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The Wednesday announcement by Kampei Shimoide, mayor of the
southern Japanese city of Minamikyushu, comes after South Korean
outrage at Japan's proposed UNESCO World Heritage listing of
early industrial sites, some of which used forced labor during
World War Two.
An unsuccessful bid last year by the city, which hosted an
airfield from which hundreds of pilots launched suicide missions
70 years ago, was condemned by China, where memories of Japan's
occupation run deep.
Both China and Korea suffered under Japanese rule, with parts of
China occupied in the 1930s and Korea colonized from 1910 to
1945.
"Our project is in no way whatsoever being undertaken in an
attempt to glorify, romanticize or otherwise rationalize the
historical legacy of (the pilots)," Shimoide told a news
conference, referring to the letters and wills from the pilots
preserved at the Chiran Peace Museum.
China applied last year for the inclusion of documents from the
1937 Nanjing Massacre and archives about the women forced to
work in wartime Japanese military brothels under the same
program, prompting protests from Japan. A decision on this is
expected later this year.
The Minamikyushu bid failed to clear the Japanese domestic
selection process last year. Should it succeed this time, it
would be considered for listing in 2017.
UNESCO's Memory of the World program, launched in the 1990s, has
registered dozens of projects to reflect the "documentary
heritage" of different periods. Documents include Britain's 13th
century Magna Carta, Anne Frank's diary from World War Two and
an annotated copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.
"This project is being undertaken to make a contribution to
lasting peace in humanity's future," said Mordecai George
Sheftall, a historian and professor at Shizuoka University in
Japan. "The world needs the Chiran documents so that nothing
like the kamikaze will happen again."
(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka, Writing by Elaine Lies; Editing
by Nick Macfie)
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