Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia
ISSN 2383-9449

Ryoko Nakano
Heritage Soft Power in East Asia’s Memory Contests: Promoting and Objecting to Dissonant
Heritage in UNESCO

Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia Vol. 17, No. 1: 50-67
DOI: 10.17477/jcea.2018.17.1.050

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Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia Vol. 17, No. 1: 50-67
DOI: 10.17477/jcea.2018.17.1.050

Heritage Soft Power in East Asia’s Memory Contests: Promoting and Objecting toDissonant Heritage in UNESCO
Ryoko Nakano1
Heritage has entered the center stage of public diplomacy in East Asia. Competition to claim andinterpret memories of World War II in East Asia has driven campaigns to list heritage items with
UNESCO. State and non-state actors aim to use heritage listings to present a particular view ofthe war and related history to domestic and international audiences. This paper highlights the roleof heritage soft power in East Asia’s “memory contests” by examining the promotion of dissonant
modern heritage in UNESCO’s heritage programs. It conceptualizes heritage designation as a soft
power resource in East Asia and presents a conceptual framework for understanding thehegemonic competition over the “memory regime” that emerged from the structural change in
East Asia’s regional order. It then uses this framework to analyze the processes by which stateand non-state actors promote and/or object to UNESCO recognition of their sites and documents
as heritage of outstanding universal value or world significance. The elements of this process areillustrated with case studies of two very different pieces of heritage, Japan’s “Sites of the Meiji
Industrial Revolution” and China’s “Documents of Nanjing Massacre,” which were enshrined as
significant world heritage in 2015. While state and non-state actors in East Asia are increasingly
recognizing the utility of heritage as a soft power resource for advancing specific historicalnarratives to an international audience, a backlash movement from civil society groups andgovernments in other countries prevents a purely unilateral interpretation. As a result, the utilityof heritage soft power in this context must be significantly qualified.
Keywords: heritage, soft power, memory of war, East Asia, UNESCO

Introduction
International heritage institutions have recently become crucial arenas of contestation for the
public and cultural diplomacy of East Asia. The governments of China, South Korea, and Japan,
in addition to civil society groups, each promote what they think of as significant world heritage
to not only national communities but also a foreign audience. The motives behind such promotion
may vary, but competition to claim and interpret the memory of World War II in East Asia drove
1

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Kanazawa University, Japan

Summer 2018 | 50

campaigns to list heritage items with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO). When heritage in dispute is inscribed, opponents do not hesitate tocriticize not only the nominators but also UNESCO.
Drawing on the literature of International Relations and Heritage Studies, this article aims to study
the use of heritage in East Asia’s international politics over the memory of World War II. Its
primary questions are how heritage is used as a soft power resource in East Asia’s “memory
contests” and why, and how successful such efforts are. To this end, this research develops atheoretical framework to analyze the use of heritage and UNESCO heritage designation in East
Asia’s memory contests. Two specific cases are used to analyze the processes in which state andnon-state actors promote and/or object to UNESCO recognition of their sites and documents asheritage of “outstanding universal value” or “global importance.” The methodology of conducting
these case studies is qualitative by nature through observation, reconstruction and analysis of the
discourse and acts of heritage nominators and opponents. They help explain both the process andoutcome of East Asia’s promotion of heritage in UNESCO.
The cases are chosen from UNESCO’s heritage listings in 2015: the introduction of the “Sites ofJapan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution” to the World Heritage List and the inscription of the“Documents of Nanjing Massacre” into the Memory of the World (MOW) Register. The first was
nominated by Japan, but the inclusion of Gunhamdo (Battleship Island) or Hashima (in Japanese),
which was known as a place where Koreans and Chinese prisoners of war were forced to work
during World War II, was contested by the government of South Korea and civil society groups.
The second case was promoted by the Chinese government with the initiative of Chinese archivists
and librarians. Despite Japan’s repeated attempts to prevent the inscription, China’s nomination
was successful, which caused fierce criticism and counter-actions by the Japanese government andcivil society groups.
Other relevant cases, such as the “Voices of the ‘Comfort Women,’” nominated jointly by a Koreabased civilian network of fourteen organizations and the Imperial War Museum London, and the“Japanese Occupation of Singapore Oral History Collection,” nominated by the National Archivesof Singapore, are also important and indicative in the study of East Asia’s memory contests andthe use of heritage. However, it is difficult to make a thorough investigation into the developmentof controversies at this stage, primarily because the nominations were unsuccessful, and/or theexamination process is still ongoing. Furthermore, the study of the two cases in different programs,
one inscribed in the World Heritage List and the other in the MOW Register, is useful inunderstanding a process from a nomination to its outcome. Those cases studies demonstrate thatheritage soft power in East Asia’s memory contests is significantly qualified.
The remainder of this article is divided into five parts. The first section conceptualizes UNESCO’s
heritage designation as a soft power resource in East Asia. The second briefly explains thenormative and institutional characteristics of UNESCO’s two heritage programmes. The thirdpresents a conceptual framework for understanding the hegemonic competition over the “memory
regime” that emerged from the structural change of East Asia’s regional order. The fourth conducts
two case studies: Japan’s “Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution” and China’s “Documents of
51 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 17, No.1

Nanjing Massacre.” In the final and concluding section, this article argues that heritage soft power
is a double-edged sword in East Asia’s memory contests.

