SADO, Japan (AP) — Japanese officials on Sunday paid tribute to workers at the country’s Sado Island Gold Mines but offered no apology over Japan’s brutal wartime use of Korean forced laborers, highlighting lingering tensions between the neighbors over the issue. 

South Korea a day earlier announced that it was boycotting the memorial, saying it had been impossible to settle unspecified disagreements between both governments in time for the event. The Korean absence is a major setback in the rapidly improving ties between the two countries, which since last year have set aside their historical disputes to prioritize U.S.-led security cooperation.

The Sado mines were listed in July as a UNESCO World Heritage Site after Japan moved past years of disputes with South Korea and reluctantly acknowledged the mines’ dark history, promising to hold an annual memorial service for all victims, including hundreds of Koreans who were mobilized to work in the mines.

The first ceremony of what Japan has promised will be an annual event held at a facility near the mines took place with more than 20 seats for South Korean attendees empty. 

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“As a local resident, I must say (their absence) is very disappointing after all the preparations we made,” said Sado Mayor Ryugo Watanabe. “I wish we could have held the memorial with South Korean attendees.” 

Families of Korean victims of mine accidents and South Korean officials are expected to hold their own ceremony near the mine on Monday as an expression of their “firm resolve not to make a compromise with Japan on history issues,” South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It said South korea will continue to strive to achieve the improvement of bilateral ties in a way that serves national interests of both countries.

At Sunday’s ceremony, four Japanese representatives, including central and local government officials and the head of the organizing group, thanked all mine workers for their sacrifice and mourned for those who died. None offered any apology to Korean forced laborers for the harsh treatment at the mines.

Akiko Ikuina, a parliamentary vice minister, representing Japan’s government, praised the craftsmanship of the laborers and their contribution to the Sado mines. 

She noted that “many people from the Korean Peninsula were at the mines under Japan’s wartime labor policies” and that they engaged in difficult work under dangerous and severe conditions away from home and their loved ones, and some died in accidents or from illnesses. But she did not acknowledge their forced labor or Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

There has been speculation that the South Korean boycott might have been because of Ikuina’s past visit to Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine — in August 2022, weeks after she was elected as a lawmaker. Japan’s neighbors view Yasukuni, which commemorates 2.5 million war dead including war criminals, as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism.

Ikuina belonged to a Japanese ruling party faction of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who led the whitewashing of Japan’s wartime atrocities in the 2010s during his leadership.

For instance, Japan says the terms “sex slavery” and “forced labor” are inaccurate and insists on the use of highly euphemistic terms such as “comfort women” and “civilian workers” instead. 

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul said Saturday that Ikuina’s Yasukuni visit was an issue of contention between the countries’ diplomats.

The 16th-century mines on the island of Sado, off Japan’s north-central coast, operated for nearly 400 years before closing in 1989 and were once the world’s largest gold producer. 

Historians say about 1,500 Koreans were mobilized to Sado as part of Japan’s use of hundreds of thousands of Korean laborers, including those forcibly brought from the Korean Peninsula, at Japanese mines and factories to make up for labor shortages because most working-age Japanese men had been sent to battlefronts across Asia and the Pacific. 

Japan’s government has maintained that all wartime compensation issues between the two countries were resolved under a 1965 normalization treaty.

South Korea had long opposed the listing of the site as World Heritage on the grounds that the Korean forced laborers, despite their key role in the wartime mine production, were missing from the exhibition. Seoul’s backing for Sado came as South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol prioritized improving relations with Japan. 

Some South Koreans had criticized Yoon’s government for supporting the event without securing a clear Japanese commitment to highlight the plight of Korean laborers. There were also complaints over South Korea agreeing to pay for the travel expenses of Korean victims’ family members to Sado.

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Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea. Associated Press writer Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.