Japan to recommend Sado mine for UNESCO World Heritage listing

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced Friday that Japan will recommend a Sado Island gold and silver mine complex for UNESCO World Heritage status, a move that could inflame tensions with South Korea. Seoul opposes the registration, pointing to the use of Korean wartime labor at the sites.

Kishida told reporters that the decision is expected to be approved by the Cabinet on Tuesday.

“We will set up a task force involving relevant ministries and deal with various discussions, including historical background,” said Kishida. He denied allegations that the government had flip-flopped from its initial position.

The move to pursue the recommendation came after reports that the Kishida government had been debating postponing the decision due to concerns about the Japan-South Korea relationship created a domestic backlash. Senior politicians from the ruling and opposition parties, as well as local officials in Niigata Prefecture, where Sado Island is located, all urged Kishida to go forward with the recommendation.

“The gold mines on Sado Island are highly regarded as an industrial heritage site that has been maintained on a large scale, over a long period of time using traditional handicrafts in Japan made during the Edo Period,” the prime minister said.

“On the other hand, there are various arguments and opinions about its registration as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Calm and careful discussions are required. In this context, when looking at when would be an effective time to apply for registration, we came to the conclusion that applying this year and starting discussions at an early stage will be a shortcut to achieving registration,” he said.

In December, the Council for Cultural Affairs selected the gold and silver mine sites on Sado Island as a World Heritage site candidate. That drew criticism from South Korea, which called Japan’s decision to pursue World Heritage status for the mine deplorable. During Japan’s 1910-45 colonization of the Korean Peninsula, Koreans were forced to work at the mine.

Following Kishida’s announcement, Kyodo News reported that the South Korean Foreign Ministry announced it was opposed to the registration effort and called on Japan to cancel the plans.

On Jan. 18, a group of 55 conservative Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers, including former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and policy chief Sanae Takaichi, called for Kishida to ignore South Korea’s concerns and submit the resolution before Feb. 1.

At a Jan. 20 meeting of his party faction, Abe said that to take into consideration South Korea’s objection by avoiding an argument was a mistake.

Speaking at a Lower House Budget Committee meeting on Jan. 24, Takaichi, who ran against Kishida in the September LDP presidential election with Abe’s support, urged the government to recommend Sado for registration before the deadline, saying that if it was postponed, it would damage Japan’s honor.

“We are not giving any diplomatic consideration to South Korea. We’re comprehensively discussing within the government the most effective way to win World Heritage designation for the sites,” Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said in reply.

Japan’s largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, is also calling for the Sado mine to be nominated. CDP policy chief Junya Ogawa said its nomination was desirable as a way to gain world recognition for its importance to Japan’s historical and cultural heritage. Takashi Kii, who serves as deputy chief, added that the focus of the nomination is on the site’s role during the Edo period (1603-1868), and not the era raised by South Korea.

Japan has previously faced criticism from South Korea over another of its World Heritage sites that once used Korean wartime labor: Nagasaki’s Hashima Island, popularly known as “Battleship Island.” The island and 22 other sites related to Japan’s Meiji Era (1868-1912) industrial revolution won World Heritage status in July 2015. At the time, Japan promised to establish information centers and take other measures to remember the victims, regardless of their origin.

But in July, after a UNESCO mission to the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo, which provides information on Hashima and the other sites, the World Heritage Committee noted that explanations about the Korean laborers were still lacking. It requested that Japan take measures to allow an understanding about the large number of Koreans and others brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions, and the Japanese government’s requisition policy. It also asked that Japan create a victims’ information center.

Japan’s deadline for submitting a report on how it has implemented those recommendations is Dec. 1 this year. The report will be closely scrutinized by the WHC and South Korea, and it could affect the debate within the committee over the Sado Island candidacy.

To win UNESCO approval as a World Heritage Site, a two-thirds majority of the 21 committee members is needed.

Japan is one of the current members, and was elected to the committee in November 2021. If approved, the Sado Island mines would be designated a World Heritage site in 2023.

The road to getting the Sado complex registered as a World Heritage Site began in 2010, when Japan’s UNESCO delegation put it forward on the World Heritage Center’s Tentative Lists. A November 2021 introduction and explanation about the mines by the Japanese government notes that Sado Island, which lies just off the coast of Niigata Prefecture in the Sea of Japan, is home to more than 50 mines.

Gold dust on Sado Island was documented as early as the end of the 12th century. But after large veins of gold and silver were discovered, mining operations commenced on a large scale beginning in the mid-16th century. The Aikawa gold and silver mine was the largest — about 3,000 meters east to west, 600 meters north to south and 800 meters below ground.

Over four centuries, until it closed in 1989, nearly 78 tons of gold and 2,330 tons of silver were mined from Aikawa. It supported the finances of both the Tokugawa Shogunate during the Edo Period and the subsequent Meiji government, which operated the mine.

In its 2010 submission to the WHC’s Tentative Lists, the Japanese government noted that the Sado mines evolved over 400 years utilizing unique mining technologies prior to the introduction of Western mining techniques in the Meiji Era. In addition, as gold and silver coins came from the mines of Sado Island, they impacted not only the domestic but also the international economy, which was based on the gold standard. Sado’s candidacy, the Japanese government concluded, is similar to gold and silver mines in Bolivia, Mexico, Germany, Slovakia, Spain and Brazil, as well as Japan’s Iwami Ginzan and its Cultural Landscape, all of which have been designated World Heritage Sites.

During a Jan. 19 news conference, Niigata Gov. Hideyo Hanazumi said that if South Korea was saying that the site’s connection to wartime labor was inappropriate, it was a discussion that should be carried out within UNESCO and that it was just part of the mines’ centuries-long history.

“The fact that a gold mine unparalleled in the world was operated during the Edo Period is what makes Sado worthy of being designated a World Heritage Site. I don’t think we should avoid discussion (of the Korean wartime labor issue). But that’s a different discussion from one about the gold mine as a World Heritage site,” Hanazumi said.