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Dealing with a Difficult Past: Japan, South Korea and the UNESCO World Heritage List

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Cultural Contestation

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ((PSCHC))

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which contested colonial heritage leads to cultural contestation between Japan and South-Korea. On May 4 2015, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs announced that it would recommend parts of its late nineteenth-century industrial sites to be placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. These sites symbolised Japan’s swift economic and political development towards a superpower, challenging Western nations. The South-Korean government was quick to point out that Korean civilians did forced labor at these industrial sites during the Second World War. As such, Korean government felt that Japan ignored its feelings about the shared colonial past, leading to political conflict between the two states

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous funding support for this publication provided by the Volkswagen Foundation, issued within its initiative “Key Issues for Research and Society ” for the research project “Protecting the Weak: Entangled processes of framing, mobilization and institutionalization in East Asia ” (AZ 87 382) at the Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies (IZO), Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Ioan Trifu

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  1. Ioan Trifu
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

    Jeroen Rodenberg

  2. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

    Pieter Wagenaar

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Trifu, I. (2018). Dealing with a Difficult Past: Japan, South Korea and the UNESCO World Heritage List. In: Rodenberg, J., Wagenaar, P. (eds) Cultural Contestation. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91914-0_10

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