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 Not because it failed technically, and not because the historical content was inaccurate.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 The resource supplies the historical content, conceptual frameworks, primary sources, and teaching materials; you bring the dialogue and debate that makes learning meaningful.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 04: Labour, Empire, and Evidence addresses these questions directly.
Regional Perspectives
This resource does not centre Japanese institutional narratives—it critiques them. Module 04 engages with scholarship on coerced labor including work from the Ōhara Institute for Social Research. The Regional Perspectives and Institutional Positions source pages analyse 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.
The Core Sequence
Nine modules tell the complete story of the HashimaXR project, from conception through obstruction to the archive of obstruction itself.
The HashimaXR Project
What we built, what we intended, and why it matters. Start here to understand the project before examining its obstruction.
~15 min · Start Here Module 01Hashima in Time and Place
Historical context for the site—from Meiji industrialisation through wartime mobilisation to UNESCO inscription.
~20 min Module 02How Heritage Works
Authorised Heritage Discourse, interpretive regimes, and the politics of "balance."
~15 min Module 03UNESCO & Contested Heritage
The 2015 inscription, Japan's "full history" commitment, and transnational counter-narratives.
~15 min Module 04Labour, Empire, and Evidence
Coerced labour at Hashima and the politics of historical knowledge.
~15 min Module 05Digital Histories
XR as historiography and the digital landscape around Hashima.
~15 min Module 06Reading Institutional Positions
Analytical tools for interpreting how heritage governance operates through documentary evidence.
~15 min Module 07Positions & Perspectives
Regional media discourse and institutional positions on Hashima's contested heritage.
~15 min Module 08Why the Project Stayed Unreleased
The archive of obstruction: soft gatekeeping, procedural refusal, and temporal drag.
~15 minCompanion Experiences
These experiences can be engaged at any point in your learning journey. They complement the core sequence with different registers—sensory, digital, and cultural.
Social Media and Digital Memory
How platforms shape contested heritage narratives: algorithmic amplification and the testimony wars.
CompanionSongs from the Coalfields
An audio-based learning experience exploring the folk songs that Hashima's workers brought from Japan's coalfield regions.
CompanionTimeline: Hashima in History
Interactive timeline from 1890 to the present—filter by theme, explore enquiry questions, and hear the island's soundscape.
Choose Your Pathway
Different contexts call for different depths of engagement. Select a pathway that fits your available time and learning goals:
Single Sitting
Quick introduction to the key concepts and case study
60–90 minutes2–3 Sessions
Deeper exploration across heritage theory and evidence
3–4 hours totalFull Sequence
Complete module sequence with primary sources and scholarly debate
8–10 hoursProfessional Practice
For heritage professionals navigating institutional constraints
2–3 hoursFind Your Starting Point
Tailored recommendations based on your background and goals.
Welcome, Student
Whether you're studying heritage studies, digital humanities, museum studies, or East Asian history, this resource offers case-based learning on contested heritage and critical digital literacy.
The Single Sitting pathway gives you the core concepts in 60–90 minutes. For assessed work or deeper engagement, try the Extended pathway.
Start with Single SittingWelcome, Educator
This resource includes ready-to-use teaching materials: worksheets, discussion prompts, assessment rubrics, and flexible pathways for different course contexts from single sessions to full modules.
Explore Teaching MaterialsTeaching KS3 or GCSE? See our resources for secondary history teachers.
Welcome, Heritage Practitioner
If you work in museums, archives, or heritage interpretation, this resource examines how institutional constraints shape what stories can be told—and how professionals navigate those tensions in practice.
Professional Practice PathwayWelcome, Researcher
Scholars interested in heritage governance, memory politics, or digital historiography will find extensive primary sources, media analysis, and methodological reflection on the archive of obstruction.
Browse Primary SourcesWho 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
- Secondary history teachers looking for ready-to-use KS3 and GCSE resources — lesson plans, source sheets, and curriculum connections
- 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 (9 modules, 00–08) takes 2.5–3 hours.