‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining’ Designated as World Heritage Site

On May 4, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an advisory body to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that conducts preliminary inspections to determine whether sites should be inscribed on the World Heritage List, recommended the inclusion of the ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining’ (eight prefectures including Fukuoka Prefecture, twenty-three sites), which had been nominated by the Japanese government as illustrating the process by which Western technology merged with Japanese culture to rapidly form an industrial nation, on the World Heritage List. In response, on July 5, the UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, held in Bonn, Germany, decided to inscribe the sites on the World Heritage List as Cultural Heritage Sites. (Japanese)