Conceptualizing heritage and UNESCO’s heritage designation as a soft power resource
While the notion of a legacy from one’s own history is a component of heritage, states andcommunities with a keen interest in increasing their influence abroad recognize the importance of
heritage in foreign relations. With the expansion of the global capitalist system, the economic
functions of heritage increase, ranging from the enhancement of tourism to the acquisition ofdevelopment aid. Heritage also plays a role in constructing a national significance that a society
can be proud of and which appeals to a foreign audience. Because heritage can be used by thepresent generation to attract a foreign audience and improve the image of themselves, it fits within
the category of “soft power” or the “power of attraction,” as described by Nye (2004).
However, because heritage is grounded in knowledge of history, memory, and identity (McDowell,2008), it is also a “productive form of power.” Barnett and Duvall (2005, p. 21) define productive
power as power that produces the meaning of subjects through diffuse social relations. It is “thediscursive production of the subjects, the fixing of meanings, and the terms of action, of worldpolitics.” Regarding diffuse socialization processes as the core of soft power efficacy, Lee (2011,
p. 40) argues that soft power works as a productive power by which “a sender’s values andpractices have any effect on a receiver’s change in policy with or without persuasion.” While theextent of the effects largely depends on the interest of the receiver, a sender’s engagement in
discursive processes and practices has the potential to reshape social relations and policy directions.
The construction and promotion of heritage for a foreign audience does not necessarily mean
persuasion, but it can shape the meaning of historical events and produce knowledge of the past.
The presentation of heritage has the power to construct “truth” with evidence from the past.
Moreover, Smith (2006, pp. 2-5) argues that heritage is a social and cultural process in which a
sense of place, belonging, and understanding of the past is constructed and negotiated for present
human activity and creativity. Because visitors, viewers and observers can be part of the processof heritage-making, the nature of heritage is both constitutive and relational.
Nevertheless, if a state wants to make heritage its soft power resource, diplomatic and politicalefforts are required, because “for soft power to be activated it needs to be cast as a message”(Chitty, 2017, p. 24). The fastest route to disseminating the notion of heritage to the world is a
UNESCO heritage listing. UNESCO was established in the aftermath of World War II as a branchof the United Nations. As its main slogan, “building peace in the minds of men and women,”
succinctly suggests, UNESCO has a noble mission for the achievement of peace and theconstruction of human solidarity through culture and education. A wide range of UNESCO
programs and activities can be described as “soft power initiatives” whose impacts are difficult tomeasure but nevertheless can be discerned from place to place (Duedahl, 2016). Due to the soft
power element of UNESCO itself, a UNESCO listing authorizes the significance of heritage andlegitimizes the historical narrative attached to it. As Mattern (2005) suggests, legitimacy is the key

