The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme and claims for recognition of atrocities: The nominations of Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’

Abstract

This article explores the use of the UNESCO Memory of the World programme in claims for recognition of atrocities, focusing on two recent nominations: Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’. We argue that amid domestic and international contestation of memories and historical accounts, cultural programmes, such as the Memory of the World, have become increasingly politicised and used to push for international recognition of past atrocities. The article reflects on the character of the Memory of the World programme and the core reasons for nominations to such programmes. It also considers the possible consequences of registration as it transposes the heritage of memory from the local to the global stage (and back) and in the process subjects both memory and heritage to various forms of authorised transformation and reification. We bring attention to how official recognition by the Memory of the World affects ongoing collective memory formation, and express concerns about the appropriation of individual and local memories, as they are granted universal value.

Keywords

appropriation atrocity Comfort Women Memory of the World Nanjing Massacre recognition UNESCO

The need for recognition and calls for reparations

Amid increased calls for public recognition of past crimes, conflicts and atrocities (hereafter referred to collectively as atrocities) several now-familiar forms have developed: the state apology, reconciliation activities, museologisation, memorialisation, erecting memorials and monuments (or removing them), and art installations. These responses may be grounded in legal systems or explore local notions of moral justice and rights/entitlements, or even pan-national articulations of such local concerns, thus moving between the formal and the informal, and between the state and communities or interest groups. They also involve different actors, including individuals, affected groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), states and international bodies. A sign of how widespread this has become is the United Nations’ adoption of memorialisation standards in 2014. This, in turn, may be seen as ‘promoting Western memorial models as a template for the representation of past tragedies or mass crimes and, in so doing, requiring states with difficult pasts to adhere to prescribed standards of memory’ (David, 2020: 4).

However, although the notion of recognition is now commonly assigned a role in recovery processes (whether for individuals or groups) and peacemaking, it is less clear whether these forms of recognition are indeed helpful (David, 2020; Sørensen et al., 2019). For instance, the oft-repeated calls for state apologies are not supported by well-documented insights into how such apologies ‘help’ victims, what they help with, or who specifically they help. Many have expressed concerns that this form of ‘recognition’ has become an empty, symbolic political gesture (Bentley, 2015) and victims (or their spokespeople) often find the wording of such apologies or actions to be lacking. The apology, in the end, fails to satisfy their psychological or political needs (e.g. the case of Gernika, discussed in Viejo-Rose, 2011). David (2020: 2) has even argued that the standardisation of memorialisation (and especially moral remembrance) means they are ‘generally ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst’.

Behind calls for recognition is a concern with reparation – how can we be recompensed/how can ‘we’ make up for past atrocities? This is linked to ideas about rehabilitation and justice, at times even applied simultaneously to victims and perpetrators.¹ These issues have become especially relevant now, as worldwide we are experiencing widespread public concern about historical wrongs and debates about how we should respond. For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement has raised fundamental questions about the roles of reparation, and about whether and how society should compensate people for historical wrongs. It calls attention to whether and how the present should respond to long-term cross-generational hurt and deprivation. We are experiencing calls for reparation in which collective memory, history, and heritagisation are interwoven in challenging ways.

To provide further insights into this complex phenomenon, this article focuses on an international cultural policy: the Memory of the World (MOW) programme under UNESCO. We focus on MOW because heritage sites, narratives and practices are commonly embroiled in acts of remembering, and they are, therefore, often deeply implicated in discussions of official recognition of contested pasts. We use two recent nominations to the MOW to investigate such international engagement with ‘memory’: Documents of the Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’.

These two nominations illustrate how aspirations for global recognition of atrocities are sought through the MOW programme. In turn, they also offer insights into the dynamics of (contested) collective memory, history and heritagisation in contemporary East Asia. The historical events that these nominations refer to remain contested and continue to affect geopolitical relationships between Japan, China and South Korea. Their wider inter-state significance is shown by how they become ‘topics of concern’ within the international arena of heritage diplomacy (Nakano and Zhu, 2020; Suh, 2020; Vickers, 2019, 2021). A number of papers in the recent special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus dedicated to the topic of ‘Comfort Women as public history’ scrutinised the ‘Comfort Women’ case with regard to the heritage politics of East Asia. Of particular interest for understanding the process of heritagisation, some of the papers point to the tensions between activism and its claims and historical accounts (Frost and Vickers, 2021).

In contrast to such studies, the main focus of this article is the memory claims that have accompanied these two applications for MOW inscription, as they exemplify the complex politics of nominations, and have also played the central role in the mounting critique of the MOW programme and its subsequent revision. Compared with other atrocity-related applications, the two cases suit our aim particularly well as their many similarities enable meaningful comparison of memorialisation and heritagisation, and because they have affected the entire MOW programme. Locating these two cases in the trajectory of the ongoing development of the MOW programme, we examine how they represent desires for global recognition of painful memories, and how this, in turn, is seen to add values and legitimacy to specific versions of contested memories, thus potentially fuelling conflict. As an international memory depository, the MOW programme facilitates the scaling-up of regional political conflicts.

