The sites include a negative legacy because Koreans were forced to work at some of them during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.

Regarding the UNESCO World Heritage sites, I truly wish they would be even more selective than they are. In this specific case, these sites very well may be historically significant...but with every year, more and more seemingly random factories or old buildings get added which only devalue others.

When you lump things like the Taj Mahal on one hand and then the Tomita Silk Mill on the other it can confuse people and devalue the label "World Heritage Site". For those who haven't visited, the Tomita Silk Mill- it's a lot of time/space for a little. It would have been much better served as a smaller museum exhibit or expanded to show more about the entire silk process outside of the scope of the factory. (History leading up to the factory? Silk road?

My point is that these new sites need not only to be historically valuable, but they should be of a significance that can't simply be distilled into a museum exhibit.

Somebody must surely be making some money off all these places being declared world heritage, or sense would have crept in by now.