For almost two decades, Gunma Prefecture has been the site of an intense political struggle over the public representation of the history of wartime forced labor in Japan's public sphere. Following an initiative by a private group, and with the unanimous consent of the prefectural assembly, a memorial dedicated to Korean wartime laborers was set up in a prefectural park in the city of Takasaki in 2004. However, in 2014, the prefecture announced it would not extend permission to maintain the memorial—a decision confirmed by Japan's Supreme Court in June 2022. The debates in Gunma are illustrative of the rise of historical revisionism in twenty-first century Japan and the revisionist campaign to erase the term “forced labor” from Japan's public sphere. The decision taken by Gunma Prefecture in 2014 to ban the memorial was a milestone, not only in this campaign, but also because it triggered massive media interest and encouraged other prefectural administrations to launch similar campaigns of censorship in public spaces.