The remainder of this article is divided into four parts. First, we review the history of the UNESCO MOW programme as an international device of memory protection, recognition and collection. The second and third sections compare and contrast the memorialisation of two cases and their nominations, drawing particular attention to how they have used the MOW in their efforts to gain international recognition. In the final part, we reflect on the potential impact of international cultural policy programmes, especially through the politicisation of memories and their reification.

Throughout the article, ‘memory’ is used in two ways. First, in the discussion of the case studies ‘memory’ refers to rhetorical statements about memory. Questions about how these memories were constituted as collective² and cross-generational are, however, not part of our argument as the focus is how such accounts of memories are performed and responded to now. Such rhetorical usage of ‘memory’ links to Assmann’s (2008) concept of ‘cultural memory’ and refers to disembodied memories that are cited as part of societal construction of normative and formative versions of the past (Erll, 2008). Second, we refer to memory as used by the MOW programme, where it is used in a manner that makes it interchangeable with the concept of ‘records’.

‘Memory of the World’ and the politicisation of nominations

Although the MOW programme was launched already in 1992, it has received little academic interest until recently, especially when compared with the scrutiny of the World Heritage Convention (WHC) and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (ICHC). As an international instrument with the power to grant status and value to different claims of memory, it is, however, an important programme. We need to better understand its remit as well as the reasons for and consequences of the gradual changes it has undergone.

The MOW programme was initiated by the Federico Mayor, then Director-General of UNESCO, as an international platform for protecting and documenting heritage (Jordan, 2013). Aligning with the construction of several institutions devoted to memory, such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the programme was part of UNESCO initiatives to preserve libraries, archives and documentary heritage as a means towards peacebuilding (Springer, 2020). The programme composes registers at national, regional and international levels, overseen by expert groups around the world on a voluntary basis (mainly archivists, librarians, curators and historians). Unlike other UNESCO programmes, such as the WHC and the ICHC, the MOW is not governed by a Convention, and this gives it great flexibility (Springer, 2020).

MOW’s initial focus on archival records was later expanded to accommodate oral accounts and witness statements (Abid, 1997; UNESCO, 1993), revealing a lack of clarity about, or a gradual expansion of, what constitutes ‘memory’. Its original focus on archival records drew from the WHC, but as that was originally created to protect physical sites (Abid, 1997; UNESCO, 1993), it was not straightforwardly translatable to record preservation. Tension also existed between ‘memory’ and ‘world’, with the programme title either assigning memories to the world or presuming some kind of relationship between the two components. At times, the reference to ‘memory’ even appears to be metaphorical or symbolic, or a stand-in for records. Despite this uneasy use of ‘memory’, there has been a rapid growth in nominations: from 38 inscriptions from 23 countries in 1997 to 429 from 119 countries, 5 international organisations and 1 private foundation as of today.³

The MOW’s basic principles were formulated in 1993, but today it operates under General Guidelines to Safeguard Documentary Heritage, promulgated in 1995 and revised in 2002 (Harvey, 2007; Heaney, 2016; Jordan, 2013). The programme mainly focuses on preservation and public access to documentary heritage, and its aims have changed substantially and revealingly since 1993 (Harvey, 2007; Heaney, 2016). This includes the scope of the inscribed documentary heritage becoming broader, now encompassing archives with unique writing styles (e.g. Archangel Gospel of 1092), and records concerning individuals (e.g. Nelson Mandela and Alfred Nobel), historic events, voyages, and scientific and anthropological discoveries (Bokova, 2012).

Importantly, and unlike other programmes such as the WHC and ICHC, the MOW does not require state parties to be involved in the nomination and selection processes; civil organisations and individuals can make nominations. As discussed below, disputes between nations about nominations are by now well known, but it should be pointed out that the open nomination process means there can also be disputes within nations.⁴ Also worth pointing out is that the technical requirements mean that the programme will automatically privilege those who have the power to assemble a nomination archive. Decisions are made by the International Advisory Committee, which guides UNESCO on the planning and implementation of the MOW programme (Edmondson, 2002; Vickers, 2021).

The International Register is today the MOW’s most visible component. The 2002 revision of the guidelines broadened its focus from protecting endangered documentary heritage to include an emphasis on the content of such writings. The remit of the MOW is now defined as ‘the documented, collective memory of the peoples of the world [which has] world significance’ (Edmondson, 2002: 2). The 2002 guidelines can be seen as a turning point as they triggered a sharp increase in the number of nominations, including a growing number of archives concerning oppressed groups or from nations that have suffered from colonisation, war and dictatorships (also see Vickers, 2021: 4). The Register now includes inscriptions such as Human Rights Archive of Chile (2003), Documentary Heritage of Enslaved Peoples of the Caribbean (2003), Paraguay’s Archives of Terror (2009) and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archives (2009) (UNESCO, 2021). This change in aims has been widely recognised and is directly reflected in the texts of nominations. For instance, referencing the entry of the Slave Trade Archives in 2015, Matthew Houdek (2016: 204) noted that the MOW had made a deliberate endeavour to mobilise archival memory directly as a symbol of hope and ‘moral solidarity’ and to ‘break the silence’ over past wrongdoings.

