Sado Island Gold Mines: Compliance without remembrance

Kang Dong-jin

The author is a professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Kyungsung University and the chair of the World Heritage Subcommittee of the National Heritage Commission of the Republic of Korea.

Seoul — I recently returned to Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture to see for myself how follow-up measures and on-site interpretation have been handled at the Sado Island Gold Mines, which were inscribed on Unesco's World Heritage List in 2024. Despite it being a Saturday, the overall visitor flow was quieter than expected. There was, however, one conspicuously crowded spot: the Kitazawa Flotation Plant. This vast concrete structure, left standing like a ruin, is widely known as an emblematic heritage site of the Sado Island Gold Mines dating to the 1930s, during Japan's Showa era (1926–1989).

It was also one of the places that remained within the proposed property boundary until the very last stages of the nomination, even though Japan limited the temporal scope of the nomination to the Edo period and earlier, a decision that many observers viewed as an effort to avoid addressing the issue of forced mobilization. Since the inscription, cafes, souvenir shops and exhibition spaces have opened up in front of the flotation plant, encouraging visitors to linger there. Standing on the spot, I was reminded of a concern long raised by critics: “Even if this area is left outside the official World Heritage boundary, won’t it still be marketed and consumed as if it were part of the World Heritage site?”

The inscription became controversial because Korea argued that Japan had failed to adequately acknowledge the wartime mobilization of Korean workers at the site. Unesco ultimately approved the nomination after Japan pledged to present the mine's "whole history," including the experiences of Korean workers.

The most contentious issue surrounding the inscription of the Sado Island Gold Mines was the treatment and interpretation of Korean workers who had been brought from the Korean Peninsula during Japan's colonial rule. The World Heritage Committee, when deciding to inscribe the site, recommended that Japan provide a comprehensive explanation of the "whole history" of the property throughout all periods of mining exploitation and Japan, for its part, pledged to engage in close dialogue with the Republic of Korea to develop an interpretation and presentation strategy and facilities that comprehensively address the whole history of the Sado Island Gold Mines, including Korean workers.

In fact, there have been certain changes on the site. An exhibition room on Korean workers has been installed at the Aikawa History Museum, and information panels have been placed at the sites of former Korean workers’ dormitories and kitchens. Maps introducing these related locations are also being distributed. Japan has not entirely disregarded the requirements that the international community set at the time of inscription.

Yet the more I walked through the site, the more another question arose: has this history really been placed at the center of how the Sado mines are interpreted? The answer, I found, was no. Explanations concerning Korean workers do exist, but they remain on the periphery, outside the main visitor routes and the official narrative that most visitors naturally encounter. In fact, at Kirarium Sado, the official visitor center for the Sado Island Gold Mines, there was not a single explanation to be found on this subject.

What matters in World Heritage interpretation is not simply whether a set of facts has been written down. The core issue is where the center of gravity lies. Heritage interpretation is not neutral. It inevitably shapes how visitors understand the significance of a place and the people associated with it. The meaning of history as perceived by visitors changes depending on which stories are foregrounded and which are treated only peripherally. In that sense, Sado Island Gold Mines today may have acknowledged historical facts, but it does not yet appear to have reached the stage of integrating that dark memory into the core narrative of heritage interpretation.

The place that drew my particular attention on this visit was the ruins of the segregated dormitories for Korean workers, located in a cluster between Aikawa village and the mines. The Japanese government maintains that Korean workers came to the mines through open recruitment and were paid wages for their labor. That leaves one important question. Why were Korean workers housed in separate quarters and served meals in separate facilities? These spatial arrangements raise important questions about the degree of freedom, equality and social integration experienced by Korean workers. If they had truly been free to move and live as ordinary workers, would such spatial segregation have been necessary at all?

Historically, the spatial structure of an old city — especially the layout of residential areas — reveals how the society of the time viewed and controlled people. The traces of Korean workers’ dormitories and communal kitchens remaining at Sado Island Gold Mines are not merely remnants of living facilities. They are spatial evidence of a labor management system.

To be sure, these questions do not immediately lead to a single, definitive historical conclusion. Yet, at the very least, the current exhibitions and interpretations do not raise them sufficiently. The background of forced mobilization, the harsh conditions in which Korean workers lived and how their day-to-day realities differed from those of Japanese workers are still explained only in a limited way. What the World Heritage Committee called for was not the addition of a few signboards. It was a comprehensive explanation of the mines’ full history — not only its bright side, but also the uncomfortable truths of wartime forced mobilization.

A heritage site is not a space for national pride. It is a space for collective memory. This applies with even greater force to World Heritage, which is the shared heritage of humanity. For that reason, it should not become a place where a country selectively presents only the history it wishes to remember. Industrial heritage, moreover, gains its full meaning only when it tells not only the history of production, but also the lives and suffering of the people who worked within that process.

The Sado Island Gold Mines are now a World Heritage site, and Japan has fulfilled part of its commitment. Yet, the international community was not calling for formal compliance alone, but a candid and unvarnished presentation of the site's whole history, including the history of wartime forced mobilization. The challenge now is not whether this history is acknowledged, but whether it is integrated into the central interpretive framework through which visitors understand the site. World Heritage is ultimately not about preserving monuments alone, but about transmitting an honest understanding of the past to future generations. Memory by itself is not enough. What matters is where that memory is placed. That is precisely the challenge Sado Island Gold Mines must confront from here on.