910. Sado Island has financed Imperial Japan’s military operations and overseas military ventures through the large and popular gold reserves.
Mitsubishi’s increased production of gold and other minerals further accelerated Japan’s inconsistent economic affairs. After Japan seized Chinese Manchuria in 1931, the company built new facilities on Sado Island to produce more gold and meet the military’s growing financial needs. One of the factories began processing more than 50,000 tons of ore for a month after the war efforts of the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. As Japan’s inconsistent nuclear dream metastasized into the Pacific War ( 1941-1945), the Sado mines switched to the production of copper, metal and zinc.
At the time, the mine relied on Korean labor.
In 1938, Mitsubishi was struggling to fulfill the Japanese government’s purpose of expanding mining production. Veteran miners had fallen ill due to poor operating conditions, and Japanese men had been called up for wartime conscription. Japan’s General Labor Mobilization Law, passed in 1938, allowed Mitsubishi to circulate forced laborers in Korea in early 1939.
The number of Korean forced laborers on Sado Island is estimated to have ranged from 1,200 to 1,500. According to the records of hard work from the Mitsubishi branch in Sado, 1,519 Koreans were brought to the island between 1940 and 1945. However, Hirose Teizo of Fukuoka University estimates that the number may be as high as 2,300.
Before the Sado Mines were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, South Korea asked Japan to provide data on those Koreans so that visitors could perceive the mines’ darker history. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which evaluates UNESCO nominations, also asked whether Japan intended to “cover the entire history of mining on Sado Island and in the proposed shaft. “
That’s why Japan opened a small gallery on Korean staff at the Aikawa Folk Museum. However, this move angered South Koreans. First of all, the museum is located within walking distance of the Sado Mines, making it difficult for visitors to perceive Korean forced laborers when they visit the now-famous attraction. Second, no mention of “forced labor” was found. With regard to “civilian personnel on the Korea Peninsula”, the gallery only uses words such as “recruitment”, “placement” and “requisition”, in which Koreans assumed responsibilities “based on legislation and regulations”. Meanwhile, Japan’s application text to UNESCO goes so far as to say that Mitsubishi “hired more miners” in reaction to the growing demands of the war.
In fact, the General Government of Chosun, the Japanese colonial headquarters for Korea, was actively involved in regrouping and protecting forced laborers, a practice that involved kidnappings and human trafficking. Employment agencies used colonial police to forcibly evict reluctant painters, who were locked up. The fact that 15% of Korean miners fled Sado Island between the early 1940s and mid-1943 is also a testament to the forced details of their presence and paintings on the island.
When asked through ICOMOS for more information on the employment situation of Koreans, Japan stated that “married workers can bring their family members with them,” that they are provided with comfortable housing and affordable costs for “food and basic necessities,” and that “the policy of non-discrimination in the actual operations at the Sado mines. “
The truth was different. Authorities have transferred staff families with them to discourage flights. Mitsubishi unilaterally cut the salaries of Korean staff and diverted part of its source of income into mandatory savings plans. They had to pay for mining tools, blankets and food. These were tactics aimed at depriving Koreans of money and preventing them from escaping. Records from the Niigata Prefectural Employment Agency show that his outstanding bills leaked into the coffers of the post-war Japanese government.
In addition, the Koreans carried out the most dangerous tasks in the depths of mine shafts. Even healthy newcomers did not last three years on the island due to lung illnesses and injuries. Towards the end of the Pacific War in Japan, the few remaining survivors were taken into the army.
There are two reasons why Japan buried the role of the Sado mines as a source of water necessary for Japan’s imperial dream and colonial repression. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has sought to provide “a nation-centered narrative” in an attempt to restore ancient interpretation by removing ancient non-Japanese contributions as “harmful to national pride and national identity. ” . Shinzo particularly insisted that Japan rejected “masochistic history” and “tiredness of excuses. ”
In 2012, Abe’s cabinet followed revisionist and nationalist principles of cleaning up Japan’s history and selling narratives about “beautiful Japan. ” Japan’s national textbooks began to erase data on forced hard labor, as well as “comfort women,” women from Korea and other Japanese colonies. territories forced into sexual slavery (Abe and his government consistently denied that these women were coerced).
