Introduction
In an increasingly globalized, interconnected society, heritage is a useful soft power resource to influence variegated publics both at home and abroad.Footnote 1 UNESCO's World Heritage recognition particularly benefits states that seek to advance their interests such as through promoting national pride and attracting foreign tourists, aid, and investment.Footnote 2 Heritage is a curated product drawn upon history, for the present and future generations to remember, memorialize, and/or fake the selected past. While deeply grounded in a local or regional context, heritage also can be nationalized in the process of World Heritage nomination. For its specific attribution to a particular group of people, heritage can be an allure as well as a repulsion for the foreign public.Footnote 3
Japan's nomination of the “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining” (SJMIR afterward) for the World Heritage lists is a paradigmatic example of revitalizing the nostalgic memories of Japan's national legacy that also invites international criticism. As the phrase “industrial revolution” brings back memories of the dynamic period of development and transformation in Europe, the label positively signals that Japan also experienced a similar dramatic change in the Bakumatsu (the last days of the Shogunate) (1853–1869) and the Meiji periods (1869–1912). However, the Japanese government promoted the sites as World Heritage at the expense of its relationship with its neighboring countries, in particular, South Korea. Because Japan's nomination dismisses the memory of Korean and Chinese “forced laborers,” or “drafted workers” in Japanese, which is associated with Gunkanjima (known as the Battleship Island) and other places in SJMIR, it upset a group of South Korean “forced labor” survivors that sued Japanese corporations such as Mitsubishi and Nippon Steel for individual compensation and, more broadly, revived Korean memories of Japanese militarism and colonialism. At an earlier stage, ministry officials and council members expressed concerns over possible critical reactions from South Korea, but the Japanese government accelerated its campaign for UNESCO's World Heritage designation and achieved its objective in 2015. Why did the Japanese government take this step despite the alarming voices within Japan? Incorporating debates on the state's use of heritage in its cultural diplomacy, this paper demonstrates that heritage is the result of a process of inclusion and exclusion in popular memory, and, in its being activated by diplomacy, it becomes a set expression of the meaning of the past, which emphasizes only one link to a historical past while pushing others outside popular memory.
There is little academic research that comprehensively covers SJMIR as a subject of analysis. Only a small body of literature focuses on Gunkanjima, the island with many facets of history and controversies, including the one on forced labor. Kimura, as well as Hashimoto and Telfer, explore the multifaceted nature of Gunkanjima in different time and space and explain how UNESCO's World Heritage recognition has transformed the meaning of the site.Footnote 4 Underwood and Siemons highlight the links between forced labor and the nominated sites including Gunkanjima; from the standpoint of Korean and Chinese forced labor victims, they criticize Japan's nomination as another example of the disavowal of forced labor under the Japanese rule.Footnote 5 Similarly, Boyle points to the pitfall of Japan's official narrative and heritage promotion in the international context.Footnote 6 Only Chan treats Japan's SJMIR nomination as a political and diplomatic process among multiple, though mainly national, actors.Footnote 7 However, those studies do not empirically dig in to explain why Japan sought the World Heritage nomination so adamantly despite internal concerns over a potential dispute with South Korea.
This paper contributes to the debates on Japan's memory politics and heritage diplomacy. By setting its focus on the World Heritage nomination process of SJMIR, it explains why Japan's industrial heritageFootnote 8 was shaped and promoted in a way that ignores alternative historical narratives. To do so, this paper contends that it is crucial to unpack the political dynamics behind the scene and understand who has taken initiatives, in what ways, and for what end. With the use of primary sources, including official documents, minutes, prime minister's speeches, commentaries of relevant individuals, and interviews, this paper uncovers the unprecedented nature of Japan's World Heritage nomination process of SJMIR, the government's attempt to globalize Japan's “national nostalgia” for the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods. National nostalgia is essential to national identity; it is the longing for the country's “good old days,” based on the memory of shared experience of a particular national group. This paper focuses on Japan's conservative national nostalgia, which is reconstructed on the basis of what they regard as national legacy. The politics of memory within South Korea is outside the scope of this study. South Korean demands on historical justice over forced labor issues need a separate investigation.Footnote 9
The rest of this paper is structured into six sections. First, it presents heritage diplomacy as a broad theoretical framework for the study of World Heritage nomination. Second, it introduces the background of Japanese national nostalgia for the Meiji era. The specific case of SJMIR is examined in detail from the third to fifth sections. This paper concludes that, without space for multiple historical narratives of the nations and individuals to arise, the diplomatic promotion of national nostalgia pushes alternative historical narratives into oblivion.
Understanding Heritage Diplomacy
Heritage is a processed collection of the past created in the present for use by present and future generations.Footnote 10 For its strong linkage with a future vision, heritage is a useful resource for political actors, whether they are governments, groups, or individuals, to address their political needs and aspirations.Footnote 11 Often, nationalists are keen to develop heritage for the nation by the nation, whereas indigenous people demand the recovery of their heritage to find a rightful place in society. As globalization increases the degree of social and economic interactions worldwide, the government aims to capitalize on the value of heritage to obtain international recognition and interest in its culture and history.
Heritage diplomacy, the state's use of heritage in its cultural diplomacy, has a wide range of meanings. As Akagawa explains in the study of Japan's use of heritage, heritage conservation assistance and a normative contribution to the evolution of international heritage programs are the state's strategic action to increase its soft power.Footnote 12 Winter highlights the state's reconstructive use of cross-border heritage discourse as a way of reshaping international relationships.Footnote 13 In this context, heritage becomes a “strategic narrative” to enhance transboundary interconnectivity and international cooperation.Footnote 14 Although Winter hints that heritage diplomacy can cause contestation and conflict, his focus is placed on the function of heritage for international cooperation.
