Stone statues are placed near the site of former Fourth Souai Dormitory for the mine workers from the Korean Peninsula, in Sado, Niigata prefecture, Japan, on November 24, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Japan held a memorial ceremony on Sunday (November 24, 2024) near the Sado Island Gold Mines despite a last-minute boycott of the event by South Korea that highlighted tensions between the neighbours over the issue of Korean forced labourers at the site before and during World War II.

South Korea’s absence at Sunday’s (November 24, 2024) memorial, to which Seoul government officials and Korean victims’ families were invited, is a major setback in the rapidly improving ties between the two countries, which since last year have set aside their historical disputes to prioritise U.S.-led security cooperation.

Watch | Why are Japan and South Korea in dispute over ancient mines?

The Sado mines were listed in July as a UNESCO World Heritage site after Japan moved past years of disputes with South Korea and reluctantly acknowledged the mines’ dark history, promising to hold an annual memorial service for all victims, including hundreds of Koreans who were mobilised to work in the mines.

On Saturday (November 23, 2024), South Korea announced it would not attend the event, saying it was impossible to settle unspecified disagreements between the two governments in time. Families of Korean victims of the mine accidents were expected to separately hold their own ceremony near the mine at a later date.

Masashi Mizobuchi, an assistant press secretary in Japan’s Foreign Ministry, said Japan has been in communication with Seoul and called the South Korean decision “disappointing.” The ceremony was held as planned on Sunday (November 24, 2024) at a facility near the mines, where more than 20 seats for Korean attendees remained vacant.

The 16th-century mines on the island of Sado, off Japan’s north-central coast, operated for nearly 400 years before closing in 1989 and were once the world’s largest gold producer.

Historians say about 1,500 Koreans were mobilised to Sado as part of Japan’s use of hundreds of thousands of Korean laborers, including those forcibly brought from the Korean Peninsula, at Japanese mines and factories to make up for labour shortages because most working-age Japanese men had been sent to battlefronts across Asia and the Pacific.

Japan’s government has maintained that all wartime compensation issues between the two countries were resolved under a 1965 normalisation treaty.

South Korea had long opposed the listing of the site as World Heritage on the grounds that the Korean forced labourers, despite their key role in the wartime mine production, were missing from the exhibition. Seoul’s backing for Sado came as South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol prioritised improving relations with Japan.

The Japanese Government said Sunday’s (November 24, 2024) ceremony was to pay tribute to “all workers” who died at the mines, but would not spell out inclusion of Korean labourers — part of what critics call a persistent policy of whitewashing Japan’s history of sexual and labor exploitation before and during the war.

Preparation for the event by local organisers remained unclear until the last minute, which was seen as a sign of Japan’s reluctance to face its wartime brutality.

Japan’s Government said on Friday (November 22, 20240 that Akiko Ikuina — a Parliamentary Vice-Minister who reportedly visited Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine in August 2022, weeks after she was elected as a lawmaker — would attend the ceremony. Japan’s neighbours view Yasukuni, which commemorates 2.5 million war dead including war criminals, as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism.

Ms. Ikuina belonged to a Japanese ruling party faction of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who led the whitewashing of Japan’s wartime atrocities in the 2010s during his leadership.

For instance, Japan says the terms “sex slavery” and “forced labour” are inaccurate and insists on the use of highly euphemistic terms such as “comfort women” and “civilian workers” instead.

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul said on Saturday (November 23, 2024) that Ikuina’s Yasukuni visit was an issue of contention between the countries’ diplomats.

“That issue and various other disagreements between diplomatic officials remain unresolved, and with only a few hours remaining until the event, we concluded that there wasn’t sufficient time to resolve these differences,” Mr. Cho said in an interview with MBN television.

Some South Koreans had criticised Mr. Yoon’s government for supporting the event without securing a clear Japanese commitment to highlight the plight of Korean labourers. There were also complaints over South Korea agreeing to pay for the travel expenses of Korean victims’ family members to Sado.