In 2015, UNESCO designated the sites of Japan’s Meiji-era Industrial Revolution, which operated at the expense of more than 30,000 Korean forced laborers, as World Heritage Sites, on the condition that Japan take “corrective measures. ” measures to allow among a gigantic number of Koreans. ” and others were taken against their will and forced to work in harsh conditions. Japan’s applicable exhibition in Tokyo, far from UNESCO sites, still denies details of coercion and discrimination.
Outgoing Prime Minister Kishida Fumio inherited and perpetuated this denial, founding a “historic war team” to convince “the foreign community” of Japan’s own “perception of history. “Sado Island is just the newest front in the LDP’s promotion of Japan’s “beauty. “and “clean” history. Last year, Japan’s foreign minister said that “we do not pay any diplomatic attention to South Korea” in relation to the historical disputes over the island of Sado. Last month, a conservative media outlet said that forced hard labor was a hoax and that the Aikawa Folk Museum’s exhibit on Korean workers forced unnecessary workers.
The other explanation for why the LDP denies forced hard labor and wartime atrocities is that Japanese conservatives sincerely believe that the Korean personnel may simply not have been forced. Imperial Japan held onto naisen ittai, a perception of Korea and Japan as one body, organizing extensive systems of indoctrination. schooling and participation of Koreans in the rites of the Japanese imperial government. The colonial government instilled kokutai in Koreans, a set of orthodox imperial ideologies of Japan that symbolize Japanese “national essence” and “racial trust. ” Citing “the cultural and ethnic closeness between the Japanese and Koreans,” they believed that their kōminka, or task for creating imperial subjects, was actually to paint. In this grand narrative, the Koreans were not forced to paint, but simply they mobilized or volunteered out of loyalty to higher imperial callings.
Kishida’s leadership has found in South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol the best partner to whitewash Japan’s history. Yoon’s leadership has opted for the South Korean New Right movement, which justifies the Japanese profession of Korea as a source of modernity and enlightenment and ignores colonial atrocities and collaboration. elite.
In March 2023, Yoon undermined the South Korea Supreme Court’s ruling that Japanese corporations will have to compensate Korean forced laborers by failing to demand the matter from Kishida and instead counterintuitively forcing South Korean charities to shell out money. As for Sado Island, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Seoul and Tokyo agreed that the latter would not include the term “forced labor” in the description of the Sado mines. Subsequently, South Korea voted in favour of UNESCO designating Sado Island on the World Heritage Committee.
Yoon has already filled his administration with New Right figures determined to erase the legacy of independence activists from South Korean history and highlight the staunch anti-communism of colonial collaborators. All of this is intended to make it difficult to understand the chronology of the colonial complicity of the South Korean elite and the post-independence government that underpins today’s South Korean conservatism, which rejects rapprochement with North Korea and advocates unilateral cooperation. with the Japanese LDP.
However, three vital lessons can be learned from the confrontation over the island of Sado. First, it is the best time for the global network to confront UNESCO’s philosophy of building “the defenses of peace in the minds of women and men” and the recommendations of the World Heritage Convention. objective of “promoting solidarity and external cooperation”. It’s hard to see how Sado’s UNESCO seal fits those values. In the future, UNESCO and other countries would do more to avoid repeating the same suffering.
The second lesson is more about Yoon’s administration. Diplomacy, despite its means of cultivating mutual interests in foreign relations, should, as an end, seek to bring the maximum advantages to its own people. The day after Sado’s appointment as a member of UNESCO, Japan was jubilant, but South Koreans were torn and wounded. Similarly, in May 2023, Yoon, unlike most South Koreans, seemed indifferent to Japan’s release of irradiated water from Fukushima. Yoon believes that accepting Japan strengthens bilateral economic security and military collaboration. However, he is silent on how to fix South Korea’s political fortunes.
The final lesson focuses on the Kishida and Yoon administrations. History flows in a continuum that breathes the offer and illuminates the future. Truncating and adapting the history of a position is a flagrant damage to the collective memory of humanity. Sado’s gold might have been pure, but the history of it includes impurities; If we do not want to forget the good, we must not forget the evil either. Amnesia and denial have no place in ancient monuments.
Understand Asia-Pacific’s biggest issues with a subscription to The Diplomat.
