Join the World History Center for a lecture by Dr. Andrew Gordon (Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History from Harvard University) on the history of memorializing wartime foreign labor in Japan. 

During World War II, and with greatest intensity in the last years of the war, the Japanese government used drafted and in that sense forced labor of about 700,000 Koreans transported from the Korean peninsula to Japan in mines, factories, and military construction sites, as well as over 30,000 Chinese captured laborers and over 10,000 Allied prisoners of war. Since the war, and for the most part between the 1970s and early 2000s, a range of organizations have erected a surprisingly large number of monuments (cenotaphs) memorializing these experiences and mourning the many who died. In this talk Andrew Gordon will introduce a number of these monuments and discuss their significance. Whether in the vicinity of world heritage sites, or at all the many other locations where Koreans, Chinese, or Allied POWs were forced to work, the marking of this heritage remains an ongoing process. This is not a linear movement toward a full account of a difficult past, but is nonetheless a dynamic process moving in fits and starts with no sign of closure.