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attraction. UNESCO’s legitimizing effects are especially attractive to those who have a weak voice
and little authority in the international setting. Moreover, UNESCO’s heritage designation
provides a sense of confidence in the value of heritage, which can affect the domestic audience.
Thus, UNESCO’s recognition is a useful tool for governments and local communities to use in theconstruction of heritage of world significance.
The tendency to look at UNESCO’s heritage designation as a tool of public and cultural diplomacy
is strong outside Europe. At least two factors are in play. First, non-European states started
participating in UNESCO’s programs as a consumer of UNESCO’s norms and resources, by which
they could gain social, cultural, and technical support, in addition to international recognition andconnectivity. In East Asia, after the defeat of World War II, Japan craved UNESCO membershipas a step toward reentering the international arena. The image of UNESCO in Japan has been as
an international symbol of democracy and peace (Saikawa, 2016). UNESCO has also played a rolein education for countries in need. After the end of the Korean War, children in South Korea used
textbooks produced by UNESCO, and a new education system was constructed with UNESCO’s
support (Min, 2015, pp. 11-19; Jung, 2015). China, which rejoined UNESCO in 1971, also
benefitted from UNESCO’s “Education for All” campaign to tackle the illiteracy that wasprevalent in the 1980s (Lu, 2015). These historical experiences gave credit to UNESCO at boththe state and civil society levels.
Second, the dominant concept of heritage originates in Western Europe. It is embedded within a
specific discourse that defines the ethics for the proper care of material objects, sites, places, and/or
landscapes authorized by expert analysis and study (Smith, 2006, pp. 29-34). UNESCO and theInternational Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an international expert organization ofarchitects, historians, archaeologists, geographers, anthropologists, and so forth, have popularized
the notion of heritage worldwide by enacting conventions and charters. However, among nonWestern states a perception that there is a Western imperial legacy of heritage conservation andpractices makes UNESCO’s idea of a “shared heritage of humankind” less credible for those whohave a memory of colonial subjugation (Kersel and Luke, 2015). Even for states without anexperience of Western colonialism, the lack of non-Western participation in the process of heritagelegislation and institutionalization inevitably makes the World Heritage program look a “Western”
program. However, World Heritage can be an international stage for non-Western countries toshowcase their civilizations and cultural significance to a Western audience. The same applies to
MOW, commonly known as UNESCO’s “documentary heritage” program. In cooperation withnongovernmental expert institutions such as the International Federation of Library Associations
and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Council on Archives (ICA), which originate inEurope, UNESCO launched this program in 1992 and developed an MOW framework. Because
East Asian nations are latecomers to these heritage programs, they are not the heritage norm
makers and cannot easily influence the direction of discussion on what constitutes heritage andhow it should be managed.
Nevertheless, once the economic power of non-Western countries grows and their political anddiplomatic leverage in world politics expands, they can move toward actively contributing to the

53 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 17, No.1

improvement of UNESCO’s programs, most prominently in heritage conservation (Winter, 2014b).
In 1993, Japan financially and normatively contributed to the establishment of “intangible cultural
heritage,” which included oral traditions, performing arts, social rituals, and so forth as the subjectof protection, and exercised its cultural and economic power to assist other countries’ heritage
conservation in a way to direct their national policies (Akagawa, 2014). South Korea has also
consolidated its efforts in conservation and research in archaeology, intangible cultural heritage,
and the Memory of the World (MOW) in the Asia-Pacific region. Winter (2014a, p. 132) assertsthat “being a leader in heritage conservation policy” is an “important vehicle for advancing cultural
diplomacy in the region.” Compared with Japan and South Korea, China came late to active
participation in UNESCO heritage programs. However, so-called “heritage fever” since 2004 has
driven China to engage in heritage-related initiatives at both the local and national levels, partly torestore national pride in an international setting, and partly to assure constant income from tourism(Lai, pp. 317-319). Chinese President Xi Jinping is keen to collaborate with UNESCO andincorporate its heritage activities into the “China dream,” that is, a revival of the Chinese nation,
culture, and civilization (China, 2014).
In sum, heritage is an important tool for governments and civil society groups to unify acommunity and create a social and cultural cohesiveness. A UNESCO’s heritage designation iseven more useful in disseminating their historical narrative abroad and confirming the validity of
their narrative both domestically and internationally. The acquisition of a UNESCO heritage
designation is most appealing to those who feel that their heritage is neglected or unfairly treateddespite its significance. Thus, dissonance over the values of heritage attracts competitions for a
UNESCO’s heritage designation.

UNESCO World Heritage and the Memory of the WorldThis section briefly explains the institutional and procedural characteristics of UNESCO’s two
heritage programs: World Heritage (1972-) and the Memory of the World (1992-). They share anormative goal of protecting heritage of “outstanding universal value” or of “global importance,”
which is an attractive credential for those who want to obtain a UNESCO heritage designation.
These programs are different from a newer one such as the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003-),
which cherishes the specific value of culture or community along the line of cultural diversity.
However, World Heritage and MOW have different institutional structures and listing procedures.
World Heritage is based on the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World's Cultural andNatural Heritage (World Heritage Convention), which was adopted by the General Conference of
UNESCO in 1972. The centrality of state parties is embedded in this program despite themissionary statement to construct the “common heritage for humanity” (Meskell, 2013). The
World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger are used for ensuring that stateparties follow the UNESCO rules for heritage conservation. However, the program also gives stateparties a primary role in nominating sites. Only from those inventories can expert organizations
such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and ICOMOS assess andSummer 2018 | 54

