Kamikazeflygeres brev på UNESCOS liste?

 

Japan wants kamikaze pilots' wartime letters to be part of Unesco world heritage list
Japan is pushing to have more than 300 letters written by its second-world-war kamikaze pilots enshrined as UN world heritage items - a move that will likely stir up further controversy about the country's wartime past and which has already elicited condemnation from Asian neighbours.

The southern city where these suicide pilots were trained and based, Minamikyushu, has submitted these letters to the Unesco Memory of the World Programme, in the hope it will be listed next year as heritage items worthy of preservation along with the likes of the Gutenberg Bible and the diaries of Holocaust victim Anne Frank.

Minamikyushu officials have translated into English 330 letters written by the aviators before they were sent on suicide missions where they would deliberately crash booby-trapped airplanes on Allied warships or other targets.

Not many of the pilots' families are still alive.

Minamikyushu Mayor Kanpei Shimoide told a news conference on Tuesday that the messages would help people think about the horrors of war ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of the world war next year, the Japanese state broadcaster NHK reported.

The suicide notes were previously kept at the city's Chiran Peace Museum, among 14,000 other letters and poems written by the pilots.

However, the Unesco submission has prompted a backlash from China and South Korea, which had been invaded or occupied by Japanese forces during the war.

"At such a speed, you [Japan] are going to enlist the Yasukuni Shrine as a world heritage [site]. Could you be more shameless?" the state outlet China News Services wrote in its official microblog account.

China Central Television, meanwhile, deemed the kamikaze special forces "notorious", in a Sina Weibo post that has been shared some 800 times and drawn 900 comments. Many Chinese netizens said the news left them "shocked" and "speechless with rage".

Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se expressed Seoul's opposition to Japan's move to honour the wartime relics after the news conference, saying the suicide notes went against the basic ethics of a Unesco world heritage, Korea's Arirang TV reported.

Unesco launched the Memory of the World Programme in 1992 to preserve valuable archives and documents all around the world.

The current list of 300 registered items include Vasco da Gama's journals on his first expedition to India, golden lists of the Qing dynasty imperial examination and the Phoenician alphabet.

To date, Japan has three registered items on the Memory of the World programme, namely the hand-written journal of statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga, the paintings and diaries of Sakubei Yamamoto, as well as archive materials from an inter-country mission during the Keicho era which Japan submitted together with Spain.

Countries who wish to register must gain approval from Unesco's International Advisory Committee.

Previously, Japan had sought to list Kyushu and Yamaguchi - where Koreans under Japan's colonial rule were forced to work in labour camps - as Unesco world heritage sites, Arirang TV reported.