Japan's Controversial Industrial Heritage - To List or not To List?

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee (WHC) convenes in Bonn, Germany next week.  One of the Committee's tasks is to decide which properties around the world to inscribe on the World Heritage List.  The range of sites is fascinatingly varied: rock art sites in Saudi Arabia and Uganda, Viking sites in northern Europe, the Forth Bridge in the UK, Spanish missions in the US, an aqueduct in Mexico, a monastery in Georgia and botanical gardens in Singapore.  You can read about the different sites in the report of the International Council on Monument and Sites, which advises the WHC.  Click here for the report.

Somewhat surprisingly, these can be difficult and controversial decisions for the WHC to make.  For example, Japan has nominated the "Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Kyushu-Yamaguchi and Related Areas".  The site includes 23 facilities in eight prefectures, mainly in the Kyushu region, which were nominated by the government as sites representing the country’s industrialization in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  The controversy lies in Japan's use of slave labour at the sites during the Second World War.  South Korea objects to the listing of the sites because Japan continues to deny that 60000 Koreans were forced to work there without pay.  Japan's nomination of the sites is based on their significance in the rise of modern Japan in the 19th century. 

The WHC makes its decision primarily on the whether the sites are "of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science."  This is, in itself, a controversial criterion, as Laura-Jane Smith has analysed in her great work, The Uses of Heritage. What is unclear is the extent to which objections to a site's listing will carry weight in the World Heritage Committee's deliberations when they are based on other factors, such as other uses to which the sites have been put, or the circumstances in which they operated.  Should a site be listed when the cultural significance of the site remains contested, even though the criterion of "outstanding universal value" has been met?  Here are two conflicting views: the Japanese perspective and that of the relatives of British Second World War prisoners-of-war.