Yet some perceive this recent development as interfering in historical disputes between nations. As awareness of the possibility of protecting specific claims of collective memory linked to political events has grown, the MOW International Register has increasingly been used as a means to attain international recognition of such events. The 2014 nomination of Liberation Graphics Collection of Palestinian Posters, initiated by Dan Walsh, a former US marine and owner and curator of the Palestine Poster Project Archives (Ahren, 2015), was particularly significant, as it was the first time that UNESCO had processed a nomination of Palestinian documentary heritage. This archive, a powerful symbol of hope for Palestinians, demonstrated that their struggle could be globally publicised, legitimised and used to cultivate public awareness, sympathy and understanding (Houdek, 2016: 214). However, the nomination proved unacceptable to the global political mainstream, and UNESCO, under pressure from a pro-Israel lobbying group, ultimately rejected it without a formal review by the International Advisory Committee (IAC) (Houdek, 2016). Similarly, as discussed by others, the 2015 registration of the Return to Maizuru Port – Documents related to the Internment and Repatriation Experiences of Japanese (1945–1956) caused tensions between Russia and Japan, with critics claiming that the International Register had become politicised (Vickers, 2021). In response, the nominator claimed that the submitted poetry, illustrations and diaries of the Japanese soldiers describe ‘the human determination to survive in the face of great hardship [. . .] that led an aspiration for permanent world peace’ (Maizuru City, 2014). Immediately after the inscription, Russia officially denounced UNESCO’s decision, claiming the prisoners had been lawfully detained. It argued that ‘war-linked documents open a Pandora’s box’, as contested memories between the two nations could adversely affect relations between them (Suh, 2020: 99;). Russia also accused Japan of exploiting the MOW to strengthen a narrative of victimisation (South China Morning Post, 2015; The Japan Times, 2015; Vickers, 2021: 5–6). The ultimate result was an international ‘competition’ of claims of victimhood.

The controversies surrounding the MOW nominations and inscriptions attest to the increasing significance of these archives in a global age. In addition to presenting themselves as archives of global memory, they also confirm that UNESCO-certified heritage can have a remarkable impact on the politics of historical narratives, as UNESCO’s approval seems to express global recognition and to provide authority to a particular version of history (Nakano, 2018). It is, therefore, important to stress that although MOW inscriptions often relate to particular communities or groups, the historical events usually also ‘belong’ to nations. Inscriptions can serve either as confirmation of or as opposition to a nation’s promoted version of its history. Thus, while UNESCO, as with all its programmes, aims to use the MOW in pursuit of world peace, the MOW International Register is increasingly used by nominators as a battleground between stakeholders, with archives detailing the history of the oppressed used as tools to assign blame to perpetrators.

As the number of contentious, atrocity-related applications to the MOW scheme has grown, political debates about UNESCO’s politicisation and its ‘taking sides’ in conflicts between nations has become a major concern. While such nominations have become central instruments in the ongoing conflicts over memory in the twentieth century, they have also resulted in dramatic revisions to the MOW programme itself (cf. Nakano, 2020a), with potential ramifications for how alternative collective memories or historical claims will be recognised in the future. The following two cases are centred on such conflicts, and on the resultant changes that have occurred in the MOW programme itself.

Attempts to memorialise the Nanjing Massacre and ‘Comfort Women’

The terms ‘Nanjing Massacre’ and ‘Comfort Women’ refer to two historical events affecting China and Korea. Both are claimed to be evidence of Japanese atrocities committed between 1931 and 1945; they remain a source of conflict between the countries and the historical accounts are contested. Both cases feature the Japanese Imperial Army as the perpetrator, civilians as victims, and in both cases the atrocities remain prominent in local collective memory. In addition, advocates have in both cases considered the MOW as a means of securing wider recognition and support for claims. Moreover, the contestation affecting the cases can be located within wider Asian memory conflicts (Vickers, 2021). The two cases also differ in various ways. The Nanjing Massacre was a 6-week event well-defined in terms of location (i.e. a ‘site’ exists); this makes it similar to other wartime atrocities and thus, arguably, easier to secure the sympathy of international communities. In contrast, the ‘Comfort Women’ nomination refers to a phenomenon wide-ranging in time, space and effects. Some women were caught up in this system for just a few weeks, while others were kept captive for years in installations across countries under Japanese occupation. As a phenomenon, it has little in common with traditional heritage sites or records. These characteristics make the accounts susceptible to confusion and claims of distortion.

The Nanjing Massacre occurred in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). According to the Chinese government, the Japanese army occupied Nanjing for 6 weeks starting 13 December; the military’s alleged actions during this time included looting and destroying properties, and raping or murdering approximately 300,000 civilians, including children and disarmed soldiers (Qian, 2009: 9).⁵ Many Japanese officials and historians continue to deny the scale of the atrocities, despite admitting that killings and rapes did occur (Yoshida, 2006). Hence, Japan has consistently disputed the number of victims; this is seen by China as an attempt to downplay the severity of a war crime (Han, 2017).