recommend sites for World Heritage listing. Moreover, the recommended sites require a final
endorsement from the World Heritage Committee, which consists of 21 state representatives.
Career diplomats who are delegates in the Committee engage in multilateral negotiations andconsensus building to defend and pursue their national interests, which may sometimes block orretain the inscription of sites against experts’ recommendations (Bertacchini et al., 2016).
Therefore, World Heritage does not sacrifice the traditional norm of state sovereignty.
Compared to the UNESCO World Heritage, MOW, known as UNESCO’s “documentary heritage”
program, is more expert-oriented and less state-centric (Nakano, in press). It provides state parties
with little opportunity to prevent non-state actors from making an unwanted nomination and tointerfere in the expert-oriented decision-making process over the heritage listing. The nomination
process of the MOW Register is open to “any person or organization, including governments andNGOs” (UNESCO, 2002, p. 23). Only when more than two nominations are made from the same
country, the national MOW committee or a relevant regional committee will be asked to adjudicate
on its priority. Moreover, state parties cannot get involved in the selection process for the MOW
Register, as the expert committee, the International Advisory Committee (IAC), directly
recommends the selected nominations for the approval of the UNESCO Director-General. Because
IAC meetings are closed to the public, state parties cannot easily exercise their influence over the
direction of the IAC’s discussion.
While state parties are the ultimate actors in the decision-making process of World Heritage listing,the MOW allows non-state actors to nominate what they think as heritage of global importancewithout much interference from the governments. In consequence, competition for a UNESCO’s
heritage designation takes place in different ways: in the making of World Heritage, state parties
are the main actors whereas in MOW, non-state actors outside UNESCO can directly participate
as a nominator.

Heritage competition in East Asia’s memory regime
Competition to promote or object to the value of historical materials or properties as world
significant heritage derives from the diverse collective memories of the past. Controversies overcollective memories are not new in East Asia. World War II and colonial occupations have beenremembered differently across Asia. Since the end of the Cold War, East Asia has followed thetrend in Europe of revisiting and rethinking historical injustice and wartime responsibilities. While
globalization and the democratization of East Asian countries encouraged debates on historicalmemory and responsibility at civil society levels, the structural change of East Asia’s regional
order also bought those critical questions to the center of diplomatic relations.
This trend derives from uncertainty within what Evelyn Goh (2013) calls East Asia’s “memory
regime.” After 1945, a collective memory regime has developed in Asia as an “interlocking
normative framework” that shaped institutionalized practices over time (Goh, 2013, pp. 164-172).
It was sustained by the dominant memory of World War II that was constructed around Japan’s

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defeat in the Pacific War. In this memory regime, the defeat is regarded as the result of a Japanesemilitary clique who waged an aggressive war. Japan’s security policy of “de-militarization” undera new constitution was therefore justified as a way of correcting historical injustice. Although thewar was remembered differently in mainland China and other places, a thaw of the Cold War in
East Asia in the 1980s led to space for a significant number of groups to dissent from this regime,
publicly contesting the Japanese war memory. The governments of China and South Korea, in
addition to civil society groups and individual activists, each aimed to reshape the memory ofWorld War II in Asia, first at a national level and then by disputing Japan’s official historicalnarratives at the regional level. The changing balance of power in East Asia accelerated andexpanded the scale of contestation. The decline of U.S. economic power and military engagementin the region triggered Japanese conservative ambitions to reinforce Japan’s military capabilities
and expand its partnerships across Asia. While the trilateral alliance of the United States, South
Korea, and Japan is still intact, China’s economic ascendance has led to less incentive for South
Korea to cooperate with Japan. As a result, regional competition over a hegemonic position in East
Asia’s memory regime is a main feature of East Asia’s international relations. Precisely because
there is no fixed common memory in East Asia, each actor aims to use all available methods andinstruments to promote different historical narratives.
A conventional method of promoting historical narratives abroad is public diplomacy. Indeed, East
Asian political actors have accelerated their efforts in reaching out to an international audience,
not just to obtain a hegemonic position in East Asia’s memory regime, but also for political anddiplomatic leverage, most notably in Washington (Calder, 2014). Among the three nations in East
Asia, China places considerable emphasis on public and cultural diplomacy. Although China’s
public diplomacy previously focused on assuring the world of its peaceful rise, it started competingfor “discursive power” on the global stage around the Beijing Olympics in 2008 (Zhang, 2010).
Under President Xi Jinping, this power was designated as not only soft power but also a substantial
indicator for realizing the Chinese dream (Zhao, 2016). The “One Belt One Road” initiative,
China’s grand project for the creation of infrastructure partnerships, is also a soft power strategy
for consolidating its cultural standing by linking more than 500 sites across the Silk Road corridors
and bringing itself to the center stage of the Asian civilization (Winter, 2016).
To a lesser extent, Japan and South Korea have also made efforts to strengthen their public
relations efforts. The Japanese government made an institutional reform to reinforce its public
diplomacy sector and increased its budget for strategic communications. To adjust to the age ofglobalization and digital revolution, Japan launched a new program for network-based public
diplomacy (Stanislaus, 2017). South Korea has also accelerated its public and cultural diplomacy
to boost its economy and popularity worldwide. As the idea of “middle power” diplomacy has
been popularized, soft power and public diplomacy have been designated as key components ofSouth Korea’s diplomacy to seek a greater global role (Lee, 2016, p. 5). The trend of integrating
government and private sector resources and initiatives to reinforce Korea’s soft power is growing
rapidly and being institutionalized (Ayhan, 2017; Kang, 2015). Such new political initiatives
expand the scope of public communication strategy and integrates diplomatic functions and publicprivate partnerships for better public communications.