Because the existing scholarly studies on heritage diplomacy tends to focus on the use of heritage for international cooperation, the concept of heritage diplomacy remains undertheorized and not consciously examined as a thing to fail. To embrace the broad concept of heritage diplomacy, including failed cases, this paper suggests that heritage diplomacy should be understood in terms of the target audience and strategic inclusivity in the process of making heritage. As part of public diplomacy, heritage diplomacy targets foreign actors whether they are political elites or the general public. However, public diplomacy can be also driven by the state's interest in winning the “loyalty of the citizens.”Footnote 15 The variation of emphasis contributes to a different outcome, as can be explained in two opposite forms.
At one end of the spectrum of heritage diplomacy, there is a strategy to win external support for international cooperation over heritage. Taking China's diplomatic use of the Silk Roads as an example, Winter explains how a historical narrative of cultural heritage aims to reconfigure the world's geographical landscape.Footnote 16 The heritage-making process is inclusive in its invitation of non-Chinese nationals to join the discourse of the Silk Roads. If the inclusivity is ensured in the process of making heritage, even the sites of “dark” or “difficult” heritage, associated with the negative legacy of violence, pain, and shame, can become resources of soft power. As Logan and Reeves suggest, dark heritage often causes controversies either for a different interpretation or silencing the others.Footnote 17 However, if dark heritage is constructed through transnational collaboration with the inclusion of those voices outside the national boarder, it can work as an asset for states to redefine their contemporary role as internationalist and their relations with other countries in a more open manner.Footnote 18 This type of heritage diplomacy is by its nature outward-looking.
At the other end of the spectrum, heritage diplomacy is driven by an internal desire for mobilizing national nostalgia. Nostalgia is difficult to separate from heritage.Footnote 19 Because heritage values do not simply involve the recovery of lost sites and communities but the creation of meaning for the future generations, heritage can be exploited for a strategic political purpose. Not just internally creating heritage for the nation to remember the selected past in a way of fulfilling the present needs, states engage in heritage diplomacy to cultivate the international endorsement of its national narrative. Because the target audience is primarily domestic nationals, it is less important to gain the support of external actors. Even if the narrative of national nostalgia goes against the direction of international cooperation, states will continue to promote what they regard as “heritage” for the next generations. Heritage diplomacy can thus end up as unilateral disseminating information that is not shared by or even offensive to external actors.
The nomination process of UNESCO's World Heritage list shows the conduct of heritage diplomacy in action. As Winter points out that state parties often use a “language of shared heritage” to justify inscription on the World Heritage list,Footnote 20 it is through the language of cross-cultural connections to make national heritage become an internationally important asset that retains the outstanding universal value (OUV). Once national heritage enters UNESCO's World Heritage lists, it is considered the result of multilateral agreement, screened by expert organizations, such as the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and/or the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and unanimously agreed by the World Heritage Committee. However, this consensus-based decision making is often a disguise, because the World Heritage Committee has only twenty-one member states and political concerns can turn a final decision sometimes against the recommendation of expert organizations.Footnote 21 Thus, contestation arises when enlisted heritage represents only one historical narrative and ignores others.
Japan's Meiji Nostalgia
This section offers a sketch of Japan's national nostalgia for the Meiji era and the involvement of the Japanese conservative government in the construction of that Meiji nostalgia. The fascination of the Meiji Restoration and its reformers in the nation-state formation is widely shared among the Japanese public. Novels and dramas, tourism, and theme parks have created a positive image of the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods.Footnote 22 Sakamoto Ryoma, for example, is a favorite character in the Japanese entertainment and tourism industries. As the low-ranking samurai who contributed to the Meiji Restoration, his image appeals to youngsters for its connections with adventure, love, and modernity and constitutes a “nostalgia for the dream of a modern global nation.”Footnote 23
Shiba Ryotaro, a prolific writer of historical novels whose stories were known as fact-based and objective, was also fascinated by those Bakumatsu and Meiji reformers and contributed to the popularization of their stories in post-war Japan.Footnote 24 For Shiba, the Meiji era was a painful process of readjustment that all the people in Japan have gone through in order to cope with the Western-centric international order. He contrasted the Meiji era with the “dogmatic” and “egocentric” Showa, which fell into the hand of militarism. By characterizing Japanese protagonists in comparison with others such as Russians, Westerners, Asians, and Ainu, “Shiba's narrative ‘rescued’ Japan from the shadows of its negative history and provides a reassurance to the domestic audience about the peaceful and superior nature of the Japanese nation.”Footnote 25
The popularity of cultural products and entertainment drawn from the memory of the glorious Meiji period does not mean that Japan has been united under a single dominant national nostalgia. The center to left media such as Asahi and Mainichi newspapers recognize the need of acknowledging the dark side of the Meiji era as well as its historical connection to the later period of Japanese military aggression. The majority of professional historians are not blind to those who suffered behind the military and economic development of Japan. However, as Fujiwara argues, “there has emerged a widespread trend to reclaim the glory of Japanese history that has been supposedly suppressed and distorted by a combination of pressures from neighboring countries abroad and leftist campaigns at home.”Footnote 26 The millennium generations have been exposed to China and South Korea's criticism of Japanese historical “amnesia.” Japanese history textbooks, a series of statements by the conservative politicians of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP), as well as a prime minister's visit to the Yasukuni shrine, cause international controversies as they downgrade or even ignore the memories of Japan's colonialism and wartime aggression. But the majority of the Japanese population has become increasingly more cynical, as they regard such criticism as a product of historical manipulation and exaggeration.Footnote 27
When the nationalist historical narrative gains more support in contemporary Japan, a group of political and academic elites emphasize the Meiji reforming era as an amazing period of Japanese transformation. Taking the Meiji Restoration as a rather long-term process over the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Kitaoka Shin'ichi, emeritus professor and political scientist at Tokyo University and the president of the Japan International Cooperation Agency, describes the Meiji Restoration as a “great leap forwards.”Footnote 28 He argues that this era was remarkable for the rise of low-ranked samurai and farmers with their capability and willingness as well as the radical reform of the traditional fiefdom that departed from the policy of “expelling the barbarians” and paved the way toward constitutionalism. Memories of the Meiji Restoration and Japan's militarism and wartime aggression are severed in this discourse.