The explicit memorialisation of the massacre began in the 1980s, after a long period of absence from public discourse. Immediately after Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945, the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) conducted preliminary investigations with the survivors of the Nanjing Massacre and tried Japanese prisoners of war who had been involved (Zhang, 2017). It also organised memorial services for the victims (Wang, 2017). However, amid the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party (1945–1949), China entered a period of considerable political turmoil, diverting attention from specific atrocities. With the rise of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, memories of the Nanjing Massacre were intentionally suppressed until the 1980s (Qian, 2009; Wakabayashi, 2007). This was seemingly done to bolster the legitimacy of the new regime and raise confidence during the political transition from the Kuomintang to the Communist Party. In its history curriculum, the People’s Republic of China preferred to emphasise the ultimate victory over Japan while minimising stories of Chinese victimhood (He, 2007). Later, in the context of the 1972 Sino-Japanese Diplomatic Normalisation, China’s suppression of the Nanjing Massacre memories became a part of diplomacy, serving as a friendly gesture to ensure a peaceful relationship with Japan (Zhang, 2017).

However, in the 1980s, a nascent remembrance movement for the Nanjing Massacre began to advance claims for reparation. There were two main reasons behind this development. First, political changes within China encouraged a rhetoric of national humiliation, to boost patriotism (Wang, 2017; Zhang, 2017). Second, provoked by the so-called ‘textbook controversy’ of 1982, China sought to counteract the Japanese Ministry of Education’s attempts to downplay Japanese war crimes (Fogel, 2007). In response, the Chinese government supported a series of commemoration activities, including the collection of testimonies, the creation of research institutions, funded projects and the production of scholarly works, popular films and documentaries about the Nanjing Massacre.

At the peak of this development, the Memorial Hall for the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders was opened in 1985, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in the Second World War. Since then, the memorial hall has acted not only as a national site for patriotic education but also as an international hub for commemorating the Nanjing Massacre. Its continued popularity is reflected by extension and renovation projects conducted in 1995 and 2006.

The other case, that of the ‘Comfort Women’, refers to the system of forced sexual slavery operated by the Japanese Imperial Army from 1932 to 1945. In this system, women of various nationalities from the Pacific region were held captive in brothels in military camps and other installations. They included Burmese, Chinese (the second largest group), Dutch, Indonesian, Filipina, Japanese and Korean women (the largest group). This was a well-organised system in which women were brutally sexually assaulted over a long period by Imperial Japanese soldiers (Min, 2003). Although survivors have insisted that they were tricked or forcibly and violently conscripted into the ‘Comfort Women’ system, various Japanese governments have tried to characterise the system as operating via voluntary participation, or even employment. This is done, for example, by referring to the women as military ‘Comfort Women’ (ianfu, 慰安婦), or prostitutes.

Whereas the Chinese government eventually took a central role in memorialising the Nanjing Massacre, the case of the ‘Comfort Women’ was largely initiated by a transnational grassroots movement involving South Korean and other East Asian activists, civil organisations and global NGOs.⁶ Given that under Confucianism the loss of female chastity was deemed equal to social death, the ‘shameful’ stories of ‘Comfort Women’ were suppressed after the war, and many ‘Comfort Women’ were never fully reintegrated into their communities and families (Jonsson, 2015). This lasted until 1991,⁷ when the public testimony of Kim Hak-sun, a surviving South Korean ‘Comfort Woman’, broke the silence. Her testimony gave momentum to calls for reparation and encouraged other ‘Comfort Women’ to tell their stories (Lee and Huang, 2019). Fuelled by this, the South Korean government in March 1993 officially raised the issue of accountability for the ‘Comfort Women’ system with the Japanese government, asking the latter to commit to an investigation into what had happened to these women and to secure education about ‘Comfort Women’ for future generations (Cho, 2018). In response, the then Japanese Chief Cabinet Minister Yohei Kono issued the Kono Statement in August 1993, apologising for the Japanese military’s ‘involvement’ in the use of women as sex slaves (Cho, 2014).

In 1995 the private Asian Women’s Fund was founded in Japan to distribute monetary compensation to ‘Comfort Women’. Although agreement about ‘Comfort Women’ was thus reached at the diplomatic level, the surviving ‘Comfort Women’ and the relevant civil organisations (e.g. the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, hereafter the Korean Council for ‘Comfort Women’) strongly denounced the agreement, objecting that the Japanese government had not admitted legal responsibility and that the forceful mobilisation of ‘Comfort Women’ had been an infringement of human rights (Cho, 2018; Frost and Vickers, 2021). In response, the South Korean government in 1998 asked the Asian Women’s Fund to stop distributing funds. Later, in 2015, the Japanese and South Korean governments signed an official accord on ‘Comfort Women’ (Shin, 2019). However, this too failed to reflect the needs of the surviving ‘Comfort Women’ and the demands of civil organisations (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2017). The South Korean public also broadly opposed the agreement, objecting to Japan’s official requests to remove a ‘Comfort Women’ statue in Seoul (Cho, 2018; Shin, 2019). In the face of intense domestic opposition, a ‘Reconciliation and Healing Foundation’ established by the Japanese government to compensate ‘Comfort Women’ was officially disbanded by the South Korean government in 2019 (Park, 2019). Thus, despite several efforts from the 1990s onwards, diplomatic agreements did not satisfactorily address the demands of victims’ groups and their spokespersons. This sequence of events raises central questions about what form of statement, if any, could ever be perceived as adequate compensation for the atrocities committed. The subsequent nomination of Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’ to the MOW can be seen as a part of this search for wider recognition but also calls for scrutiny about what it actually aims to gain.

