(25 Nov 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sado, Japan – 25 November 2024
1. Various of family members of forced labor victims from Japan’s Sado mines at memorial service
2. Mid of South Korean ambassador to Japan, Park Cheol-hee, speaking
3. Mid of man (non-family member) marking a minute silence
4. Mid of family members laying flowers
STORYLINE:
South Korea paid tribute to wartime Korean workers at Japan’s Sado Island Gold Mines for forced labour as Seoul hosted its own memorial ceremony on Monday, held separately a day after boycotting one organized by Japan.
The move highlights still deep hard feelings toward Japanese wartime atrocities.
The Korean absence on Sunday was a major setback in the rapidly improving ties between the two countries, which since last year have set aside their historical disputes to prioritize U.S.-led security cooperation.
South Korea had said it had been impossible to settle unspecified disagreements between both governments in time for the event.
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 mobilized to work in the mines.
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 mobilized 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 normalization 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 prioritized improving relations with Japan.
Some South Koreans had criticized 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.
AP video shot by Ayaka McGill
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