Lately, the Aikawa Japanese Folk Museum, a small design made of cream-colored tablets and oven-baked tiles, has a familiar appeal among South Koreans. It is located on the island of Sado, the subject of much controversy following the designation of the gold mines on the island of Sado as a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the end of July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, green topography are around 50 mines with a long history spanning Japan’s classical era, industrialization, and imperialism. Japan’s UNESCO candidacy for the Sado mines is solely due to its legacy from the Edo era (1603-1867).
In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, after subduing his rival warlords, introduced a shogunate, necessarily a military dictatorship. The Tokugawa shoguns (samurai dictators) were wary of foreign influences; They have locked down Japan by banning Christianity and breaking relations with the West. From Edo, present-day Tokyo, the Tokugawa circle of relatives oversaw more than two and a half centuries of peace and isolation.
Close interactions with the outside world, the Pax Tokugawa, gave rise to the unique cultural and social landscape of early modern Japan. Japan’s unique orientalist belief and appeal is largely derived from the practice and artifacts of this period: Kabuki actors dressed in bright costumes. silk, floating their whitewashed faces and surreal voices, whose dreamlike performances definitely capture the audience beyond and present; woodcuts depicting scenes of hectic neighborhoods and dormant domestic life, whose disordered themes and hazy settings have captivated artists around the world since the 19th century; and Edo architecture reflects the stratified degrees of grandeur and modesty of the other social classes, whose exquisite temples and houses carved and stacked in wooden and clay tiles never fail to attract tourists.
The Sado gold mines ran parallel and were an integral component of this entire Edo flourishing. In 1603, the same year that Tokugawa established his shogunate, he took direct charge of the mines of Sado and sent mining experts to the island to extract gold and silver. The mines of Sado have become the monetary lifeline of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the early part of the 17th century, one-tenth of the world’s total gold production came from Sado. The samurai regime sent most of its gold and silver to China to pay for imported manufactured goods.
Based on artisanal methods, Edo-era Sado miners achieved a gold purity of 99. 54, something unprecedented in the world at the time. Unlike in Europe, no machine or chemical product facilitated the process of extraction, processing, smelting, refining, and minting. This classic ingenuity was “the pinnacle of the manual gold production system”.
Japan’s narrative, as presented to UNESCO, that Sado’s mining heritage – the framework of manual gold extraction and refining techniques – reflected the socio-technical sophistication of the Edo era, which played an invaluable role in Japan’s socio-cultural evolution. Progression and global trade. For Tokyo, this heritage is a valuable legacy of an era that was “the last era of classical Japanese government, culture and society. “
So far, that’s smart enough to receive UNESCO’s blessing, but the story of the Sado mines didn’t end at the end of the Edo era. Its story unfolds in two parts: and after the shogunate.
In 1854, the United States forced Japanese ports to open up to the West through international gunboat relations, threatening military action to gain publicity advantages. Believing that the isolated shogunate no longer existed in the world, the young samurai overthrew their feudal society and established a new government inspired by the fashionable bureaucracy and technocracy in 1868, the year of the Meiji Restoration, named after Emperor Meiji, who served as a figurehead.
Once again, Sado Island financed another bankruptcy in Japanese history. In 1869, the Meiji government sent a Western technician to Sado Island and began drilling mine shafts with Western techniques. Just as Sado gold wove the social fabric of the Edo period, Sado silver now underpinned the Japanese currency, the yen, reinforcing the immediate industrialization and militarization of the new regime that helped Japan win the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan expelled Chinese influence from Korea and colonized Formosa, present-day Taiwan.
However, towards the end of the 19th century, the price of silver depreciated in global markets, making it more difficult for Japan to unload machinery and weapons from the West. In 1896, Mitsubishi Materials took over the Sado mines from the government. The following year, thanks to war reparations paid through China from its depot in London, Japan adjusted its yen to the foreign gold standard. With a less complicated convertibility of the yen and a higher price on the foreign economy, Japan boosted its heavy industrialization systems, fueling hostile militarism.
Japan exchanged Mitsubishi gold from the Sado mines for Western warships and munitions, allowing it to triumph over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Japan has become the sole hegemon of the region, making Korea its protectorate that same year. and then its colony in 1905. 1910. Sado Island has financed Imperial Japan’s military operations and overseas military ventures through the large and popular gold reserves.
