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

On May 4, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an advisory body for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which carries out a preliminary assessment of its inscription on the World Heritage List, recommended ‘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, be inscribed on the World Heritage List. In response to this, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which was held in Bonn, Germany on July 5, decided to inscribe the sites on the World Heritage List as Cultural Heritage Sites. (Japanese)