The conservative government under Prime Minister Abe Shinzo also has promoted the positive legacy of the Meiji Restoration. Although commemorating the national legacy is not unique to Japan, Abe's promotion of Meiji nostalgia should not be understood in isolation from his political agendas. Since his return to the Prime Minister's Office at the end of 2012, Abe and other conservative LDP members in his cabinet have initiated their revisionist agendas in foreign policy, historical memory, school education, and the 1947 constitution, among others, even though the outcome is rather limited by institutional and emotional constraints in Japan.Footnote 29 Under those circumstances, presenting the Meiji legacy as separate from the memories of Japanese military aggression appears benign but is also expected to reduce emotional obstacles to constitutional revision, including a change of the pacifist provisions of Article 9. In his ceremonial speech, Abe made an analogy between Meiji Japan and contemporary Japan as both facing “crisis.”Footnote 30 The former struggled with the rapid change of Japan's environment by Western imperialism, whereas, on the one hand, the latter faced the domestic challenge of low birth rate and aging population and, on the other, rapid changes of the international society. Abe narrated the devotion of the Meiji people to the nation as a reference point for current Japanese to follow. The positive conception of Japanese Meiji heroes is used to encourage people, including women and foreigners, to face up to the challenges in today's global competition and internal moral decline. Linking the past to the current challenges, Abe emphasized the innovative minds and revolutionary transformation of the Japanese nation as a whole.
Disregarding the impact of Japan's military rise underlines the obsessive adherence to the single and linear historical narrative of the successful Japan. Botsman and Clulow alert that the centennial national celebration of the Meiji Restoration manipulates the past for the contemporary political agenda of those in power.Footnote 31 For example, a year-long celebration of the anniversary of the Meiji Restoration in 1968 under Prime Minister Sato Eisaku, which happened for the first time after the end of WWII, promoted the positive reinterpretation of the Meiji Restoration in the way of outstripping the Japanese professional historians' cautious attitude toward the celebration of national nostalgia.Footnote 32 Similarly, in 2018, the Abe government mounted ceremonial events and commemoration activities for the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Meiji era.Footnote 33 According to Botsman, both national celebrations derive from the broader efforts of the LDP to promote the goal of re-militarization.Footnote 34
From the perspective focusing on the domestic conditions, Japan's World Heritage nomination of SJMIR is part and parcel of Abe's attempt to push their political agendas, primarily targeting the domestic audience. An attempt to mobilize national nostalgia is taken into the international arena, namely, UNESCO's World Heritage. Once it is done, other actors outside Japan, who do not share this nostalgia, cannot remain silent due to their fear for losing a moral ground of justifying their historical demands in the international arena.Footnote 35 The following sections examine the historical narrative of SJMIR, as well as a long-term, contested process of Japan's World Heritage nomination.
Historical Narrative of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution
Japan's official narrative of SJMIR, which was certified as World Heritage in 2015, appears on the webpage of UNESCO's World Heritage Centre:
The site encompasses a series of twenty-three component parts, mainly located in the southwest of Japan. It bears testimony to the rapid industrialization of the country from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, through the development of the iron and steel industry, shipbuilding and coal mining. The site illustrates the process by which feudal Japan sought technology transfer from Europe and America from the middle of the nineteenth century and how this technology was adapted to the country's needs and social traditions. The site testifies to what is considered to be the first successful transfer of Western industrialization to a non-Western nation.Footnote 36
The broad historical narrative presented here marks Japan's successful industrialization in a turbulent period in which the Japanese nation and, more broadly, non-Western people encountered advanced Western technology and a strong military. Emphasis is placed on the rapid development of Japanese heavy industries as a way to meet “the need to improve the defenses of the nation and particularly its sea-going defenses in response to foreign threats.”Footnote 37 The “technology transfer from Europe and America” to Japan is described not as a passive but proactive movement with the initiative of the Japanese people. As a result, Japan became “a world-ranking industrial nation by the early twentieth century,” and “profoundly influenced the wider development of East Asia.”Footnote 38 The description also specifies that the period of this rapid industrialization is just “over fifty years between 1850s and 1910.”Footnote 39 Its OUV is discerned based on the criteria (ii) to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design and (iv) to be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural, or technological ensemble or landscape, which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history. Although the physical conditions of some properties are vulnerable and under conservation challenges, a high level of integrity and authenticity is recognized in the nominated properties. Thus, “collectively the sites are an outstanding reflection of the way Japan moved from a clan-based society to a major industrial society.”Footnote 40
The mechanism of “serial nominations” on the World Heritage List allowed Japan to bring together more than twenty components of industrial complexes spreading across eight prefectures under the same roof. As the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention suggests, serial nominations can be used to nominate two or more properties in “cultural, social or functional links over time that provide, where relevant, landscape, ecological, evolutionary or habitat connectivity the same thematic group or geological period in a single nomination dossier.”Footnote 41 Although the inherent connections and coherence are sometimes doubtful and even contested, the number of serial nominations has increased to the level that World Heritage advisory bodies seek to articulate how these nominations differ from single-component nominations.Footnote 42 Successful examples of serial nomination range from Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis (Argentina and Brazil, 1984) to Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape (the United Kingdom, 2006). Accordingly, the grand historical narrative of the Meiji “industrial revolution” was constructed to connect multiple properties spread across Japan.