Mitsubishi’s intensification of gold and other mineral production further accelerated Japan’s inconsistent trade commitments. After Japan conquered Chinese Manchuria in 1931, the company built new facilities on the island of Sado to produce more gold and meet the army’s growing monetary needs. It began processing more than 50,000 tons of ore per month to aid the war efforts of the Second Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. As Japan’s inconsistent military dream turned into the Pacific War (1941-1945), the mines at Sado began to generate copper. with, steel and zinc.
At the time, the mine relied on Korean labor.
In 1938, Mitsubishi struggled to fulfill the Japanese government’s purpose of expanding mining production. Veteran miners had fallen ill due to destructive operating conditions, and Japanese men had been called up for wartime conscription. Japan’s General Labor Mobilization Law, passed in 1938, allowed Mitsubishi to circulate forced laborers in Korea in early 1939.
The number of Korean forced laborers on Sado Island is estimated to have ranged from 1,200 to 1,500. According to the records of hard work from the Mitsubishi branch in Sado, 1,519 Koreans were brought to the island between 1940 and 1945. However, Hirose Teizo of Fukuoka University estimates that the number may be as high as 2,300.
Before the Sado mines were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, South Korea asked Japan to provide data on those Koreans so that visitors could perceive the darker history of the mines. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which evaluates UNESCO nominations, also asked whether Japan intends to “cover the entire history of mining on Sado Island and on the nominated property. “
That is why Japan opened a small gallery about Korean personnel in the Aikawa Folk Museum. However, this measure angered South Koreans. Firstly, the museum is located a short distance from the Sado Mines, making it difficult for visitors to notice Korean forced laborers when visiting the now famous attraction. Secondly, no mention of “forced labor” was found. Regarding “civilian personnel on the Korean Peninsula,” the gallery only uses words like “recruitment,” “placement,” and “requisition,” in which Koreans took on responsibilities “based on laws and regulations. ” Meanwhile, Japan’s application text to UNESCO goes so far as to say that Mitsubishi “hired more miners” in reaction to the growing demands of the war.
In fact, the General Government of Chosun, the Japanese colonial headquarters for Korea, was actively involved in regrouping and protecting forced laborers, a practice that involved kidnappings and human trafficking. Employment agencies used colonial police to forcibly evict reluctant painters, who were locked up. The fact that 15% of Korean miners fled Sado Island between the early 1940s and mid-1943 is also a testament to the forced details of their presence and paintings on the island.
When asked through ICOMOS for more information on the employment situation of Koreans, Japan stated that “married workers can bring their family members with them,” that they are provided with comfortable housing and affordable costs for “food and basic necessities,” and that “the policy of non-discrimination in the actual operations at the Sado mines. “
The truth is very different. Authorities moved the workers’ families with them to discourage escapes. Mitsubishi unilaterally cut the wages of Korean workers and diverted part of their source of income into mandatory savings plans. They had to pay for mining tools, blankets and food. These were tactics aimed at depriving Koreans of money and preventing them from escaping. Records from the Niigata prefectural employment company show that its pending bills leaked into the coffers of the postwar Japanese government.
In addition, the Koreans carried out the most dangerous tasks inside the mine shafts. Even with compatibility, the newcomers lasted only 3 years on the island due to lung diseases and accidents. Towards the end of the Japanese Pacific War, the few remaining survivors were incorporated into the army.
There are two reasons why Japan buried the role of the Sado mines as a source of water needed for Japan’s imperial dream and colonial repression. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has sought to provide “a nation-centered narrative” in an effort to recapture the old interpretation by removing old non-Japanese contributions as “harmful to national pride and national identity. “Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo insisted in particular that Japan rejected “masochistic history” and “excuse weariness. ”
In 2012, Abe’s cabinet followed revisionist and nationalist principles of sanitizing Japanese history and selling narratives about “beautiful Japan. ” Japan’s national textbooks began erasing data on forced hard labor, as well as on “comfort women,” women from Korea and other Japanese colonial territories forced into sexual slavery (Abe and his government have consistently denied that such women were coerced).
In 2015, UNESCO designated the sites of Japan’s Meiji-era Industrial Revolution, which operated at the expense of more than 30,000 Korean forced laborers, as World Heritage Sites, on the condition that Japan take “measures to allow the passage of a huge number of Koreans. and others brought against their will and forced to paint in difficult conditions. Japan’s exhibition in Tokyo, far from UNESCO sites, still denies details of coercion and discrimination.
