UNESCO

In January, news that Japan had plans to nominate several gold and silver mines on Sado Island as a UNESCO World Heritage site sparked anger in South Korea, ...

The Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC), a human rights coalition based in San Francisco, says discussion has been met with “fierce resistance” from the Japanese side and that UNESCO’s director-general has not responded to repeated requests for a meeting. But to date, no dialogue has occurred and the “comfort women” nominations remain in limbo. It now covers nearly 5,000 square meters of the Tilanqiao area of Shanghai and has about 1,000 objects donated by survivors on display. To countries in East Asia, which see UNESCO status as highly important, it’s “almost like a stamp,” Zhu says. That provision became an official guideline in 2021 after Japan demanded a comprehensive review of the competition’s rules. The Nanjing Massacre in particular has long been a sensitive subject between the two countries as Beijing claims that Japan has failed to properly atone for it. The UNESCO nomination was no exception: Japanese organizations submitted their own “comfort women” counter-nomination, which characterized the women as legally employed prostitutes. Submissions closed in November, but final decisions will not be made until 2023. “China is ready to promote itself as the one who can offer help to those Jewish victims,” Huang says, even though the number of Jews who fled to Shanghai — and who exactly “saved the Jews” of Shanghai — has been subject to debate: both China and Japan have reportedly overstated the number of Jews “saved” by their countries. “The contestation does not require exact reasonable logic. UNESCO told CNN in a statement that it has “continued to seek the conditions for this dialogue and will continue to do so.” But Japan has long denied that the wartime government was directly responsible for the “comfort women” system, and in recent years has attempted to whitewash its dark history by demanding the removal of references to comfort women from U.S. textbooks and pressuring governments around the world to remove memorials.