Tourists visiting Hashima (“Battleship Island”) in 2017. The island, a former coal mine, was approved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, as part of Japan's Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution. In July 2021, UNESCO gave Japan a deadline to address the “insufficient” information available about the history of forced labor on the island. Photo by Nevin Thompson. Image license: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 In July 2021, the Japanese government and UNESCO briefly engaged in a war of words over heritage sites and Japan's legacy of forced labor. When UNESCO reprimanded Japan for failing to acknowledge the use of forced labor during wartime at a UNESCO heritage site, the Japanese government promised to issue a formal rebuttal, and said that it is “sincerely making good” on the promise to remember victims of forced labor. On July 12, 2021, UNESCO issued a draft decision stating that Japan still needed to improve the way it talked about the historical use of forced labor at former industrial installations now recognized collectively as a World Heritage Site. UNESCO followed this with a formal reprimand on July 22, 2021, over Japan's seeming unwillingness to tell the “full history” of the former industrial sites. The row centres around “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining,” 23 historical sites on the western island of Kyushu that are designated collectively as a UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site. The 23 sites are recognized as the birthplace of Japan's rapid industrialization in the latter half of the 19th century. The UNESCO reprimand came after an information center, built in Tokyo specifically to explain and celebrate the Meiji Industrial Revolution UNESCO World Heritage Site on Kyushu, failed to inform visitors that some of the locations were the scene of wartime forced labor of Koreans. Prior to the reprimand, the draft decision on July 12 had noted that the Japanese government, as part of its original UNESCO submission in 2015, said it was: […] Prepared to take measures that allow an understanding that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites, and that, during World War II, the Government of Japan also implemented its policy of requisition. Japan is prepared to incorporate appropriate measures into the interpretive strategy to remember the victims such as the establishment of information center. The UNESCO reprimand noted that Japan had not fulfilled this obligation and focused specifically on forced labor that occurred on Hashima, a coal mine located on an island off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture in western Japan. Best known around the world as “Battleship Island,” Hashima, also the site of one of Japan's first coal mines, was featured in the James Bond movie “Skyfall.“ Japan has until December 1, 2022 to implement UNESCO's recommendations about acknowledging forced labor. The mine on Hashima was operated by giant conglomerate Mitsubishi, which relied on forced Korean labor during World War II to extract coal. At least 800 Koreans were sent to Hashima during the war, 134 of whom reportedly died while working there. Another fact so far officially unacknowledged by interpretive materials is that other industrial facilities in UNESCO's “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining” also relied on forced labor. For example, Mitsui, another industrial conglomerate, relied on prisoners of war slave labor to operate its Miike coal mine in Omuta, Kumamoto. Even before World War II, or even before Japan engaged in colonialist expansion in Asia at the start of the 20th Century, the Miike mine relied on forced convict labor to extract coal. Despite its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, there is no acknowledgement of this part of Miike's history. “Japan has a responsibility under its UNESCO World Heritage agreement to tell the full history of [Miike] and other ‘Meiji Industrial Revolution’ sites.” An important article by David Palmer on wartime forced labor at Miike mine: https://t.co/xrtlwDOwNa — 永原宣 Hiromu Nagahara (@HiromuNagahara) July 7, 2021 Japan's transformative Meiji period Meiji period followed the end of the Edo period in 1867 and more than two centuries of strict control over nearly all aspects of everyday life. With a new government and political system, Meiji entrepreneurs in Japan quickly capitalized on new opportunities to trade with Europe, the United States, and other places around the world.