Outgoing Prime Minister Kishida Fumio inherited and perpetuated this denial, founding a “historic war team” to convince “the foreign community” of Japan’s own “perception of history. “Sado Island is just the newest front in the LDP’s promotion of Japan’s “beauty. “and “clean” history. Last year, Japan’s foreign minister said that “we do not pay any diplomatic attention to South Korea” in relation to the historical disputes over the island of Sado. Last month, a conservative media outlet said that forced hard labor was a hoax and that the Aikawa Folk Museum’s exhibit on Korean workers forced unnecessary workers.
The other explanation for why the LDP denies forced hard labor and wartime atrocities is that Japanese conservatives sincerely believe that the Korean personnel may simply not have been forced. Imperial Japan held onto naisen ittai, a perception of Korea and Japan as one body, organizing extensive systems of indoctrination. schooling and participation of Koreans in the rites of the Japanese imperial government. The colonial government instilled kokutai in Koreans, a set of orthodox imperial ideologies of Japan that symbolize Japanese “national essence” and “racial trust. ” Citing “the cultural and ethnic closeness between the Japanese and Koreans,” they believed that their kōminka, or task for creating imperial subjects, was actually to paint. In this grand narrative, the Koreans were not forced to paint, but simply they mobilized or volunteered out of loyalty to higher imperial callings.
Kishida’s leadership has found in South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol the best partner to whitewash Japan’s history. Yoon’s leadership has opted for the South Korean New Right movement, which justifies the Japanese profession of Korea as a source of modernity and enlightenment and ignores colonial atrocities and elite collaboration.
In March 2023, Yoon undermined the South Korea Supreme Court’s ruling that Japanese corporations will have to compensate Korean forced laborers by failing to demand the matter from Kishida and instead counterintuitively forcing South Korean charities to shell out money. As for Sado Island, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Seoul and Tokyo agreed that the latter would not include the term “forced labor” in the description of the Sado mines. Subsequently, South Korea voted in favour of UNESCO designating Sado Island on the World Heritage Committee.
Yoon has already filled his administration with New Right figures determined to erase the legacy of independence activists from South Korean history and highlight the staunch anti-communism of colonial collaborators. All of this is intended to make it difficult to understand the chronology of the colonial complicity of the South Korean elite and the post-independence government that underpins today’s South Korean conservatism, which rejects rapprochement with North Korea and advocates unilateral cooperation. with the Japanese LDP.
However, three vital lessons can be learned from the confrontation over the island of Sado. First, it is the best time for the global network to confront UNESCO’s philosophy of building “the defenses of peace in the minds of women and men” and the recommendations of the World Heritage Convention. objective of “promoting solidarity and external cooperation”. It’s hard to see how Sado’s UNESCO seal fits those values. In the future, UNESCO and other countries would do more to avoid repeating the same suffering.
The second lesson is more about Yoon’s administration. Diplomacy, despite its means of cultivating mutual interests in foreign relations, should, as an end, seek to bring the maximum advantages to its own people. The day after Sado’s appointment as a member of UNESCO, Japan was jubilant, but South Koreans were torn and wounded. Similarly, in May 2023, Yoon, unlike most South Koreans, seemed indifferent to Japan’s release of irradiated water from Fukushima. Yoon believes that accepting Japan strengthens bilateral economic security and military collaboration. However, he is silent on how to fix South Korea’s political fortunes.
The final lesson focuses on the Kishida and Yoon administrations. The story flows in a continuum that breathes the offer and illuminates the future. Truncating and adapting the history of a position is a flagrant damage to the collective memory of humanity. Sado’s gold might have been pure, but its history includes impurities; If we do not want to forget the good, we must not forget the evil either. Amnesia and denial have no place in ancient monuments.
Lately, the Aikawa Japanese Folk Museum, a small design made of cream clapboards and kiln-fired tiles, has a familiar appeal among South Koreans. It is located on Sado Island, the subject of great controversy following the designation of the Sado Island gold mines as a UNESCO World Heritage Site last July.
Beneath the island’s rugged, verdant topography lie some fifty mines whose long history spans the classical era, industrialization and imperialism of Japan. Japan’s UNESCO nomination for the Sado Mines is solely due to its heritage from the Edo era (1603-1867).
Eunwoo Lee writes about politics, society, and the politics of Europe and East Asia.