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| Hashima Island |
By David Tizzard and Benjamin Acree
One of Northeast Asia's greatest challenges is for there to be constructed an account of history that is acceptable to Koreans, Chinese and Japanese people alike. If history is real, such a thing should be possible: the facts should stand clear and distinguishable.
One should be able to read a text and not know where the Korean historian put his pen down and the Japanese historian picked his up. A single narrative that recounts the factual events that have taken place here over the past couple of centuries.
Such an idea, however, even as we enter the second decade of the 21st century seems little more than wishful thinking. History hurts, it scars, and it lingers. The past is still well and truly alive today, particularly for South Korea.
South Korea's current relations with Japan are probably at their lowest ebb in the modern age. Paradoxically, this is probably good news for President Moon and Prime Minister Abe as they bolster their relative domestic positions by mobilizing their support base against an external enemy which, in turn, helps detract from their own internal problems.
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| Family Housing Apartments |
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| Single Worker Apartments |
Despite suggestions to the contrary, the "make our country great again" tactic which focuses on demonization and otherization is not limited in its use by people with bad hair, white skin, and an inability to walk normally down a ramp.
The Empire of Japan extended over much of the region and ruled eventually through a process of military dictatorship and totalitarian rule. Ralph Blumenthal has described what took place as an "Asian Holocaust", and estimates the human casualties in a range from 3 to 14 million as a result of the many massacres, forced labour, sexual slavery, human experimentation, and other atrocities.
Japan's frequent apologies over the years have all been rejected as either non-existent by that do not care for them to have taken place or inauthentic by those with a closer eye on history. The latter group definitely has more of a case, particularly when such apologies are then followed by Japanese politicians making visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine which remains home to 14 Class A war criminals.
This glorification of, for what is many, a brutal and murderous history rankles. The Japanese are accused of whitewashing their past and not repenting for the imperialism and brutality to which they subjected their neighboring countries. The accusations are correct for the most part, but it is also a charge that applies to most other countries focused on post-colonial nation building, particularly in the Northeast Asian region. One doesn't find many famous Noam Chomsky-esque dissidents in places such as China, North Korea, Russia, or South Korea.
Thus the decision by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in 2015 to designate 23 Meiji industrial sites as locations of "world heritage", including Battleship Island (otherwise known as Hashima) rightly caused some consternation here in South Korea.
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| Lighthouse and Management Buildings |
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| Seawall Boat Landing |
Younger readers might know Hashima as the location of Raoul Silver's lair, the antagonist of the 007 film Skyfall played by Javier Bardem. Its ominous vertical buildings dropping sharply into the water that surrounds it on all sides while dust whistles through the streets of what is now essentially a ghost town.
Despite UNESCO's frequent recommendations that the Japanese government include a full account of the locations' history, and South Korea's vocal protestations that argue the same point, for the most part visitors are still subjected to Japanese rose-tinted glasses and all the chrysanthemums that come with it.
However, eventually an agreement was reached between Korea and Japan and the following declaration made public: "Japan is 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."
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| Undersea Coal Mine Access Tunnel |
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| Takazane Yasunori |
This could and perhaps should have been a welcome resolution. However, while the Koreans took this as an admission of Japan's use of forced labour, in Tokyo the Foreign Minister played a game of semantics and suggested that being "forced to work" is very different from "forced labour". Any element of good faith was quickly lost.
Lee Young-chae, a South Korean professor at Keisen University in Japan, has long advocated a civil society approach to improving relations, particularly vis-a-vis Japan's right-wing anti-Korean sentiments. Professor Lee visited Hashima in April 2019 and lamented the fact that before departure, and on the island itself, there was no mention of the forced labour, terrible working conditions, or discrimination suffered by the Korean (and Chinese and Japanese) workers.
Instead it was presented as a site of incredible technological and industrial achievement as well as a demonstration of Japan's generosity and forward-thinking for allowing different nationalities to work together. The reality was of course far from the GAP commercial portrayed.