Summer 2018 | 56

The competition in East Asia’s public diplomacy becomes even fiercer when it is associated withthe memory of war, as it is driven more by the “logic of consequences” than by the “logic ofappropriateness.” According to Hall and Smith (2013), the logic of consequences associates public
diplomacy with a strategic value that political leaders recognize in promoting and using soft power.
States engage in public diplomacy because of a belief that by doing so they can increase their soft
power and mitigate rival nations’ influence. The logic of appropriateness is related to the status of
public diplomacy as a common practice for emerging powers. Public diplomacy must be practiced
because other countries do so. Certainly, the logic of appropriateness plays a part in East Asia’s
public diplomacy over the memory of war, but the logic of consequences is a more substantial
driving force because, as Gustafsson (2014) explains, the memory of World War II in Asia is
deeply connected to the “security of identity.” China, Japan, and civil society groups concernedwith the memory of World War II in Asia are not shy about defending their historical narratives
and objecting to others because this is a defense of their identity and current existence. An attempt
to change a storyline of East Asia’s memory regime is taken as an effort to subvert the regional
order attached to the memory regime. A verbal fight between Chinese and Japanese diplomats over
the Senkaku/Diaoyu island dispute escalated precisely because of a fear of the opponent’s
historical narrative dominating on the island (Nakano, 2016).
Based on the same logic, civil society groups are even more active in reshaping the public
perception of war because their identity is set to correct historical injustice. For instance, Koreabased nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have organized war-related museum exhibitions,built monuments and statues to commemorate victims of war and oppression, and run campaigns
to protest against the Japanese government for not fully recognizing its responsibility for the
women recruited as sexual slaves for the Japanese military. They have secured internal support
and widened their transnational networks to push their agenda internationally (Kim, 2014).
Although less successful, Japanese conservative politicians have also conducted public diplomacy
by taking out full-page advertisements in international newspapers and sending historicalrevisionist books to professors overseas to “correct” the historical misunderstanding abroad(Yamaguchi et al., 2016). These civil society groups take action because they believe it is the rightthing to do and is part of their raison d'être.
If these actors are serious about improving the quality of public diplomacy and making it moreengaging than propaganda, heritage is a reasonable resource. As discussed earlier, heritage does
not directly send a message to viewers but is involved in the construction of values and meanings
with the help of the historical information and interpretation attached to it. In competition over ahegemonic position in East Asia’s memory regime, both state and non-state actors recognize theutility of heritage as a soft power resource in putting forward a specific historical narrative to theinternational audience. By using this resource, they aim to create a favorable environment in which
they can manage the problematic relationship between their nation-state and others in East Asia.
Thus, heritage is no longer just an issue of culture; it is also a concern of politicians and diplomats.
East Asia’s promotion of dissonant modern heritage57 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 17, No.1

To gain a UNESCO heritage designation, nominators craft words and sentences to convey aninterpretation of what they believe to be heritage of outstanding universal value or global
significance. Their campaigns intentionally promote their heritage to win international public
support for their own historical understanding. This section examines two examples of theacquisition of UNESCO’s heritage designation: Japan’s “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial
Revolution” and China’s “Documents of Nanjing Massacre.”

