In July 2015, UNESCO inscribed "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining" on the World Heritage List. The inscription of 23 sites across eight prefectures was celebrated as recognition of Japan's rapid industrialization — but it immediately became a flashpoint in transnational memory politics. This module examines the 2015 inscription process, Japan's unfulfilled commitments, and the counter-hegemonic responses from civil society organizations in Japan and Korea.

The 2015 Inscription and Its Controversy

The nomination of Meiji industrial sites proceeded under an explicit temporal framing: the heritage period was defined as 1850s–1910, celebrating Japan's transformation from feudal society to industrial power. This periodization was not neutral. By anchoring the designation in the Meiji era while many constituent sites — including Hashima — continued operation well into the 1940s, the official framing separated industrial "achievement" from industrial exploitation.

At the 39th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Bonn, South Korea objected to the nomination on grounds that it omitted the history of Korean forced labor at these sites during World War II. After intense diplomatic negotiations, Japan's representative made a statement that would become central to subsequent controversy:

This commitment was immediately contested. The day after the inscription, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide clarified that "forced to work" did not mean "forced labor" — a distinction without apparent difference that signaled the government's intention to minimize the acknowledgment it had just made.

Periodization as a Technology of Concealment

The choice to limit the heritage period to 1850s–1910 performs what critics characterize as temporal violence — or, in the Guidebook's more precise formulation, periodization as a political technology of concealment. The Guidebook argues that by defining the story to end in 1910, the nomination produces "a strange composition including only a small portion of Japan's modern industrial facilities," united only by their capacity to generate national pride without generating uncomfortable questions.

This is not merely a matter of exclusion. The Guidebook insists that Japan's coal, iron, and shipbuilding complex grew through successive wars (Sino-Japanese, Russo-Japanese, World War I, and the Asia-Pacific War) and through colonial extraction. Any interpretive strategy that isolates "industrialization" from war and empire misrepresents causality rather than merely omitting context. The coercion and militarization that official heritage excludes actually structured the industrial system that UNESCO recognized.

This periodization serves ideological purposes beyond administrative convenience. The Meiji period (1868–1912) occupies a privileged position in Japanese national memory as an era of modernization, national strengthening, and successful resistance to Western imperialism. Anchoring industrial heritage in this period frames the sites as monuments to Japanese achievement rather than as infrastructure of empire.

Yoshida Shōin and the Ideological Frame

The inclusion of Shōka Sonjuku (松下村塾) — the private academy of Yoshida Shōin — within the World Heritage designation reveals the deeper ideological project at work. Yoshida, executed in 1859 for his role in anti-shogunate activities, became a posthumous icon of Meiji nationalism. His academy educated several future leaders of the Meiji government.

However, Yoshida's intellectual legacy included explicit advocacy for Japanese expansion into Korea as necessary for national security. The Japan-Korea Citizens' Guidebook argues: "Including the Matsushita Village Academy of Yoshida Shōin, who advocated for external expansion, in the industrial heritage demonstrates a lack of reflection on past wars and consideration for the regions that were invaded."

The linkage between Yoshida's academy and industrial sites like Hashima is not accidental. It positions Meiji industrialization within a narrative of national destiny — fukoku kyōhei (富国強兵, "enrich the country, strengthen the military") and shokusan kōgyō (殖産興業, "promote industry") — that led directly to imperial expansion. The steel works produced weapons; the shipyards built warships; the coal mines fueled war industries. Celebrating these as purely technological achievements requires erasing the military-imperial context that gave them purpose.

The Counter-Narrative: Japan-Korea Citizens' Guidebook

In November 2017, two years after the UNESCO inscription, a coalition of Japanese and Korean civil society organizations published a remarkable document: the Japan-Korea Citizens' World Heritage Guidebook (Nikkan Shimin ni yoru Sekai Isan Guidebook).

The guidebook represents a counter-hegemonic intervention by transnational civil society against state-sponsored historical amnesia. Its central thesis is unambiguous: Japan's official heritage narrative constitutes a deliberate erasure of the forced labor of approximately 33,400 Koreans, 4,184 Chinese, and 5,140 Allied prisoners of war who toiled under brutal conditions at these sites during World War II.

Site-by-Site Documentation

The guidebook's most substantial contribution lies in its systematic documentation of forced labor at each World Heritage site:

Source: Japan-Korea Citizens' Guidebook (2017)

The Guidebook contextualizes these numbers within the broader structure of imperial extraction. Yawata Steel Works was built with war reparations extracted from China following the First Sino-Japanese War — its very construction funded by colonial extraction, its later operation dependent on coerced labor. At Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, many Korean forced laborers became victims of the atomic bombing while engaged in producing weapons for the Japanese military — a tragic irony in which coerced workers were killed by Allied attacks on the facilities where they were forced to work. Miike Coal Mine, the largest single site of Korean forced mobilization, had relied on convict labor since 1873, revealing how coerced labor formed a continuous thread through Japan's industrial modernization.

The Guidebook includes survivor testimony that personalizes these statistics. Kim Gyu-su, taken to Yawata Steel Works at age 17, testified: "I cried every day from hunger and loneliness after being forcibly mobilized to an unfamiliar foreign land at such a young age."

The German Comparison

To demonstrate that industrial heritage sites can and should acknowledge "negative heritage" (負の遺産), the guidebook invokes European precedents — most prominently the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Germany's Ruhr region, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2001.

Five Mechanisms of Silence

The Japan-Korea Citizens' Guidebook provides an early, field-grounded articulation of what this learning resource frames as simulation, not merely omission. The Guidebook identifies distinct, interacting mechanisms that together produce interpretive silence while preserving the outward form of explanation.

These five mechanisms do not operate in isolation. They reinforce one another: compositional decisions about periodization shape what guides can say; linguistic choices partition audiences; thin description fills space while avoiding substance; and UNESCO compliance becomes a performance rather than a practice. The result is a heritage system that appears to communicate while systematically withholding.

What This Means for HashimaXR

The UNESCO controversy provides essential context for understanding the institutional resistance that HashimaXR encountered. The project attempted to do at the digital level what the guidebook demands at the physical level: present the "full history" of Hashima, including coerced labor.

The obstacles documented in Module 08: Why Unreleased — the withdrawal of stakeholder support, the refusal of landing permits, the characterization of the project as not leading to "true Hashima coal mine information" — must be understood against this backdrop. HashimaXR threatened to demonstrate that alternative approaches were possible, that digital heritage could practice interpretive accountability rather than replicating the erasures that UNESCO had criticized.

The project's non-release is thus not merely a failed production but evidence of ongoing institutional commitment to the interpretive framework that UNESCO found inadequate. The "archive of obstruction" that HashimaXR became documents the same dynamics that the Japan-Korea Citizens' Guidebook critiques — now operating in the digital heritage domain.