Prime Minister Abe publicly endorsed the historical narrative of SJMIR at the reception held after Japan sent its nomination file to UNESCO's World Heritage Centre in 2014. He congratulated Japan's nomination as follows:
Japan amazed the world as the first non-Western country to ride the wave of an industrial revolution to transform into a modern state without becoming a colony. The passion of the officials fighting to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate, who hoped for the development of the country through the construction of an industrial state, became the driving force for this. Through repeated trial and error with traditional craftsmanship, they created the foundation for the craftsmanship nation that we are so proud of today. In building Japan during the Meiji period, they were able to construct industrial systems and infrastructure during a time of difficulty. The industrialists of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution embody that spirit of facing difficulty head on.Footnote 43
Abe emphasized the enthusiasm and brevity of the samurai warriors who fought for the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and established a new Meiji government, which contributed to the development and prosperity of the nation. His statement fits the overall discourse of the Meiji era under the Abe government.
Local politicians and corporate managers echoed Abe's statement. The official website of SJMIR, managed by the cabinet secretariat, provides the voices of the local governors and company presidents. The terminologies of “hope,” “challenging spirit,” “craftmanship” (monozukuri), “opening a new path, and connection with the world” are used to remind the current generations in Japan of the openness, creativity, and frontier spirit that might have been submerged in the twenty-first century.Footnote 44 SJMIR is presented as the symbolic icon for the Japanese nation linking the past, present, and future with a hope to fight against challenges based on people's power.
Packaging Local Sites in the Framework of Meiji Industrial Heritage
Internal Cooperation and Conflicts
Japan submitted its nomination file of SJMIR to UNESCO's World Heritage Centre in 2014. Although the historical narrative of Japan's endeavor for modernization and industrialization during the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods is popular among the Japanese, and SJMIR had been already included in Japan's tentative list for the World Heritage List of 2015, it was not the first choice of the Council for Cultural Affairs, which is in charge of the World Heritage nomination process.Footnote 45 As I outline below, before the official announcement of the nomination, internal debates had taken place within Japan, concerning the appropriateness of the nomination and a potential controversy that the nomination might incur. However, the emergence of new actors initiating the nomination and the rise of a new institutional structure for the construction of SJMIR dismissed the opposing voices.
Conventionally, Japan's engagement in UNESCO's World Heritage is under the provision of the Council for Cultural Affairs in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) and Japan's Cultural Agency (JCA). From the outset, MEXT officials and academic members of the World Heritage Committee in the Council for Cultural Affairs acknowledged the challenges in terms of proper management for the protection and preservation of sites and properties.Footnote 46 In particular, the inclusion of sites such as Mitsubishi No. 3 Dry Dock and Mitsubishi Giant Cantilever Crane in Nagasaki Shipyards was unprecedented, as they were operating assets that rest outside the scope of Japan's existing legislation on cultural property (Law for the Protection of Cultural Property, 1950).Footnote 47 Company owners of the operational assets were also reluctant to support the idea of including those assets in the World Heritage nomination because this might create an extra obligation to protect and preserve their properties in the current status forever.Footnote 48 Moreover, officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) raised concerns about a potential conflict with China and South Korea because the narrative of industrialization in some industrial sites is related to “forced labor” issues.
However, a new political team, led by Kato Koko, the author of Sangyo Isan (Industrial Heritage),Footnote 49 the first academic type of book on industrial heritage in Japanese, bypassed the conventional decision-making process. Its venture started at the turn of the millennium. Kato approached local governors and corporate members in the Kyushu-Yamaguchi region to develop the idea of Meiji “industrial heritage.” Shimazu Kimiyasu, the vice chairman of Shimazu Limited, fondly reflects that Kato's idea revived his ambition to place the collection of reflection furnace and other industrial machineries and objects produced under the influential lord Shimazu Nariakira in a broad history of industrial technology and industrial archeology.Footnote 50 As his business specializes in “contents tourism” featuring Japanese history, he argues that one of the important strategies is to construct a proper historical narrative to make sense of historical sites and properties and to create a network with other related sites in Japan.Footnote 51 Kagoshima governor Ito Yuichiro was also keen to use the historical sites and properties for tourism and regional revitalization. As local economic and political interests merge under the broad idea of Meiji industrial heritage, the regional consortium for the promotion of the sites, named the “Modern Industrial Heritage Sites in Kyushu Yamaguchi Region,” was formed in 2006, while non-Japanese heritage experts, mostly connected with the ICOMOS and the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), were invited to Kyushu-Yamaguchi regions to examine the sites and properties for advice.