Case 1: The Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution
As a state party adhering to the World Heritage Convention, Japan submitted a nomination file ofthe “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution” to the World Heritage Centre of UNESCO in
2013. Its official preparation for the nomination started in 2008 (World Heritage Council of theSites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, 2015). Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (JCA)
decided to include the “Heritage of Modernization and Industrialization in Kyushu and Yamaguchi”
on Japan’s World Heritage Tentative List. Because the properties were in different parts ofsouthwest Japan, mainly in the Kyushu-Yamaguchi region, they require “serial nominations” bywhich all properties are connected by a single storyline. Eventually, the nominated sites werereorganized to include 23 components of industrial complexes in 11 sites within 8 areas, whichwere renamed “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal
Mining.” Japan also provides a storyline of “the first successful transfer of industrialization fromthe West to a non-Western nation” between the 1850s and 1910 (UNESCO, 2015a).
There is some evidence to suspect that a specific group of people in the government’s circle
promoted this nomination. The coordinator of this nomination was Kato Koko, a Harvard graduate
in town planning, with a close connection to Abe Shinzo and internationally well-connected. Under
her leadership, the World Heritage Promotion Council of Japan constructed a strategy for
UNESCO’s inscription, one aspect of which was to make a success story of Japan in the turbulent
period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This story fits in the Japanese grandnarrative that most conservative and nationalist politicians, such as Abe Shinzo, like: the legacy of
Meiji Japan characterized by a remarkable modernization and industrialization (Abe, 2006). In
September 2013, against the recommendation of the Heritage Committee in the Cultural Council
in JCA, the Abe administration put forward the nomination of the Site of Japan’s Meiji Industrial
Revolution instead of the “Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki.” Upon the visit of an
ICOMOS expert to the nominated sites in 2014, a Japanese reception party marked the enthusiasmof the Japanese government for the UNESCO listing, including over 1,700 participants such as
Prime Minister Abe, members of parliament, senior officials, and local and business
representatives (Yanagisawa, 2015).
Japan’s nomination and promotion of the Sites was likely to invite criticism from South Korea.
The sites include the island of Gunhamdo (Battleship Island) and the Mitsubishi Shipyard in
Nagasaki. In South Korea, Gunhamdo had been publicly known as a place where Koreans andChinese prisoners of war were forcibly taken to work during World War II. Because Korean former

Summer 2018 | 58

laborers and their families sued the related Japanese companies including the Mitsubishi Industrial
Group, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, and the Nachi-Fujikoshi Corporation for individualcompensation since 1997, Japanese storyline that ignores this part of history in Gunhamdo looked
like a case of historical injustice.
When Japan nominated the sites in September 2013, there was no official discussion between thegovernments of Japan and South Korea on this matter: the issue of “comfort women” was morepressing for the two governments to settle. Only after ICOMOS endorsed the “outstanding
universal value” of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution in accordance with the World
Heritage criteria such as integrity and authenticity did South Korea express its strong opposition:
President Park Geun-hye directly presented her concern to the UNESCO Director-General.
According to Kimura (2015), South Korea suddenly started a campaign to prevent the inscription
for two reasons: first, the ICOMOS decision looked like South Korea’s loss in a competition withJapan over historical perceptions, and second, South Korea saw this occasion as a great opportunity
to bring out Japan’s acknowledgment of “forced labor,” which was prohibited under the 1930
Forced Labor Convention of the International Labor Organization.
The Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution were successfully introduced to the World
Heritage List in July 2015. During the World Heritage Committee meeting, the governments ofJapan and South Korea had a closed session, which led to an agreement that both parties would
support South Korea’s nomination of Baekje Historic Areas in addition to the Japanese nomination.
As a condition, the Japanese ambassador Kuni Sato, the Permanent Delegate of Japan to UNESCO,
acknowledged at the table of the World Heritage Committee meeting that the civilians from the
Korean peninsula were brought to the island and “forced to work,” and promised to establish an
information center to explain the history of Korean victims on the site (UNESCO, 2015b). For thedomestic audience, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs translated “forced to work” into theJapanese phrase “hatarakasareta,” by which it denied “forced labor” and Japan’s breach of the1930 Forced Labor Convention of the International Labor Organization (Japan, 2015b). For the
Korean side, this remark was equivalent to Japan’s acknowledgment of “forced labor,” as inEnglish such a differentiation does not make sense.
Although this diplomatic settlement publicly saved face for both parties, it did not satisfy Korean
activists and labor unions concerned with the Japanese wrongdoings against the forced laborers.
In September 2015, “Infinite Challenge” (Mudo), a popular entertainment show in South Korea,
featured the site of Gunhamdo, criticizing that Japan had not yet put any explanation of Korean
forced laborers at the site. The show became a major engine of a new entertainment and social
movement related to the Korean forced laborers. South Korea’s two umbrella labor groups, theFederation of Korean Trade Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, erected statuesof Korean forced laborers, first in Bupyeong Park, the former factory site of Mitsubishi Heavy
Industry in Incheon, and then in front of Yongsan Station in central Seoul with a donation of 100
million won (US$89,000) in 2017 (Yonhap, 2017b). Film director Ryoo Seung-wan produced thefilm Gunhamdo (2017) with a “sense of duty to raise awareness of a deeply atrocious, but lesspublicized, historical subject” (Rumy, 2017). Although the film was relatively unsuccessful in

