Properly assessing Battleship Island's history

By Tomohiro Shinkai
Executive director, Meeting to Support the Trial for Chinese Forced Laborers in Nagasaki


The Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun on March 31 reported that the Japanese government opened the Industrial Heritage Information Centre in Tokyo's Shinjuku district to introduce relics from the country's version of the Industrial Revolution, the Meiji Restoration.

At the time, the Japanese government initially aimed to enlist Meiji's relics as UNESCO World Heritage, a move opposed by the Korean government over the issue of Korean victims of forced labor. Tokyo later admitted that workers, including Koreans, in the 1940s were sent against their will to the island to perform labor. Japan pledged to build an information center on the history of forced labor, which led to Meiji's inclusion on the World Heritage list. As far as I know, however, the center is at the heart of many issues, including history distortion.

The first problem was the opening ceremony for the center. The Japanese government claimed to have built the center to remember forced labor victims from the Korean Peninsula, but the ceremony had no victims or relatives of their bereaved families attending.

The center has five sections under the following themes: the nascent era, shipbuilding, steel and iron production, coal mining industry and industrialized nation. A video clip released there showed a resident of Hashima Island off the coast of Nagasaki, a place also known as “Battleship Island,” denying that Koreans faced any discrimination, a statement totally opposite from what the Korean side argues. The center also displayed a wage envelope of a Taiwanese national who worked at a shipyard of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagasaki to claim that foreign staff also received pay.

So did Japan take the proper measure to commemorate the victims? Absolutely not. Koko Kato, executive director of the National Congress of Industrial Heritage, the body that runs the center, told Sankei, “The center emphasized the first round of historical data and the testimonies at that time." Yet she totally ignored testimonies from Korean and Chinese workers. 

The organization also claimed in a video that no mistreatment of or discrimination against foreign workers occurred on the island, and that the ties between the island residents and foreign workers were good. I have no desire to say the residents are lying. However, to deny mistreatment of forced labor victims simply because the witnesses did not mistreat them is both grossly exaggerated and illogical.

Though many testimonies remain on persecution of or discrimination against the victims, the center's attitude is one of constant denial. Kato’s comment that visitors should judge what happened despite the center providing an arbitrary and one-sided view is also extremely irresponsible and inappropriate.

At the time, working conditions for the laborers differed depending on the times. Yet the overall conditions, including types of housing and work, were so different for workers sent to the sites before Japan implemented its labor mobilization plan in 1939 and for those dispatched there after the plan, even if they were the same Koreans.

The establishment of such center tramples on Japan's promise to an international conference. To fulfill its initial purpose of promoting a comprehensive understanding of history, the center should have been built in Nagasaki after discussions with related parties from Korea and China. Thus I question why Japan built the center in Tokyo, which is more than 1,200 km away from Nagasaki. Hisatomo Kobayashi, secretary general of the Network for Uncovering the Truth about Forced Labor, also said the Abe administration sought to build the center as a base for spreading Japan’s history distortions.

Japan must objectively face history and reflect on its past wrongdoings. It should take a closer look at the truth behind the forced labor victims, whom the country hid behind the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, the Japanese government has consistently distorted and hid the truth instead of facing history. This attitude is reflected in the information center.

If Japan sincerely takes care of the forced labor victims and admits to its wrongdoings of invasion and colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, the whole world will send a message of reconciliation and amity. The information center should be such place. This attitude is what the whole world, not just UNESCO, wants to see from Japan.

Since 2003, Tomohiro Shinkai has served as executive director of the Meeting to Support the Trial for Chinese Forced Laborers in Nagasaki.

Translated by Korea.net staff writer Yoon Sojung.