Since the 1990s, the Korean Council for ‘Comfort Women’ has been the main entity advocating for the women and seeking reparation not only within South Korea but also in North Korea and across Asia.⁸ Their efforts have yielded international legal actions against Japan, including the Tokyo Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in 2000 and a class-action lawsuit in the United States (Lee, 2003).⁹ Elements of memorialisation have also been grassroots-based. In 2011, the first ‘Comfort Women’ statue, called the ‘Statue of Peace’, was erected in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul by the Korean Council for ‘Comfort Women’. Copies of this statue have now been erected in several places, and these statues have become an iconic marker linking the memorial movement across nations (Lee and Huang, 2019).

While concerns about memorialisation of the Nanjing Massacre and the ‘Comfort Women’ emerged in China and Korea, albeit with different governmental backing, a growing historical revisionist tendency in Japan distanced the country from these claims. Japan’s Prime Minister during this time, Shinzo Abe, provided the doctrine and political legitimation for historical revisionism (Yamaguchi, 2017), stating repeatedly that the Japanese government should endeavour not to burden the next generation with war memories and guilt (Soble, 2015). Statements about war crimes have consistently been minimised within public discourse in Japan, and attention has been shifted to the Meiji Restoration period, Japan’s ‘golden past’ (Underwood, 2015). The designation of 23 Meiji-era sites as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2015 under the title Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining, is widely seen as an expression of this desire (Boyle, 2019; Nakano, 2020b). The inclusion of Hashima Island in this designation shows how different facets of the past are highlighted or suppressed: Japan emphasised the island’s glorious Meiji industrial past at the expense of mentioning that the site used forced labour from China, Taiwan and Korea during the Asia-Pacific War (1941–1945).

However, our purpose is not to single out Japan here: such strategic use of a nation’s past is by no means unique to Japan. Rather, we seek to stress how in this case, as in so many others, historical revisionism has sought to divert attention from the need to take responsibility for atrocities. Amid these memory wars, nominations to the MOW programme are arguably used as means of strengthening rhetoric about collective memories by securing global attention.

Nominations to the MOW of the Documents of Nanjing Massacre and Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’

In 2014, six Chinese national archives and the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders submitted the Documents of Nanjing Massacre – 11 sets of archives including films, photographs and texts – to the MOW International Register. The Japanese government opposed the submission, concerned that the nomination could inspire debates about human rights violations in the same vein as the Holocaust (Ap and Ogura, 2015; Ryall, 2015). From 2014 to 2015, the Japanese government repeatedly tried to persuade China to withdraw its nomination and requested that the International Advisory Committee consider the political consequences (Nakano, 2018). Despite this intervention, the documents were officially inscribed into the MOW International Register in 2015.

Even after this inscription, debates between China and Japan continued. Japan denounced UNESCO’s decision, contesting China’s claim that there had been 300,000 casualties, and accused China of using ‘wartime misdeeds for propaganda’ (Yoshida, 2015). While Japan continues to cast doubt upon the authenticity of the Documents of Nanjing Massacre records, China maintains that these documents are part of global heritage due to their universal significance to human rights and truth (Ap and Ogura, 2015; Ryall, 2015). In response, Japan suspended its 2016 contribution to UNESCO, totalling 4.4 bn yen (34.3 m GBP), and accused UNESCO of being politicised (France-Presse, 2016). Many have placed Japan’s response to UNESCO within the wider context of Japanese right-wing’s political tactics of denying wartime atrocities (France-Presse, 2016). Meanwhile, some scholars have also pointed out that the Chinese government used the MOW strategically to draw international attention to China’s wartime victimisation and its global contribution to the victory of the anti-fascist forces to divert attention from recent atrocities committed by the Chinese Communist Party (Frost et al., 2019; Vickers, 2021).

Following the success of the inscription of the Documents of Nanjing Massacre, in May 2015, at the initiative of the Secretariat to the International Committee for Joint Nomination of Documents on the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ to UNESCO Memory of the World Register (hereafter SIC), 14 groups from eight countries, including Japan, China, the Netherlands and the Philippines, united to advocate for a ‘Comfort Women’ joint inscription. Many ‘Comfort Women’ had died in the intervening years, so advocacy groups sought to act on their behalf, seeking global memorialisation of their stories (Interview with SIC Vice-Director Dr. Hein Han, 2018). Prior to this transnational application, China had in 2014 sought to nominate ‘Comfort Women’ documents under the heading Sex Slaves for Imperial Japanese Troops to the MOW along with the Documents of Nanjing Massacre. The MOW’s International Advisory Committee, aware that the transnational application was in process, encouraged China to join this nomination (Shin, 2021: 2). Through SIC, 2744 documents and records were collected and presented under the heading Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’ and submitted for inscription in 2016 (Shin, 2021: 7).

Meanwhile, four Japan–US groups – the Alliance for Truth, the Study Group for Japan’s Rebirth (US), the Institution of Research of Policy of Media and Broadcasting and Japanese Women for Justice and Peace – made another nomination, Documentation on ‘Comfort Women’ and Japanese Army Discipline, to the MOW, also in 2016 (Hideaki et al., 2017b). In contrast to the SIC nomination, this application asserted that ‘Comfort Women’ were commercial prostitutes participating in a state-regulated prostitution system during the war (Hideaki et al., 2017b). In effect, this application approached ‘Comfort Women’ in direct opposition to the narrative set out in the Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’ application, and the four Japan–US groups requested a UNESCO mediation between the nominations (Hideaki et al., 2017a). SIC expressed deep regret about the situation, firmly asserting that the Japan–US application was supported by Japanese right-wing political elements (Interview with SIC Vice-Director Dr. Hein Han, 2018).