The local project in the Kyushu-Yamaguchi region transformed into a national project in 2012. Although Kato was not a politician, she was well connected with the LDP members as well as senior bureaucrats because her father, Kato Mustuki, was one of the leading members of the LDP, a right-hand man of Abe Shintaro, who was current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's father. In 2006, Kato secured support from the special advisor to the prime minister, Izumi Hiroto.Footnote 52 In 2012, the Office for the Promotion of Regional Revitalization in the Cabinet Secretariat established the “Expert Committee on the Industrial Heritage Including Operative Properties” whereby three Western experts – Sir Neil Cossons (former chairman of English Heritage), Michael Pearson (Heritage Planning Consultant in Australia), and Dinu Bumbaru (ICOMOS Canada), who had already served as advisors for the regional consortium for the World Heritage nomination – became the committee members. In particular, Cossons, as one of the most established authority figures in industrial heritage, took the non-Japanese chairman's role.Footnote 53
Local governors and corporate leaders who promoted the idea of Meiji industrial heritage welcomed the move that their regional campaigns had become national. They recognized that local achievement should be cherished as an important contribution to the nation. Shimazu argues:
Shuseikan, the industrial complex that Shimazu Nariakira, created to produce armaments, glass, ceramics, and farm tools, is not just technological transfer but it is for the future of the Japanese nation. At that time, many feudal domains focused on their military, but Nariakira believed that his activities should not be limited to Satsuma but nationwide to create a rich and strong Japan and build equal relationships with other countries in trade and diplomacy. … Those who are involved in monozukuri created a great product one after another without any previous foundation. This energy comes not from the order from the top but from the high spirit of those people to do something for the nation.Footnote 54
Imagining that innovative heroes in Satsuma have a desire to contribute to the Japanese nation as a whole, the local nostalgia for local heroes in the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods is converted into the national one.
Significant tension was found between the cabinet secretariat and JCA. Cossons' letter to the representatives of JCA demonstrates that JCA is reluctant to support the nomination of SJMIR. He argues that the sites and properties of SJMIR met all the requirements to have OUV and deserve the World Heritage designation.Footnote 55 However, this letter did not seem to eliminate concerns among the members of the Council for Cultural Affairs in JCA. For some members of the World Heritage Committee in the Council of Cultural Affairs, JCA, the fundamental problem was the lack of communication with the cabinet secretariat's expert committee.Footnote 56
Nevertheless, during the process of developing a plan of the World Heritage nomination, it was decided that the application should be focused on the time slot until approximately 1910. This is a way of rejecting criticism that questions an alternative historical narrative of some of those sites. While there was little consensus and no direct communication between the Council for Cultural Affairs and cabinet secretariat's expert committee, Kato's message on the promotion of Japanese modernization as World Heritage succeeded in the end. Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide announced in September 2013 that the Japanese government decided to prioritize nomination of the sites to the “Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki,” the primary choice by the Council for Cultural Affairs. Afterward, Kato organized the international conference of industrial heritage in July 2014 when ICOMOS experts visited the nominated sites for inspection. The scale of this conference was unprecedentedly big and colorful: over 1,700 participants, including high-profile politicians and corporate figures such as Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the chairmen of Mitsubishi Corporations, Nippon Steel, and Sumitomo Metal Corporation.Footnote 57
Constructing a Narrative of the Meiji Industrial Heritage
The main architects of the SJMIR historical narrative are a mixture of Japanese and Western industrial heritage experts. Although the inclusion of experts in preparing the nomination file is a standard practice, it was unprecedented to have the engagement of a substantial number of non-Japanese heritage experts and consultants from the outset. They were invited to examine the potential sites and properties by local and national governments and to share their knowledge and perspectives in international symposia held in Japan (e.g. Tokyo in 2006 and 2014; Hagi in 2007; Kitakyushu in 2013). As noted earlier, three of them became members of a newly established committee under the cabinet secretariat and visited all the potential sites for World Heritage nomination to “refine the narrative and rationale for the World Heritage nomination.”Footnote 58 In this way, they contributed to discovering the potential sites for World Heritage, confirming historical facts and descriptions, and crafting a narrative for the serial nomination of Meiji industrial heritage. In this process, SJMIR was developed for the World Heritage inscription.
Although inputs from Western experts played a significant part, it was Kato Koko and her Japanese team who finalized the construction of the historical narrative of SJMIR. The selected voices of non-Japanese experts appear on the SJMIR official website, which is managed by the cabinet secretariat, with a notice that the site is “directed by Kato Koko,” and the website of the National Consortium of Industrial Heritage, established in 2013 to support the World Heritage nomination of SJMIR. In the following section, I will first examine how those websites present the voices of Western experts and, second, demonstrate the descent of their voices found in other sources.
