Scholarly Perspectives
Critical analysis of Hashima's contested heritage
This page surveys scholarly analyses of Hashima's heritage governance, drawing on critical heritage studies, memory studies, and East Asian history. These academic assessments provide frameworks for understanding the institutional dynamics documented on the Institutional Positions page.
Learning context: This material supports Module 03: How Heritage Works and Module 07: Positions & Perspectives.
Heritage and Memory
Selective Memory and Strategic Forgetting
Writing in Japanese Modernity, Christopher Gerteis analyzes how Japan's industrial heritage sites navigate contested memory:
"By framing the labor practices of the colonial period as 'mobilization' rather than 'forced labor,' Japan's UNESCO inscribed heritage sites present a version of history that aligns with nationalistic narratives of progress and technological achievement, downplaying the exploitation and suffering of colonial workers."
Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past (1995) and David Lowenthal's The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998), the essay examines how "heritage" as constructed for tourism differs from "history" as scholarly inquiry. Trouillot's analysis of how power operates at multiple stages in the production of historical narratives — through the creation of sources, the assembly of archives, and the construction of retrospective significance — illuminates the mechanisms by which certain histories are systematically silenced.
See also: H-Net announcement
Battleship Island and Transnational Memory
In their study of the South Korean film Battleship Island (2017), scholars examine the transnational dynamics of cultural memory between South Korea and Japan. The study documents how Hashima became "an internationally recognisable icon of Korean suffering" through popular media, while simultaneously prompting counter-memory campaigns from Japanese groups presenting "nostalgic narratives of a harmonious, unified and vibrant community without racial discrimination."
The article notes that Japan's 2015 UNESCO statement committed to measures that "allow an understanding that there were a large number of Koreans and others who were brought against their will and forced to work," but then-Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida immediately clarified that "forced to work" did not mean "forced labour" under international law.
Critical Heritage Studies Frameworks
Authorized Heritage Discourse
Heritage scholars applying Laurajane Smith's concept of Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) have analyzed how Hashima's presentation exemplifies the "heritage-as-consensus" model — where acknowledgment of difficult history is managed through formulaic statements that satisfy diplomatic requirements without substantively engaging with historical evidence or survivor testimony.
Smith's framework, developed in Uses of Heritage (2006), identifies how a "dominant Western discourse about heritage... works to naturalize a range of assumptions about the nature and meaning of heritage," privileging expert knowledge, monumentality, and consensus narratives while marginalizing contested or uncomfortable histories. The AHD "focuses attention on aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes that current generations 'must' care for, protect and revere so that they may be passed to nebulous future generations."
Reference: Smith, Uses of Heritage (Routledge, 2006)
Silencing the Past
Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History provides essential theoretical grounding for understanding how certain histories are systematically excluded from public memory. Trouillot identifies four moments at which silences enter the historical record:
- The moment of fact creation (the making of sources)
- The moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)
- The moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives)
- The moment of retrospective significance (the making of history)
Applied to Hashima, this framework illuminates how silences about forced labor were produced not through a single act of censorship but through accumulated decisions about what testimony to collect, which documents to preserve, what narratives to construct, and whose experiences count as historically significant.
The Heritage Crusade
David Lowenthal's The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History distinguishes between "heritage" and "history" as fundamentally different enterprises. As Lowenthal argues, "Heritage should not be confused with history. History seeks to convince by truth... Heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly admits and frankly forgets, and thrives on ignorance and error."
This distinction is crucial for understanding how industrial heritage sites can simultaneously claim historical authenticity while systematically excluding inconvenient facts about forced labor, colonial exploitation, and wartime conditions.
The Interpretive Dilemma
Structural Analysis of Heritage Governance
Scholars have documented what some call an "interpretive trap" facing heritage projects on Hashima: presentations that include forced labor history face criticism from Japanese nationalist groups, while presentations that exclude it face criticism from Korean observers and international scholars.
This structural dynamic creates pressure toward silence or minimal acknowledgment, as any substantive engagement with the contested history attracts opposition. As documented in the Asia-Pacific Journal, the Managing Director of the Industrial Heritage Information Center has rejected acknowledging forced labor, claiming that workers from the Korean Peninsula "supported the system of increased production as a harmonious workforce like a family."
UNESCO and Colonial Heritage
Writing in Al Jazeera, scholars have argued that UNESCO's tolerance of Japan's interpretive approach "undermines its own credibility and reinforces historical revisionism." The analysis notes that UNESCO inscribed the Sado Gold Mines in 2024 despite Japan's unfulfilled commitments at the Meiji Industrial Sites, raising questions about the World Heritage system's capacity to enforce interpretive standards at sites of contested colonial history.
Project Reflections
The HashimaXR project team has published open-access essays reflecting on the design philosophy, institutional constraints, and ethical decisions that shaped the project. These essays, available on Past Meets Pixel, document the project's trajectory from concept to non-release.
Why the Island Is Silent
This essay explains the ethical decision to halt development rather than release under conditions requiring erasure of coerced labor history. As the authors note: "This was not a technical failure. It was an ethical decision." The essay positions the project's incompletion as testimony to "a history that has become unrenderable because people, both in Japan and Korea, are not ready to listen to alternative voices."
The essay documents how institutional pressure mounted "not to engage with the topic of non-Japanese labor before 1945," culminating in a proposed non-disparagement clause that "would have rendered large portions of the narrative off-limits."
Against Authenticity
This essay interrogates the concept of "historical authenticity" in digital heritage and video games. It argues that authenticity claims often privilege surface-level accuracy — architecture, clothing, weaponry — while sidelining critical engagement with historical complexity. Drawing on Edward Said's analysis of Orientalism, the essay examines how heritage representations can perpetuate colonial narratives even while claiming fidelity to the past.
The argument has direct implications for Hashima: visual reconstruction of the island's architecture can coexist with systematic exclusion of labor history, because "authenticity" as commonly conceived does not require engagement with difficult or contested narratives.
Exploring the Potential and Challenges of Historical Video Games
This foundational essay surveys the field of historical game studies, examining how games represent the past and what this means for historical understanding. It discusses the methodological and theoretical contributions of scholars like Uricchio (2005) and Chapman (2016), and raises questions about "the accuracy and authenticity of the historical representations in these games and the responsibilities of game developers and historians in creating and presenting these narratives."
Additional Resources
The project maintains two open-access Substack publications that continue to explore issues raised by the HashimaXR case study:
- Past Meets Pixel — Essays on XR ethics, design logic, procedural historiography, and the intersection of history and video gaming
- Japanese Modernity — Analysis of Japan's modern and contemporary history, including contested heritage and memory politics
What These Perspectives Reveal
The scholarly literature on Hashima's heritage governance reveals several patterns:
- The gap between commitment and implementation. Japan's 2015 UNESCO statement established clear obligations; the IHIC's interpretive approach has not fulfilled them in UNESCO's assessment, as confirmed by the 2021 monitoring mission and subsequent committee decisions.
- Diplomatic language as constraint. UNESCO's ability to compel action is limited; "strong regret" represents the outer boundary of available criticism, and the July 2025 vote demonstrated how procedural mechanisms can shield states from accountability.
- The persistence of the controversy. A decade after inscription, the interpretive dispute remains unresolved and continues to shape heritage governance at the highest international levels.
- The interpretive trap. Projects face structural opposition regardless of their positioning, creating pressure toward silence — a dynamic that the HashimaXR project encountered directly.
- Asymmetries of power. Japan's position as UNESCO's third-largest financial contributor (approximately $91.7 million for 2024–2025) compared to South Korea's 14th-place ranking ($31.9 million) reflects broader structural inequalities in heritage governance.