The Project

HashimaXR was a virtual reality project developed between 2020 and 2025. It aimed to reconstruct life on Hashima (Gunkanjima)—a small island 15 kilometres off the coast of Nagasaki and Japan's contested UNESCO World Heritage site—as a living community rather than a picturesque ruin, centring everyday experience while making space for the histories of coerced labour that official heritage narratives have systematically excluded.

The project was never released. Not because it failed technically, and not because the historical content was inaccurate. It remained unreleased because the conditions required for publication made critical interpretation effectively impossible.

This learning resource begins with the project itself—what was built, how it was designed, and what it set out to accomplish—before examining why it couldn't be released. The archive of obstruction becomes evidence of how heritage governance actually works.

Trailer from the HashimaXR prototype demonstration (2022)

How This Resource Works

HashimaXR is an open educational resource designed for integration into existing courses, workshops, and professional development programmes. Unlike a structured online course with enrolled cohorts and assigned instructors, this resource provides materials that educators and learners can adapt to their own contexts—whether that's a single seminar session, a multi-week unit, or independent professional study.

This design reflects a deliberate choice. Peer discussion and instructor guidance happen where they belong: in your classroom, your reading group, your institutional setting. The resource supplies the historical content, conceptual frameworks, primary sources, and teaching materials; you bring the dialogue and debate that makes learning meaningful.

On Evidence and Testimony

Users sometimes ask why this resource does not present extensive survivor testimony from Korean workers at Hashima. The answer is itself part of what this resource examines. Testimony from Korean workers mobilised to Hashima during the 1940s is fragmentary, contested, and shaped by decades of political dispute over what counts as credible evidence. To present such testimony as if it were simply "available" would misrepresent the evidentiary landscape.

Instead, this resource takes a historiographically honest approach: it examines why testimony is scarce, how archives were constructed, what conditions shaped remembering and forgetting, and how the politics of evidence continues to structure what can be said about this past. Module 05: Labor, Empire, and Evidence addresses these questions directly.

Regional Perspectives

This resource does not centre Japanese institutional narratives—it critiques them. Module 05 engages with scholarship on coerced labor including work from the Ōhara Institute for Social Research. Module 07: Positions & Perspectives analyses regional media discourse from Korean and Chinese sources alongside Japanese positions, examining how different actors frame the same contested past. The resource's purpose is to help learners understand the mechanisms by which official heritage narratives exclude or marginalise certain histories—not to reproduce those exclusions.

Choose Your Pathway

Different contexts call for different depths of engagement. Select a pathway that fits your available time and learning goals:

The Modules

Who This Is For

• Students in heritage studies, digital humanities, museum studies, game studies, or East Asian history
• Educators teaching courses on heritage, memory, digital media, or historiography
• Heritage professionals navigating tensions between critical interpretation and institutional constraint
• Researchers interested in the politics of historical representation

Reading time: Each module takes approximately 10–15 minutes to read. The complete sequence (10 modules, 00–09) takes 2.5–3 hours.