Japan will not consider South Korean opposition in deciding whether to push ahead with a plan to nominate a gold and silver mine site on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture for the 2023 UNESCO World Heritage list, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said Monday.
Hayashi made the remarks after South Korea said it was deplorable that a Japanese state cultural body had recommended that Tokyo seek listing of the mine, where Koreans were subject to forced labor during Japan's 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula, and called for immediate retraction of the plan.
"We are not giving any diplomatic consideration to South Korea," Hayashi said at a House of Representatives session. "We are comprehensively considering within the government what would be most effective" in seeking the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's World Heritage designation, he added.
In the same session, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said, "We place emphasis on issues pertaining to historic understanding," apparently referring to South Korean media reports about the issue. "Japan will firmly respond to unjust slanders," he added.
Among conservative members of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, calls for nominating the site as planned are growing.
Sanae Takaichi, policy chief of the LDP, said in the session, "This is a situation that relates to the state's honor. We should nominate the site in fiscal 2021."
The government will consider its options until the Feb. 1 deadline for submitting a recommendation to UNESCO.
Japan's Council for Cultural Affairs last month selected the mine as a candidate. Niigata Prefecture has said the mine has a history of outstanding mining technology development before and after industrialization and became one of the world's largest producers of gold in the 17th century.
Tokyo and Seoul also remain at odds over a Tokyo-based information center on Japanese industrial locations listed as World Cultural Heritage sites. Seoul says the center does not give an adequate account of Korean victims of forced labor at such sites.
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