Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining
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How it came to be
The property has 23 components in eight areas and shows how, in about 50 years from the 1850s to 1910, Japan took up Western technology and built iron and steel, shipbuilding and coal mining industries. Shimazu Nariakira, lord of Satsuma, began the Shuseikan works in 1851, and the Nirayama reverberatory furnace, completed in 1857, actually cast cannon. The eight areas are Hagi, Kagoshima, Nirayama, Kamaishi, Saga, Nagasaki, Miike and Yawata.
In Nagasaki the Glover House was built in 1863, and the Giant Cantilever Crane was installed in 1909. Coal mining on Hashima began in 1870; Mitsubishi took over the island in 1890 and the mine closed in 1974. The Miike coal mine opened in 1873 and passed to Mitsui in 1889. The Higashida No. 1 blast furnace of the state-run Yawata Steel Works was fired in February 1901.
At inscription in 2015 the World Heritage Committee asked for an interpretive strategy allowing an understanding of the full history of each site. In 2021 it said it strongly regretted that Japan had not yet fully implemented the relevant decisions, and asked for measures to allow an understanding of a large number of Koreans and others brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions.
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