In early May 2015, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) reported that the 23 sites related to Japan's industrialization in the Meiji period (“Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining”) met the criteria for designation as World Heritage sites. ICOMOS' evaluation paved the way for the sites to be inscribed in the World Heritage list at the 39th session of the World Heritage Committee in Bonn, Germany. South Korea voiced its opposition immediately, citing the use of Korean forced labor at 7 of these sites, and criticized Japan's nomination for attempting to obfuscate that history. Seoul demanded that Japan address the use of forced labor at these sites, but Tokyo rejected these calls as “political claims.” Japan and Korea met twice to discuss the issue (on 22 May and 9 June) but failed to reach any agreement. At the same time, Korea's foreign minister met with his counterparts in Germany, Croatia, and Malaysia - all three are members of the 21-member World Heritage Committee - to present Seoul's case against Japan's World Heritage proposal. On 21 June, however, Japanese and Korean foreign ministers meeting in Tokyo announced their agreement to cooperate to ensure the inscription of both Japan's Meiji industrial sites and South Korea's Baekje Historic Area into the World Heritage list at Bonn.

The dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands erupted in the 1970s, but the territorial dispute between Japan and China itself had started earlier, over Okinawa, immediately after the Second World War. The major point of dispute in the Senkaku/Diaoyu issue is whether these islands are part of Okinawa or part of Taiwan. The former is the position of the Japanese government, while the latter is the position of both Chinese governments, that is, the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. There was no such dispute over these islands before the end of the Second World War, that is, when both Okinawa and Taiwan were territories of the Japanese Empire.