Suh Jung-woo was one of the Korean labourers fortunate to actually survive the island. In a 1983 interview, he recounted the harrowing experience he and others faced. For Suh, Hashima was a symbol of despair: an oceanic prison with no Napoleonic grand ending.
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| Former Administrative Buildings, Destroyed by Tsunami |
Suh states: "I was one of two boys forced onto a truck in my village and taken to the government office, where several thousand other Koreans ranging in age from about fourteen to twenty had been gathered. After a night at an inn, we were taken by truck to a nearby city, then by train to the port at Pusan and ship from Pusan to Shimonoseki. About 300 members of the group, including myself, were then taken by train to Nagasaki, where we arrived the following morning. All of us were being sent to Hashima.
"The island was surrounded by high concrete walls, and there was ocean, nothing but ocean, all around. It was crowded with concrete buildings as high as nine stories.... We Koreans were lodged in buildings on the edge of the island. Seven or eight of us were put together in a tiny room, giving each person no more than a few feet of space."
"We were given uniforms like rice bags to wear and forced to begin work the morning after arrival. We were constantly watched and ordered around by Japanese guards, some of whom were wearing swords. It was excruciating, exhausting labor. Gas collected in the tunnels, and the rock ceilings and walls threatened to collapse at any minute."
"I was convinced that I would never leave the island alive. Four or five workers in fact died every month in accidents. Modern concepts of safety were nonexistent. The corpses were cremated on Nakanoshima, the little island beside Hashima."
Suh's distressing depiction of life in the prison is one that no-one should be forced to endure. Yet that was the reality that he and many others faced; a reality which Japan seemingly still seeks to deny.
Yet there are some dissenting voices in Japan, none more so than Takazne Yasunori, professor emeritus at Nagasaki University and director of the Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum. Yasunori references locations such as Auschwitz in Poland, the atomic dome in Hiroshima, and Liverpool's slave-trade port as World Heritage sites that "provide materials for humanity's self-examination, and warnings of actions that must never be repeated."
If Hashima is to be remembered, he believes that it should be remembered for the correct reasons and not to celebrate a time in which humans had fallen from the light.
Yasunori has explained that he only truly became aware of the level of agony that took place through a Korean documentary rather than his own country's recounting of history. He then visited Korea and spoke to the survivors in an effort to understand their personal experiences and stories of suffering.
He has published much that seeks to shed light on the plight of Korean and Chinese forced labour at the hands of the Japanese Empire and continues to work with Korean survivors of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki.
The world needs more Yasunoris, however.
UNESCO's decision to label Hashima a World Heritage site is not in and of itself problematic as there are others around the world which similarly stand in recognition of the darkness from which we emerged. However, requiring Korea and Japan to resolve the issue of its classification and description without any external adjudication is deeply problematic.
Japan repeatedly refuses to account for its past in a meaningful way. It has certainly paid lip service to remorse and regret, yet then negates this through actions which raise the ire of its regional neighbours.
Successive South Korean governments have responded differently to the problem and there is no monolith consensus. Moreover, with current Democratic lawmaker Yoon Mi-hyang facing serious allegations of misappropriating funds donated by the public for surviving Korean victims of Japanese sexual slavery, there are demons to be addressed on both sides.
If Northeast Asia is going to get its history correct - a notoriously difficult job in a region home to states such as North Korea and China - it is imperative that locations such as Hashima are recognized for what they are. Complex, troubling, and part of a dark period of history - but still very much a part of the thread upon which the modern states stand.
Yasunori suggests that Japan has "a duty to not be swept up in facile celebrations but instead to face history earnestly." Few could argue with that.
David Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) is an assistant professor at Seoul Women's University where he teaches Korean Studies. He discusses the week's hottest issues on TBS eFM (101.3FM) on "Life Abroad" live every Thursday from 9:35 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Benjamin Acree (benjamin.acree@egs.edu) is a photographer and PhD candidate in philosophy at the European Graduate School.
