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The dominant diplomatic conflict of the 39th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Bonn, 2015, concerned a Japanese nomination for the World Heritage List. A selection of mines, steel works, shipyards and other sites of the Bakumatsu and early Meiji periods–among them the artificial island Hashima (Gunkanjima)–was to be honored as testimony of the first independent industrialization outside the West. Months before, however, the South Korean government had already started to campaign against the nomination, since the Japanese documents failed to mention the wartime use of Korean forced labor at some of the sites. Since both states were members of the 21-state member committee, a collision was imminent. As the result of tense negotiations, this was averted in the end, but in return for South Korea not blocking the World Heritage inscription, Japan had to read out a statement confirming that South Koreans were» forced to work «at some of the sites. While this avoided the legally problematic term of» forced labor «, South Korean and international media interpreted it as Japan’s first official recognition of such abuse. Given also the pending compensation claims, supporters of Prime Minister Abe’s conservative government were upset and questioned the Japanese negotiation strategy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at the World Heritage Committee session in Bonn, the article gives a chronology of events and attempts to explain why the Abe government approved a statement that runs counter to its nationalist politics of the past. The Japanese side seems to have overestimated the semantic distance between the two …