A further obfuscation also arose from some feminist historians, challenging how the concept of coercion was used in this dichotomised debate and pointing to the underlying prevalent chauvinism behind violence against women. They pointed to the reluctancy to address the root cause of the problem (Soh, 2008; also see Vickers, 2021: 11). Such arguments have, however, been critically denounced by many scholars/activists who argue that this dilutes the main issue about the ‘Comfort Women’ (for a wider discussion see Frost and Vickers, 2021: 4–5). Such arguments further illuminate potential twists, silencing and tensions such as between a focus on underlying structural issues versus the specific historical case.

Alarmed by the successful registration of the Documents of Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese government’s response was very specific. They criticised the MOW for lacking transparency and fair mechanisms for decision-making, thus calling on the programme to revise its review process and guidelines (Suh, 2020). They also threatened to suspend funding to UNESCO, a critical threat as Japan has been one of UNESCO’s most significant supporters, particularly after the United States withdrew its funding (McCurry, 2015). In response to such criticism, UNESCO postponed the inscription of the Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’ in 2017 and asked for ‘dialogue’ between the applicants and the Japanese government (Shin, 2021). After a long pending period, a total of four meetings were organised to work on the possibilities for joint nomination and further dialogue between the two groups between November 2020 and January 2021 (Interview with SIC Vice-Director Dr. Hein Han, 2021). The work was conducted under the facilitation of Dr Parent from Canada who was appointed by UNESCO (also see Shin, 2021: 13). Dr Parent submitted a report on the results of the meetings to UNESCO in January 2021. However, no follow-up has been announced as of July 2021.

Meanwhile, UNESCO suspended the nomination cycle for the International Register and undertook a comprehensive review and revision of the General Guidelines, including the International Advisory Committee Statutes and the nomination and selection processes (Edmondson, 2020; Suh, 2020). As a result, all international nominations now need to go through the UNESCO National Commission of each member state, a significant change that moves the MOW away from its original design as an expert-led programme (Edmondson, 2020). This means MOW applications will be screened at the national level before submission to the International Advisory Committee. Those who support the revision argue that the new guidelines will help to prevent political conflicts between nations (cf. Suh, 2020). However, its opponents insist that documents and archives that encompass non-national memories will lose the opportunity to be inscribed and to be protected from political pressure. Thus, the conflicts that arose with these nominations have had a decisive effect on the entire MOW programme that will affect global documentary heritage protection.

Discussion

These attempts to use the MOW to document atrocities as a part of global memory-making resulted in one success, the case of the Nanjing Massacre, and one apparent failure, the ‘Comfort Women’. There are diverse reasons for the different outcomes. Vickers (2021), for instance, has argued in detail for how the cases must be understood within larger regional political machinations. We propose that the order of the nominations also mattered, as it seems clear that the success of the Nanjing nomination made it even more important for the Japanese government to prevent yet another nomination presenting Japan as the perpetrator. In addition, the Nanjing nomination had characteristics that made it align with other cases of atrocities. In particular, it referred to an event and a site/location. This, for international assessors, made it immediately understandable and comparable to other cases. It suited the international language of war-related atrocities in that it matched an existing trope. We suggest this eased its acceptance for registration. In contrast, although the Register Sub-Committee initially gave a positive assessment on Voices of the Comfort Women (describing it as ‘irreplaceable and unique’; quoted in Shin, 2021: 8), the ‘Comfort Women’ application did not easily fit any existing memorial trope. As a phenomenon, it was diffuse without clear boundaries in either time or space. The argued similarity with the Holocaust largely backfired, and the gender-imbued sub-text was potentially threatening. Its fundamental characteristics were probably far more challenging for the MOW programme than is immediately obvious, and the case may in different ways have been distracted and confused due to deep-seated ideological views about women (see also Vickers, 2021). A final constraint was UNESCO’s unwillingness to become the arbitrator between the opposite claims that it had received related to the ‘Comfort Women’.

Meanwhile, irrespective of the different results, both cases remain a part of ongoing political and historical conflicts regarding wartime memories in East Asia.¹⁰ The nominations helped to generate more public awareness and debates and stimulated transnational interest in the memorialisation of these atrocities, as illustrated by the widening recognition (and appropriation) of both cases. For instance, while preparing the Documents of Nanjing Massacre application in 2014, the Chinese government designated 13 December, an annual day of commemoration of the massacre, with accompanying rituals (The Telegraph, 2014). Indeed, the success of this inscription seems to have heightened the profile of this event not only on the domestic level but also internationally. Since 2016, Chinese Canadians and Chinese Americans have actively joined commemoration events for the Nanjing Massacre in Ontario, Canada and the San Francisco Bay Area, US (Sankei Shimbun, 2017; Zhu, 2017). Zhang Jianjun, the Director of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, argues that the successful inscription to the MOW increased awareness of the Nanjing Massacre.(ChinaDaily.com.cn, 2017). Its inscription helped the Chinese government fulfil its aim of gaining international recognition for its narrative of Chinese victimhood during the Second World War, as well as its ambition to make the Nanjing Massacre a subject of worldwide commemoration.