59 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 17, No.1

Korea mainly due to its negative characterization of a Korean collaborator with the Japanese, it
played a role in reconstructing the value of the Japanese island of Hashima as a place for Koreans
to commemorate the forced labor victims and shame the Japanese for their “wrongdoings.”
Korea’s major entertainment company, CJ Entertainment, promoted the film in the U.S. and othercountries, and organized a special prescreening of “The Battleship Island” in Paris for UNESCO
headquarters officials and Korean diplomats stationed there (Yonhap, 2017a).
In presenting the cultural products and statues related to Korean forced laborers in Gunhamdo,
non-state actors challenged the UNESCO-certified storylines of the legacy of Japanese industrial
revolution. In this sense, the inscription was not the end of controversy but the beginning of
heritage politics from below. The Japanese government regarded the erection of forced laborer
statues as a problem for the South Korea-Japan relationship, even suggesting that it breached theVienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (Suga, 2017). Nevertheless, under Moon Jae-in’sleadership, South Korea government was unwilling to suppress the activities of civil society groups,
as was the case for the comfort women statues. Ironically, while Japan aimed to promote a
successful image of Japanese modern history through UNESCO’s World Heritage Program, it
caused a backlash that the governments could not easily contain. In other words, this casedemonstrates that a state-level agreement is insufficient to manage heritage dissonance.

Case 2: The Documents of Nanjing Massacre
In October 2015, China’s nomination for the “Documents of Nanjing Massacre” was inscribed
into the MOW Register. The nomination was initiated by Zhu Chengshan, the curator of the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and former deputy director of the Communist Party of China
Jiangsu Provincial Publicity Office. At the Nanjing People’s Congress in 2009, he and nine otherparty members proposed a plan to nominate the documents related to the Nanjing Massacre for the
MOW Register. After this plan was chosen as one of ten important agendas for Nanjing, theoriginal documents were selected from the holdings of the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the
Nanjing Massacre, the Second Historical Archives of China, and the Nanjing Municipal Archives.
Then the Documents of Nanjing Massacre were nominated for the Register in 2010 (Jiang and Cai,2015). After an unsuccessful result, the collection was expanded to include other sources from four
more archives in China, which led to a successful nomination in 2015.
The nominated collection has three parts. The first part concerns the period of the massacre (1937–
1938). The second part is related to the post-war investigation and the trials of war criminals as
documented by the Chinese National Government’s Military Tribunal (1945–1947). The third partconcerns files assembled by the judiciary authorities of the People’s Republic of China (1952–1956). These documents comprise 11 sets of archives that include films, photographs, and texts.
According to Chinese nomination form, they provide “solid evidence” that “had a profound appeal
to the global community and helped people around the world better understand the cruelty of war”
(UNESCO, 2014).

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In China, the Nanjing Massacre has an iconic meaning in the public memory of Chinese wartime
suffering under Japanese military aggression. This massacre was seen not just one of many tragic
events, but rather equivalent to the Jewish Holocaust or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima andNagasaki. While Iris Chang’s famous book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust ofWorld War II (1997) contributed to international recognition of the event, the UNESCO inscription
provides further assurance that the Nanjing Massacre was an enormous human tragedy for theworld to remember. After the inscription, Zhu Chengshan explained that the UNESCO listing
represented the “global recognition” of “one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against
humanity” and “will help us honor history, refute wrong claims and disseminate the truth” (Xinhua
Net, 2015). Zhu was one of the vocal opponents of Japan’s Prime Minister’s visit to the Yasukuni
Shrine and the revisionist history textbook that did not mention the Nanjing massacre. For him,
UNESCO’s heritage designation proved his point that any attempt to deny the massacre would be
deemed illegitimate and unjust. For those who committed to the remembrance of Chinese people’s
suffering, the real value of the inscription was the notion of acquiring international recognition
that China’s records and accounts of the Nanjing Massacre were authentic.
The inscription of the Documents of Nanjing Massacre provoked unprecedented Japanesereactions against UNESCO. Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide (2015a) argued that the
UNESCO decision was regrettable despite the conflicting views of Japan and China. He demandedthat UNESCO should carry out its work properly, arguing that China had been allowed to use
MOW for its own political purposes. Later, he added that Japan would consider suspending its
financial contribution to UNESCO unless the organization improved MOW’s institutional
mechanism and increased its “transparency and fairness” to prevent any future abuse of
UNESCO’s authority (Suga, 2015b). A spokesperson for Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs also
called the inscription into question, claiming that the documents themselves lacked “integrity andauthenticity” (Japan, 2015a).
At the public civil society level, two popular magazines in Japan featured discussions of theinscription and the “Nanjing Massacre.” The right-wing magazine Seiron (Sound Arguments) gave
sensational media coverage in December 2015 on the “defeat” of Japanese diplomacy, featuring
articles by revisionist Japanese historians and journalists. The critics accused not just China and
UNESCO, but also Japanese ministry officials and the Japanese nation of neglecting the heritage
competition in East Asia (e.g. Takahashi, 2015). The center-left magazine Sekai (The World)
organized a tripartite discussion in its February 2016 issue between Matsuura Koichiro, the former
UNESCO Director-General, Igarashi Takayoshi, a former special advisor to Japan’s Prime
Minister Kan Naoto, and Togo Kazuhiko, former ambassador to the Netherlands and the DirectorGeneral and Chief of the Treaties Bureau for Japan’s Foreign Ministry. Although the discussion
did not have a nationalistic tone, the three expressed concerns over the inscription of theDocuments of Nanjing Massacre as the politicization of MOW. They agreed that although theDocuments of Nanjing Massacre were probably authentic, it was necessary for UNESCO to be
more neutral (Matsuura et al., 2016).

