New Japanese sites on UN heritage list have negative historic value

By including Japan's controversial sites in its World Heritage list, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has helped Japan cover or glorify one of its past wartime atrocities. The 23 sites include coal mines, steel works and shipyards from 1850 to 1910 that exemplify how Japan became the first Asian nation to enter the modern industrial age.

Japan has a great deal to be proud of when it comes to its rapid modernization and industrialization beginning in the mid-1800s, which launched it on the path to becoming the world's second-largest economy scarcely one generation after the devastation of World War II, although it has slipped to the third now.

But seven of the 23 sites are questionable because some 60,000 Koreans and thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners of war were forced to work there in support of imperial Japan's war efforts. Japan wants the world to recognize these sites as important historical landmarks in its modernization process and acknowledge their contribution to Japan's development as the first industrial power outside Europe and North America.