Stuart B. Smith, the former director of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum and the former Secretary-General of TICCIH, engaged in the project for more than a decade. Kato met Smith as early as 1992. He was one of the key experts who prepared the British serial nomination of “Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape” for the World Heritage designation.Footnote 59 Following the successful outcome of inscription in 2006, Smith engaged more substantially in building up a narrative for Japan's industrial heritage.Footnote 60 He introduced other heritage experts, including Cossons and Barry Gamble, a freelance heritage consultant, to Kato's project and consistently supported it until his death in 2014. According to the English website of the National Consortium of Industrial Heritage, Smith viewed SJMIR as a remarkable example of “self-industrialization.”Footnote 61 The website also presents as his view that Japan's industrial heritage should be severed from upon the memory of Japanese military activities:
The subsequent involvement of Japan with the First World War on behalf of the Allies does not play any part in this [SJMIR] story, nor do the excesses of the Japanese army in Manchuria during the 1920s and 1930s have any significance. The Pacific War was the unfortunate outcome of the Imperial designs of the Japanese armed forces, resulting in the Allied use of atomic weapons. For this reason many people chose to avoid discussing the period from the Meiji restoration onwards but there is very little to be ashamed of in the incredible pace of technological and social development which took place during the forty years between 1868 and 1908. This heroic period of Japanese development is something of which they should be proud, and it is something which is of world significance, not only because Japan became one of the world's superpowers, but because at the same time Japanism swept the world creating the Arts and Crafts movement and also Art Nouveau, and a profound admiration for Japanese culture. Now is the time to inform the Japanese nation and the rest of the world of the importance of Japanese industrialization and to celebrate it by making sure that it becomes a World Heritage Site.Footnote 62
This remark suggests that the majority of Japanese do not appreciate the legacy of Japan's industrialization and development. As the third section of this paper explains, this is questionable, given that the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods have remained popular within Japan. However, with this assumption, the argument goes on to say that the “heroic period of Japanese development” should not be forgotten simply because of what followed afterward. The emphasis is placed more on the Japanese ability to adapt Western knowledge and technology to its own culture and environment as well as its creativity, which can influence the Western world. In this way, Meiji industrial heritage should be celebrated as a symbol of East–West cultural integration.
The Japanese official site of SJMIR introduces, in the form of interview reports, the voices of key international figures who have been involved in the World Heritage nomination. Cossons' voice is presented as a full endorsement and praise of the OUV of SJMIR that “signified the rise of Japan as an industrial state in the late-nineteenth century.”Footnote 63 Dinu Bumbaru, Canadian industrial heritage expert who drafted the “Joint ICOMOS – TICCIH Principles for the conservation of industrial heritage sites, structures, areas and landscapes,” known as Dublin principles, particularly showed interest in the inclusion of operational sites, i.e., Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, and Miike Port, in the World Heritage nomination.Footnote 64 He suggested that the inclusion of the operational sites and machinery demand appropriate policies and measures to protect the sites of industrial heritage and welcomed Japanese initiatives in taking up this challenging task.
Linked to the website of the National Consortium of Industrial Heritage, the video clips demonstrate the positive view of Dietrich Soyez, German geographer and industrial heritage expert, over one of the SJMIR properties, Yawata Ironworks. In 2013, he was invited by Kato to the Yawata Ironworks at Kitakyushu City, currently part of Nippon Steel, to advise for the World Heritage nomination. In the video, he suggested to Kato and other Japanese:
During the application process, and in your application process to make this World Heritage, I think you should stress the fact that this is the Japanese world heritage site but with the German past, and if you stress that these trans-boundary, cross-border relationships between the original German plant and German engineering and what became very genuinely Japanese, then you present a unique line of argumentation because most world heritage sites are decidedly national, but this is a transnational asset for an application, from my point of view. This is my personal point of view, a transnational geographer's point of view.Footnote 65
Those selected voices in the SJMIR websites suggest that they are keen to take a challenging task. Smith had a huge interest in the rediscovery of Japan's industrialization's sites and properties. Bumbaru is more for the preservation of operational assets. Soyez identifies a great value of the factory site as a cross-border, transnational heritage. The SJMIR websites suggest that Meiji industrial heritage is unique and significant, and, further, that the World Heritage nomination process itself is a historic legacy of cooperation between Japanese and Western teams that achieved an impossible mission.
However, other sources suggest different perspectives from those involved in the nomination process. Soyez, for example, consistently acknowledges that industrial heritage, in particular in the iron and steel sector, is marked by uncomfortable and dark historical facets.Footnote 66 Observing the transborder industrial sites, machinery, and buildings in Germany and Japan, he points to the inseparable connection between industrial heritage and cross-border deportations of forced laborers in response to the production needs during wars.Footnote 67 Instead of just highlighting the positive elements of industrial heritage, which also means the side-lining of the tragedy in the history of iron and steel industry, he signaled a potential of making the most of the multifaceted nature of industrial heritage, arguing that the sites “could become special places of memory and reconciliation, not despite but because of their history, a turn that is currently characterizing a rapidly growing field of academic and economic interests: dark tourism.”Footnote 68 Those words demonstrate that he recognizes the need to address both the positive and negative facets of industrial heritage.
Even Smith, who had been involved in this project for long, wrote more distantly about the two historical narratives in Japan. In Smith's words:
To many Japanese people it is seen that the natural progression of industrialization and the growth of the Japanese Empire was the Second World War and its disastrous consequences for Japan. However, the consultants believe that unless people understand this story, they will never understand why Japan rose from being an undiscovered country in the 1850s to the world's second superpower in the present century [emphasis added by the author].Footnote 69
As with his statement presented on the site's official website, Smith seems to suggest a hegemonic historical view in Japan that industrialization and growth of the Japanese empire have a direct connection to its military aggression. At the same time, he indicates that it was the Japanese heritage team, not himself, that aimed to highlight the story of the country's development.