61 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 17, No.1

In response to the public debates on UNESCO and Japan’s loss in the memory contests, theJapanese government took measures both domestically and internationally. First, in June 2016,
Japan’s National Commission for UNESCO, part of the Ministry of Education, Science, andTechnology, changed its translation of the term kioku isan (memory heritage) to sekai no kioku(the memory of the world). Originally, the Ministry had used the term kioku isan to describe theprogram, but after the inscription of the Documents of Nanjing Massacre, Japan emphasized that
MOW differed from the more established heritage programs such as World Heritage and Intangible
Cultural Heritage, which were founded by treaties and had a transparent selection process.
Presumably, the intention behind the change in wording was to soften the impression that aweakness in Japanese diplomacy was to blame for the inscription of the Nanjing Massacre
documents.
Second, Japan urged UNESCO to make the selection process more transparent and accountable tostate parties (Hase, 2015). By suspending the payment of its assessed contribution to UNESCO,
Japan pressured UNESCO to accept its proposal for the creation of an inter-state committee, arequirement for expert examination of submitted documents, and a revised process for selecting
the MOW committee members. UNESCO had an internal discussion on MOW, which resulted ina report to its Executive Board (UNESCO, 2017). The report partially reflects Japan’s suggestions:a “mechanism which would protect the MOW program from political abuse” is required: if there
is any “questioned nomination,” mediated dialogue between the concerned parties should be arequirement at the earliest stage.
Although a formal decision on MOW reforms has not yet been made, the UNESCO report affected
the selection process of MOW in 2017. While a Korea-based civilian network nominated “Voicesof the ‘Comfort Women’,” a Japanese rightwing nationalist group also gathered similar documents
and nominated them as “Documentation on ‘Comfort Women’ and Japanese Army discipline.”
Because these two civil society groups nominated overlapping documents from different angles,
UNESCO decided to postpone a decision on the inscription of both documents until the nominatorand concerned parties had been invited for a dialogue.

Concluding thoughts
A race to anchor historic sites and objects to UNESCO’s heritage designation has started in East
Asia. While heritage is often cherished for a society’s collective memory and identity, it is also a
powerful resource capable of attracting foreign tourists and the international media. Because
heritage has a productive power to develop historical narratives, states domestically support
heritage conservation and preservation and internationally promote heritage to educate a foreign
public about what should be remembered and what kind of story should be told. In East Asia, bothgovernments and civil society groups regard a UNESCO heritage designation as useful foradvancing their historical narratives to the world. Due to the uncertainty within the “memory
regime” that has emerged from the structural change of East Asia’s regional order, competition
to obtain heritage designations is a significant feature of regional politics.

Summer 2018 | 62

The two case studies demonstrate how difficult memories of the war and related history can bemobilized by state and non-state heritage organizations and how this contributes to the escalationof memory contests. When the historical narrative of items listed by UNESCO does not correspondto their own, state and non-state actors are not hesitant to contest UNESCO’s decision. If heritageis positioned as a static product against the interests of others, the utility of heritage soft power issignificantly qualified. In this sense, heritage soft power is a double-edged sword: heritage canmake the past experience of a particular group accessible to a foreign public and provide anchorage
points for people to reflect on the past beyond national boundaries, but it can also weaken apotential of reconciliation if it only serves the interests of a particular community of sharedmemory. Further research is necessary to fully uncover the role of civil society in international
heritage politics, but the findings of this article suggest that the inclusion of civil society is a key
to a successful public diplomacy. This is related to the nature of heritage by which both state andnon-state actors are invited to take part in a process of constructing a dominant historical narrative.
Without an understanding and a shared notion of heritage at a transnational civil society level, it
is almost impossible to manage heritage dissonance and prevent negative pushbacks to an attempt
to make a “common heritage for humanity.”

Funding
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) Grant
Number 17K03582 and JSPS Topic-Setting Program to Advance Cutting-Edge Humanities andSocial Sciences Research.

63 | Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, Vol. 17, No.1

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