On July 27, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee agreed to register the Sado Island Gold Mines off the coast of Niigata Prefecture as a World Heritage Site, the 26th for Japan. Sado was at one time the largest gold mine in the world, and the Japanese government wants to promote its history as a pioneering enterprise in manual mining technology. 

As with other similar World Heritage industrial sites, such as Hachima Island off the coast of Kyushu, South Korea, a member of the UNESCO committee, initially questioned the intentions of the site’s boosters, saying that any exhibits would need to mention the use of Korean forced laborers in the mine during the period when Korea was a Japanese colony. Japan had dismissed these concerns by focusing on Sado’s history during the Edo period, meaning before Koreans worked in Japan and when the valued technologies were developed. The UNESCO committee, in response, asked Japan to create “facilities that comprehensively address, at the site level, the whole history of the nominated property throughout all periods of mining exploitation,” according to the Jiji Press. 

Japan agreed to these conditions and set up an exhibit at the Aikawa History Museum on the island explaining the harsh working conditions of the mine complex, which covered some 400 kilometers of underground tunnels. Consequently, the current Korean administration approved the registration in the belief that Japan would carry out its promises with regard to its promotion of the site for historical purposes. However, the Korean media outlet, Hangyoreh, found the Korean government’s agreement to the registration unacceptable, since the exhibit’s acknowledgement of the harsh working conditions did not include an admission that the Koreans who worked under those conditions had been forced to do so by Japan’s colonial administration. In essence, Japan’s UNESCO representative had simply said that all workers had labored under “severe conditions,” meaning Japanese and Korean alike. “‘All workers’ erases the specific nature of the cruel discrimination that only Korean slave laborers were subject to,” wrote Hangyoreh in its editorial. The current South Korean administration was ignoring this aspect of the registration, thus allowing the Japanese government once again to “sweep” its history of forced mobilization of Korean workers “under the rug.” Consequently, the exhibit will not fully address the whole history of the mine, which is what the committee supposedly demanded.

But it isn’t just the matter of forced Korean labor that is being left out of the annals of the Sado mine. Another editorial, this one in the Asahi Shimbun, pointed out that other aspects of the mine related more directly to Japanese workers may be excised. The editorial mentions a 76-year-old woman named Noriko Yanagidaira, who used to be the chief archivist of the Aikawa History Museum. Yanagidaira has mine administrative documents dating from the Meiji Era showing how the prostitution quarters were managed by the local mine authorities. Any woman who worked as a prostitute was confined to these quarters and needed permission from the local police to leave them to visit relatives or even go to the doctor. There are also documents showing how these women sought employment, with one typical application stating that the applicant needed the work to alleviate her impoverished situation. Yanagidaira found most of these documents in the trash (they had been used as paper to repair fusuma sliding doors), meaning that the relevant officials after the war—the brothels on Sado operated until the war ended—didn’t think they should be kept for posterity. 

Yanagidaira insists that no history of the mines is complete without mention of the prostitution quarters, which contained as many as 10 brothels at any given time. These quarters were originally authorized by the Edo government, whose bureaucrats were transferred to Sado from the capital to oversee the enterprise. The brothels were considered essential to the success of the mining operations. Yanagidaira, who has been collecting these documents and studying them for the last 50 years, has many of the records committed to memory, such as the common saying among officials on Sado that the “cheapest things” on the island were “women and fish.” She is also haunted by one police report about a 13-year-old prostitute who was killed by a client. 

What concerns Yanagidaira is that when the museum reopened in May, after renovations were carried out ostensibly to accommodate the history requirements for the World Heritage registration, anything having to do with the prostitution quarters had been removed. Moreover, any mention of the 2,000 or so workers referred to as mushukunin had also been taken out of the exhibits. These workers were exiles; not necessarily criminals (Sado was once a penal colony), but men who had been, for one reason or another, renounced by their families, removed from their family registers, and handed over to the Edo authorities, who treated them as property of the state. They were sent to Sado to do the worst work in the mines, such as bailing water from the deepest recesses of the tunnels. They lived within the mines and were often forced to work 24-hour shifts. They had no freedom, no sanitation, no clean air. Most died within 10 years of arriving. According to Yanagidaira, the Shogunate actually devised this system to deal with “cumbersome citizens” in the cities, which were considered “safer without them.” Famed historical writer Ryotaro Shiba once said that the Edo government did many praiseworthy things compared to other contemporary world governments, but its greatest crime was hunting down “undesirable” young men and shipping them off to Sado as mushukunin. Asahi points out that a silver mine in Bolivia was designated a World Heritage asset in 1987, and its official history explains in detail how indigenous people were forced to work there under terrible conditions and how that work was the reason for the mine’s prosperity.

So it isn’t just forced Korean laborers that the Japanese government wants to selectively eliminate from the history of the Sado mines. Anything that suggests calculated cruelty on the part of the authorities, even at the time, will not be discussed. Prostitution is not a cruel commercial practice in and of itself, but any mention of the brothels would need to be supplemented with explanations of how the women were recruited and the conditions under which they worked, so it’s better just to not mention them at all. This is the same rationale behind the government’s position on the so-called comfort women of the Pacific War. Though there is plenty of evidence and testimony showing how women were forced, one way or another, to become prostitutes at front-line “comfort stations” for Japanese soldiers, the official line is that they were all professionals and, thus, free and willing to serve the needs of the military. Anyone who has any knowledge about the use of sexual power during wartime will see this as a specious argument at best, but basically the conservative elements who wish to whitewash the history of comfort women as well as ignore the presence of prostitutes at the Sado mine simply find prostitution distasteful and sex workers, regardless of how they came to the occupation, not worthy of attention. Which is why their argument that “those were different times” doesn’t wash. They themselves find the idea of the male appetite, especially under extremely stressful circumstances, too disgusting to even ponder, much less talk about.