Despite the postponed adjudication on the nomination of the Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’, the international memorialisation movement and transnational solidarity has grown stronger. The international alliance has pledged to continue its campaign to inscribe ‘Comfort Women’ documents, declaring its readiness to enter whatever form of dialogue UNESCO mandates (Vickers, 2017). In November 2018, SIC’s Japanese Committee organised an international conference in Tokyo to simultaneously seek ‘dialogue’ with the Japan–U.S. groups and the Japanese government. The SIC has urged UNESCO to ensure a fair and speedy adjudication of the nomination (Kim, 2018). Meanwhile, SIC committee members and other activists have been involved in erecting statues of ‘Comfort Women’ in several countries, thus aiding the sense of global memory, similar to the Nanjing Massacre’s international memorialisation.

These case studies reveal how an international instrument, such as the MOW, can be used, manipulated and politicised by different states, groups and local actors for specific claims and counterclaims, although such usage is often in conflict with the original intention of UNESCO of aiding peace. It is, however, useful to also consider how the act of inscription in itself will affect these accounts and memories. The historical events behind nominations, as they are made into authorised accounts, will necessarily be affected by the very nature of the institution they seek to be a part of, and how they will be ‘packaged’ through the process of nomination.

Registration on the MOW will bring memories and accounts into line with other memory projects, and this has some consequences. First, the UNESCO MOW programme was established out of an archival concern to preserve libraries and documents; it was a concern with the documents themselves. Logically, this may extend to oral accounts and witness statements, making the inclusion of both our cases viable proposals. It must be recognised, however, that at a formal level (i.e. how it makes itself comparable to other cases) it will be primarily through their status as records rather than as collective memories or claims about atrocity and call for reparation that the documents will be valued. Due to the MOW’s formal structures, registration is blind to politics – despite the political disputes the cases have given rise to. Political relevance or importance is not formal criteria used in the validation of an application. However, the cases discussed have clearly shown that these nominations were saturated in politics and ideological claims. The current state intervention and revision of the MOW programme has transformed it from its original status as an independent expert-led platform into another UNESCO programme led by state parties. Such structural shifts have made politics even more visible through the exercise of power and lobbying among governmental agencies.

Second, integral to UNESCO’s philosophy, the MOW programme stresses that ‘[its] vision [. . .] is that the world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, should be fully preserved and protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance’ (UNESCO, 2019). This, however, risks glossing over the difference between, on one hand, victims/claimants and perpetrators and, on the other hand, the rest of us: we are not really an ‘all’. At the same time, of course, UNESCO aims to engender collective responsibility towards the conservation of historical memory. That task, however, is not simple and uniform. The reasons for accepting collective responsibility towards preserving, for example, the Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’, are fundamentally different to those which make us accept responsibility for the care of, for example, the Bayeux Tapestry or the 1703 Census of Iceland. These historical sources or voices are of a different order: one is about a moral obligation, whereas the other is rather about physical care. This leaves it unclear how collective responsibility and collective acceptance of the duty to preserve very different kinds of documents, including those related to atrocities, may be agreed upon. Perhaps we should ask in what manners do these voices and memories belong to us all and what risks arise from universalising and essentialising these memories rather than recognising them as distinct and part of a particular regional history? Maybe too, we ought to consider whether former ‘Comfort Women’ (and their families) desire to become appropriated as ‘memories of the world’ or gender history. The forceful appropriation of women’s diverse individual experiences to the global heritage-making process may result in individuals’ stories or opinions, which might challenge the well-established grand narratives of the ‘Comfort Women’ issue, being more easily excluded and neglected. Such a possibility prompts us to rethink our responsibility as keepers of memory. In short, we should question whether registration dulls critical historical awareness, a concern similar to that raised by Frost and Vickers (2021: 1) in their discussion of activism versus historical research in which they ask, ‘what becomes of the original communicated historical experience and the original quest for historical understanding?’ The moral dilemmas that these cases hint at are considerable and point to important avenues of further research.

Third, having inherited much of its language and philosophy from the 1972 UNESCO Convention on Cultural and Natural Heritage, the MOW programme similarly operates through the core selection criteria of ‘world significance’ and ‘outstanding universal value’. Both come with assumptions, including that the significance and value of these memories can be compared and ranked; otherwise, there would be no basis for including or excluding cases from the register. In turn, this introduces a sense of objective measures. The assumption of comparative value is crucial. It will negate individual experiences and small-scale events because they simply cannot ‘compete’ for the status of world memory: but that must raise questions about the scale itself. By what right do we rank certain atrocities more highly – as holding greater universal significance – than others? To be included on the register, certain criteria (e.g. authenticity of documents) have to be met. However, such qualities do not relate to individual or even group experiences and memory in any direct manner; they are only case-specific in the shallowest of senses and turn the attention to the quality of evidence instead of the significance of the event. The existence of a register also communicates the idea that registered memories are more important than others that cannot satisfy these criteria, thereby creating a memory competition. In practice, however, the selection is influenced by power: who has the resources and connections to make a case according to the required format? Despite this, the world’s memories are ranked as if they are absolute, timeless, and even apolitical, equally relevant to us all. This is a dangerous practice, and the assumed existence of criteria that can be met objectively and transparently is worrisome in its naivety.

