Park Ji-won is a writer for The Korea Times who has been covering a wide range of topics from Korea’s culture to its politics. An avid journalism enthusiast to the core, Ji-won brings a thoughtful and unique perspective to every topic she covers. On weekends, you'll often find her contemplating life’s purpose on a yoga mat — with a cup of quality tea in hand. A native Korean speaker by birth and fluent in English through her work, she went to college in Japan and is learning Chinese and French — hoping to add Polish, Russian and Thai to the mix.
UNESCO review finds Japan's Sado mines follow-up still falls short
Interior of a historic mine on the Japanese island of Sado / Courtesy of Jung Hye Kyung of Northeast Asian History Foundation
By Park Ji-won
Seoul to press Tokyo for changes ahead of new 2027 deadline
Korea's foreign ministry said Wednesday that a draft UNESCO decision validates its long-standing position that Japan has failed to adequately address the "whole history" of Korean forced labor at the Sado Island Gold Mines, as the World Heritage Committee (WHC) prepares to adopt the review at its 48th session in Busan.
The finding is part of a review of Japan's State of Conservation (SOC) report on the site, which sets a new deadline for Japan to submit a further progress report by Dec. 1, 2027, for review at the 50th WHC session the following year.
“The government views the review as a step toward bringing Japan’s conservation efforts back under evaluation at the upcoming WHC session, based on the understanding that despite Japan's progress in developing an interpretation and presentation strategy and facilities, the measures still fall short,” a senior foreign ministry official said.
The official said the review's call for Japan to consult closely with Korea on the site's interpretation strategy reflects Seoul's consistent position that the committee needed to revisit Japan's compliance.
“The Korean government will handle the issue based on its position that Tokyo's follow-up measures have been insufficient and that Japan must faithfully and sincerely implement both the WHC's decisions and its own promises,” the official said, adding that the government would keep working with UNESCO and other member states toward that goal.
The Sado mines were listed as a World Heritage site in July 2024 at the WHC's 46th session, on condition that Japan develop a strategy to comprehensively present the site's overall history — including during the 1910-45 Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, when Koreans were forced to work there — at the site itself and hold annual memorial ceremonies honoring the Korean victims of forced labor, in return for Seoul endorsing Japan's bid.
More than 1,500 Koreans were forced to work at the Sado mines under harsh conditions between 1939 and the end of World War II, according to a 2022 joint report by the Korean Center for Historical Truth and Justice and Japan's Network for Research on Forced Labor Mobilization.
However, UNESCO's official justification for the listing centers on an entirely different era, describing the site as an outstanding example of manual mining and smelting technology from Japan's 17th-century Edo period, when large-scale gold extraction relied on techniques that remained largely unmechanized, even as mechanization spread elsewhere.
The wartime use of Korean forced labor falls outside the core justification, which is why the committee addressed it separately, recommending that Japan cover the whole history across all periods of the mines' operation.
Japan submitted its SOC report on the matter in December 2025. UNESCO's advisory bodies, the International Council on Monuments and Sites and the World Heritage Centre, reviewed the report over the first half of this year to produce the draft decision now before the upcoming committee.
Korea's foreign ministry criticized the submission at the time, saying Japan had failed to keep the promises it made when the site was listed.
“We point out that the Japanese government has failed to faithfully implement both the WHC’s decision and its own promise to reflect the whole history at the Sado mines at the time of its listing," the ministry said in a statement then.
The foreign ministry official said Wednesday that the current review reflects the same assessment that Tokyo's follow-up measures, while showing some progress, remain inadequate.
The draft decision welcomes the progress Japan has made on "management, conservation planning and visitor management." But on the history question, it finds that "further clarification is needed" on how the site's interpretation strategy addresses "the whole history of the property throughout all periods of mining exploitation" and asks Japan to keep the World Heritage Centre "regularly informed of its progress."
The committee also recommends that Japan hold "close consultation with the States Parties concerned," referencing Korea, to improve the site's interpretation strategy, after finding that Japan's approach to presenting the whole history "has shown some progress but remains to be fully developed."
On the ground, Japan has added more than a dozen signposts on the island this year directing visitors to the sites of dormitories and a communal kitchen used by Korean laborers. It also set up an exhibition room on Korean forced laborers at the Aikawa History Museum shortly after the listing.
None of the official documents or the new signage use the term "forced labor," instead referring to "workers from the Korean Peninsula" — a phrasing critics say understates the coercive nature of the wartime labor. Korea and Japan have been holding separate memorial ceremonies rather than a joint one, due to a rift tied to the dispute over terminology.
Decisions at the WHC are typically adopted by consensus unless a member state formally proposes amendments. The foreign ministry official declined to say whether Korea plans to seek changes to the draft text, saying only that the government's response would be shaped by its assessment that the review already reflects its position.
Delisting a site over noncompliance is rare — only a handful of the more than 1,000 sites on the World Heritage List have ever been removed, and typically only in cases of severe physical damage to the site itself.
The 48th WHC session runs from July 19 to 29 in Busan, the first time Korea will host the committee since joining the World Heritage Convention in 1988. The review report on the Sado mines' conservation status is expected to come up for discussion around July 22 and 23, though the schedule could shift depending on how earlier agenda items proceed.