The Japanese team has never acknowledged the dark facets of Meiji industrial heritage. Only positive expressions of Japan and industrial heritage, such as Japan as “the first Asian country to undergo such an industrial transformation” (Cossons) and Meiji industrial heritage as “trans-boundary, cross-border” relationships (Soyez) were adopted by Japan. Although Soyez's original report on Yawata Steel and Japan–Germany industrial connection made suggestions to “accept different – and maybe conflicting – interpretations and perspectives,” the chapters including such remarks were completely dropped in the Japanese translation. According to Soyez, it was based on his consent because Kitakyushu officials in Tokyo in 2017 explained to him the reasons for the deletion of those chapters.Footnote 70 First, his task is primarily to provide a first overview regarding crucial documents at the Archives in Cologne and not future interpretation strategies. Second, the city wants to avoid generating the impression that the city had agreed with his suggestions. This episode confirms that the recommendations and references from Western industrial heritage experts were taken selectively by the Japanese team and, in this way, contributed to the construction of SJMIR's historical narrative.
Japan's Response to Korean Protests and Contestation
Japan's nomination file of SJMIR caused a visible discord between Japan and South Korea at the thirty-ninth session of the World Heritage Committee held in Bonn, Germany, in 2015. By that time, Japan had already secured an ICOMOS recommendation, but it also had invited criticism from the South Korean government and NGOs, as well as the Chinese government, that wanted to remember Japanese modern history differently.Footnote 71 For them, the island of Hashima in SJMIR was the symbol of Japanese militarism and aggression. In South Korea whereby a group of “forced labor” survivors had repeatedly sued the related Japanese companies for individual compensation since 1997, the news of Japan's SJMIR nomination invited nationwide criticism. The National Assembly of South Korea passed a resolution in 2015 to denounce Japan's nomination and urge UNESCO to prevent Japan's attempt to forget the approximately 57,900 Koreans who were forced to work in seven of the sites in the Meiji industrial heritage.Footnote 72
As one of the twenty-one committee member states at the decisive meeting of the World Heritage Committee, the South Korean government voiced out its view and refused to support the inscription of Japan's industrial heritage into the World Heritage List. Due to the ongoing struggles among the chair (Germany), South Korea, and Japan, the schedule of the whole meeting was changed to postpone the vote of the decision by one day. As unanimous agreement is a conventional way to make decisions, the Japanese and Korean delegates eventually had a closed meeting. After the discussion, the Japanese ambassador Sato Kuni, the permanent delegate of Japan to UNESCO, stated at the table of the World Heritage Committee meeting:
Japan is prepared to take measures that allow an understanding that there were a 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 an information center.Footnote 73
With the promise that Japan would provide a full history of the sites, including Korean and other victims of Japanese militarism, the Korean government agreed to support the inscription.
Kato was there at the meeting. Because Japan's nomination focused on the time slot until approximately 1910, as noted previously, Korean criticism looked unfair to her. After the World Heritage meeting, Kato contributed her report to Newsweek Japan, criticizing South Korean “politicization.”Footnote 74 She wrote that ICOMOS Korea and Korean NGOs “relentlessly” protested and lobbied members of the World Heritage Committee to make them accept the Korean view of “forced labor” issues. In particular, she gave an alert that Germany, the host country of the session, was “cajoled” by South Korea's “propaganda” and was “tolerant” to South Korean activities. She also expressed her strong frustration with MOFA's lack of actions against South Korean activities. She found it as a defeat for the Japanese delegates to negotiate with South Korea in a closed meeting, instead of using all measures to stop what she regarded as unfair and outrageous South Korean action, and blamed MOFA's culture “to be nice to others and compromising.” She argues,
History is a matter of sovereignty. No matter what South Korea and China say, we should not easily give in. Even if the previous government gave in, it is necessary to correct once you notice the mistake. What other countries do or say does not matter. The important thing is to assert that what you think is right is right. This way sounds like the way of Prime Minister Abe. What is required for the future is to work as a whole [of all Japan] to disseminate the real values of World Heritage to the world.Footnote 75
According to the seminar report on Kato's talk given at a conservative NPO, Kato reflected in more detail upon the difficult path that she went through due to strong opposition from different sectors.Footnote 76 After all, MEXT, MOFA, and members of the Council for Cultural Affairs in JCA were against the nomination of Meiji industrial heritage. According to Kato, the objection had five reasons:
(1) the potential of causing a history textbook controversy with South Korea and China;
(2) the provocation of Japanese nationalism;
(3) the inclusion of operational assets, which did not fall in the existing legal framework;
(4) the administrative difficulty in protecting the sites spreading across prefectures; and
(5) the difficulty in managing private properties included in the nominated sites.
In this paper, she added that some council members and MOFA were worried about trouble with South Korea, and, even after the cabinet's decision over the nomination, MOFA continued to exhibit its opposition because of the possibility of damaging the Japan–South Korea relationship. Kato reiterated that it is “necessary to send a message of what is correct as a correct thing whatever other countries respond.”Footnote 77
After the inscription, the cabinet secretariat established a new sector for the interpretation of the Meiji industrial heritage, which also had to work to meet Japan's promise at the World Heritage Committee meeting to establish an information center. Having obtained a new position as a special advisor to the Abe Cabinet (2015–2019), Kato engaged in the interpretation process. Japan's state of conservation report on the Meiji industrial heritage, submitted to UNESCO's World Heritage Centre in November 2017 (revised in January 2018), was not satisfactory for the Koreans. Using the term “industrial workers” to describe what the Koreans call forced laborers, the report explained that Japan was planning to establish an “Industrial Heritage Information Center” within the fiscal year of 2019 to “share the primary historical documents regarding workers’ stories with the public.”Footnote 78 However, because the location of this center is not within the sites of World Heritage or related museums but in Tokyo, the degree of seriousness to reach out to the visitors of the sites was doubtful from the outset. The content of the exhibition, which became available in June 2020, was also a disappointment for South Korea, as they could not “see any kind of effort to commemorate the victims in any part of the exhibit.”Footnote 79
Kato also engaged in the task of collecting information and oral testimonies on “drafted workers.” The website of the National Consortium of Industrial Heritage provides links to the testimonies of the local people living near Gunkanjima that no “forced labor” took place in Gunkanjima.Footnote 80 Arguing that there was little difference in terms of treatment between Japanese and non-Japanese workers, she also contributed to a historical revisionist magazine her article denying forced labor in Gunkanjima.Footnote 81 Those words and deeds were opposite to an impression given by the Japanese ambassador on the table of the World Heritage Committee in 2015. The potentialities of SJMIR as a resource for creating shared dark heritage were shut down.