Returning to ‘lest we forget’

These two cases clearly illustrate that attempts to recognise atrocities have made MOW a battlefield for regional memory conflicts. UNESCO’s involvement has not only widened the impact of these memory conflicts beyond the regional but has also brought about a complete revision of the MOW system itself. Such changes will affect not only the management of documentary heritage, but also memory formation and memory values. To contribute to memory studies, we have used these cases to reveal how claims on memory can turn them into a common good, and that there are political consequences of such transformations.

Since its inception, the MOW has become an ever more widely recognised international brand, affirming and authenticating both the value and content of the inscribed archives. Through the very process of nomination, value is created, or assigned, to the registered cases. It is also clear, and very significant, that new emotional and moral connections and rights to such claims can emerge quickly and become shared globally, especially for relatively recent events for which empathy is readily felt. Such positions, however, lead to conflicting views, or even disputes, about atrocities, which become expressed as questions about the validity of the accounts. From being a repository of historical sources, the archive has become something that can be wielded as a weapon in a conflict about attributing guilt and responsibility. The recent critique of the principles used for adjudication is revealing in how the concept of the ‘political’ is both used as a critique and yet also forcefully protected. The critique simultaneously rejects the use of the MOW programme by specialist interest groups, as these are seen to have political motivations, and yet suggest that the nation-state should be given the control.

In discussing the two cases, we have raised concerns about whether the MOW is an appropriate platform for the recognition and reparation of atrocities. We also point to concerns about what certification as a global memory of atrocity may mean for the accounts of these events and memories (cf. Frost and Vickers, 2021). This leads us back to the quintessential question of why public and formal recognition of atrocities is desired, why it is so difficult to agree on the best form of recompense, and what the benefits of such claims are being played out at the international level rather than at that of the individual, group or region?

Thus, we may need to consider again the core reasons behind the push for the registration of recent historical atrocities – cases where the memory in question is literal, rather than a received account. Whereas registration to the MOW may satisfy the desire for global recognition, it is not necessarily a gesture of reparation, although it may eventually give legitimacy to such claims. Here it is important to stress that the principle of the MOW is documentation, and not reconciliation. However, some argue that global recognition helps create a public memory sphere that fosters empathy and understanding (cf. Kim, 2021). From that point of view, the two nominations may be seen to have strengthened solidarity with victims of atrocities.

The desire for recognition takes different forms and many of the core arguments appear as a mixture of specific emotional concerns and the importance of reckoning, with the latter sliding into a concern with justice and human rights. This is commonly phrased both as a demand for recognition of the specificities of the atrocities and a didactic concern with it never happening again. The latter aims at keeping memory alive as a warning. A concern with the safeguarding of human rights underwrites this notion as well as the MOW programme. However, as the cases in this article show, it is important that we continue to question the assumptions of an ‘inevitable causality’ between memorialisation and our ability to uphold human rights. Also, we cannot afford to ignore that whose experiences are being remembered is depending on who controls the narrative.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

This paper uses the Revised Romanisation of Korean.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [NRF2017S1A6A3A01079727], by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF2021S1A5B5A16077275], and by the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies under Grant [AKS-2016-LAB-2250005].

ORCID iDs

Hyun Kyung Lee

Yujie Zhu

Notes

Author biographies

Hyun Kyung Lee is Assistant Professor at Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University in South Korea. Her research interests include difficult heritage (colonial/Cold War heritage) and memory politics in East Asia, transnational heritage networking, heritage interpretation and peacebuilding at UNESCO Her latest book is Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia written in collaboration with her Taiwanese colleague Shu-Mei Huang (2019). She is also the author of Difficult Heritage in Nation Building: South Korea and Post-conflict Japanese Colonial Occupation Architecture (2019). Her most recent collaboration with colleagues Shu-Mei Huang and Edward Vickers, an edited volume titled Frontiers of Memory: Difficult Heritage and Cross-border Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism, is published with Hong Kong University Press (2022).

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen was, until her retirement in 2021, Professor of European Prehistory and Heritage Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK and Professor Emerita of the Bronze Age at Leiden University, The Netherlands. She was one of the founding members of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre and its first director. She has extensive research experience having worked on the role of material culture, gender, nationalism, memorials, and heritage and post-conflict. Her publications include the volumes Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches (with J. Carman, 2009), Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict: From History to Heritage (with Viejo Rose and Filippucci, 2019), War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place (with Viejjo Rose, 2015), and African Heritage Challenges (with B. Baillie, 2020).

Yujie Zhu is Associate Professor at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University, Australia. His research focuses on cultural heritage, particularly in relation to politics, social memory and cultural tourism. His recent books include Heritage Tourism (2021), Heritage Politics in China (2020, with Christina Maags) and Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China (2018). His work has shown heritage to be a powerful instrument of identity-making, memory activism, geopolitics, post-conflict recovery and reconciliation. He served as Vice-President of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies from 2014 to 2020.

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