South Korea has called in Japan's top envoy to Seoul to lodge a complaint over Tokyo's failure to honor wartime forced labor victims at an information center of Japan's industrial revolution sites registered by UNESCO.
According to the foreign ministry here, Second Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-ho expressed regrets to Japanese Ambassador Koji Tomita on Monday, hours after the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo opened to the public without commemorative measures for the wartime victims.
The center, which had suspended operations due to the coronavirus pandemic, opened in March to showcase 23 Meiji-era sites commemorating Japan's industrial achievements.
Among the 23 sites that were put on the UNESCO list in 2015 is the notorious Hashima Island, also known as the Battleship Island, where thousands of Koreans were forced into harsh labor during Japan's colonial rule between 1910 and 1945.
Back in 2015 when UNESCO designated the sites, Japan said it would establish the information center to remember the victims, recognizing "Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions in the 1940s at some of the sites."
UNESCO had recommended for Japan to come up with an "interpretive strategy" that allows an "understanding of the full history of each site."
However, a visit by a pool of Tokyo-based correspondents on Sunday revealed that the center solely focused on highlighting achievements of Japan's industrial revolutions in areas of iron, steel and coal mining, without mentioning the suffering of the Korean victims.
<Photo: Yonhap News>