In a nutshell, the entire process of nomination and interpretation of SJMIR was dominated by the Japanese initiative for mobilizing Meiji nostalgia without concern for the depth of conflicts over what to remember and what to forget in terms of modernization and industrialization in East Asia. Although Japan's World Heritage promotion did not directly deny the Korean side of the story, it nonetheless downgraded the historical narrative of Japanese colonialism, which the Koreans remember as having started before 1910. Gunkanjima, presented through the prism of Japanese modernization and industrialization, is an existential threat to those Koreans whose identity is grounded on the memory of “forced labor” under the Japanese colonial rule. Korean reactions also alerted the Japanese promoters of SJMIR whose concern is about the securing of what they believe as correct Japanese history. Japan's national campaign for mobilizing its conservative Meiji nostalgia gained momentum due to the acquisition of the World Heritage designation and moved further in the direction of eliminating alternative historical narratives of SJMIR.
Conclusion
Japan's World Heritage nomination of SJMIR provides more than just a usual picture of a Japan that remembers a glorious national legacy while forgetting an inconvenient past. It is a result of Japan's internal conflicts, which were won by a new heritage promotion team led by Kato and Western heritage experts under the Abe government. Without this new political force, the nomination process might be different or even would not have taken place. In the world where issues of the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women are internationally renowned, SJMIR provides a symbolic counternarrative of Japan's industrialization and modernization against the historical memory that connects Japan's industrialization with colonialism and war. By inscribing the celebratory memory of Japan's industrial past for the present and future generations, it feeds into the government's domestic agenda of revising the constitution including Article 9. For this reason, Japan's active engagement in globalizing its national nostalgia in the form of heritage diplomacy works for conflict. Japan's World Heritage nomination process, as well as its follow-up activities after the inscription, arises from these complex interplays of national, regional, and international forces where multiple nostalgias and traumas are at play.
To identify the characteristics of Japan's SJMIR World Heritage promotion in a broad spectrum of heritage diplomacy, a short comparison with China's Silk Roads diplomacy is useful. China's reconstructive use of the Silk Roads is based on the geographical imaginary and cultural concept of the glorious period of Chinese civilization. In terms of highlighting the positive legacy of the nation, Japan's promotion of SJMIR is the same. However, three points fundamentally differ from China's case.
First, compared with China's Silk Roads history, the history of Japan's SJMIR is a recent past. Historical details are recorded far much better than the pre-modern times and have been more diversely used for teaching, commemorating, and politically mobilizing history. It is thus more difficult to omit the dark facets. While the Silk Roads is a broad, imaginary geocultural concept, where many different things can be placed under a romanticized veil, SJMIR is more specific to the transformation of the Japanese nation. Although memories of the sites are diverse, including both positive and negative, Japan's application limits a focus on the specific period of the mid-nineteenth century to 1910. For external actors willing to remember the lost sites and experiences differently, this appears as an intentional act to silence an alternative historical narrative of the sites.
Second, the target audience of SJMIR is primarily domestic nationals. As described by Prime Minister Abe, this commemoration of Japan's Meiji industrial heritage highlights the innovation and creativity of the Japanese people in the past, which is a much-needed spirit for the present Japanese generations. The historical narrative of SJMIR as shared heritage is built around a remarkable connection between the East and West. Nevertheless, Abe rarely talks about SJMIR in his diplomatic negotiations. Despite the conciliatory attitude presented by the Japanese diplomat at the World Heritage Committee meeting, Japan's interpretation strategy of SJMIR also indicates that the Korean “forced labor” stories are eliminated by the use of the Japanese term “industrial workers.” As the key promoter of SJMIR, Kato collects only the testimonies of the Japanese locals about Gunkanjima and domestically promotes the historical narrative that denies Korean memories of forced labor in Japan.
Third, Japan's World Heritage nomination is a symbolic process in which Japan obtains a “third person” such as Western heritage experts to better construct a transnational strategic narrative that is catered to the criteria of UNESCO's World Heritage. Various interests in regional revitalization, the enhancement of content tourism, and the mobilization of national legacy have converged on the World Heritage nomination of SJMIR. The process excludes those who are concerned with Japan's relations with South Korea. The advisory committee in the cabinet secretariat prioritized the World Heritage nomination to incorporate the national Meiji nostalgia into the global heritage discourse.
After all, the mobilization of national nostalgia can also mobilize another person's trauma. Heritage drawn upon national nostalgia can close the door to plural remembrance in popular memory. To escape from this route of conflict, the act of globalizing national nostalgia or trauma should be negotiated with the foreign public, particularly with those who have different memories and opinions of the past. If the state eliminates any room for multiple historical narratives of the nations and individuals from arising, its heritage diplomacy functions to push alternative historical narratives into oblivion.
