Module 00
The HashimaXR Project
What we built, what we intended, and why it matters
Overview
- HashimaXR was an immersive virtual reality experience reconstructing life on Hashima Island—not as picturesque ruin, but as a living community
- The project centred everyday experience while making space for the histories of coerced labour that official narratives have excluded
- Development reached production-ready status: detailed storyboards, character designs, architectural reconstructions, and working prototypes
- This module introduces what the team built; Module 08 explains why it was never released
Before examining contested heritage, institutional obstruction, or the archive of silence, you need to understand what HashimaXR was—what it set out to do, what it achieved, and what it would have offered users had it been released.
This module tells that story. It is the foundation for everything that follows.
The Vision
HashimaXR aimed to reconstruct Hashima Island as it existed at its peak—a hyper-dense community of over 5,000 people living on 6.3 hectares of artificial land. Not as the photogenic ruin that draws tourists today, but as a place where people lived, worked, celebrated festivals, raised children, and died. The project used immersive virtual reality technology to preserve the history and cultural heritage of this unique undersea coal mining town—a collaboration between historians, architects, and game designers. The core premise was simple: what if you could walk through Hashima when it was alive?
Prototype demonstration from HashimaXR workshop presentations
What Made HashimaXR Different
Virtual reconstructions of historical sites are common. What distinguished HashimaXR was its interpretive ambition—and its refusal to separate technical achievement from historical responsibility.
Lived Experience, Not Architectural Tourism
Most digital heritage projects reconstruct buildings. HashimaXR reconstructed life—the rhythms of shift work, the sounds of the marketplace, the festivals that punctuated the calendar, the negotiations of space in Japan's most densely populated community.
Multiple Temporal Layers
The experience moved users through time: from present-day ruins to the bustling 1960s, back to the construction era of the 1910s, and into the wartime period that official heritage narratives have systematically minimised.
Competing Voices
Rather than a single authoritative narrator, HashimaXR presented users with different perspectives on the same history. A former resident remembers community; a historian contextualises industrial policy; archival evidence complicates both.
Absence as Presence
The project made visible what official heritage excludes: the thousands of Korean and Chinese workers mobilised to Hashima during wartime, whose presence shaped the island but whose stories remain largely untold at the physical site.
The Planned Experience
HashimaXR was structured as a series of episodes, each focusing on a different aspect of island life. The gameplay blended historical exploration, puzzle-solving, and interactive storytelling. Players would be transported to various locations and times on the island, interacting with objects, spaces, and ghostly echoes of former residents to gather clues about their current location and era. Through artifact discovery, spectral hints from figures of the past, and portal mechanics linking different historical periods, users would unravel the rich tapestry of an island that thrived and declined over a century.
Return to Hashima
Players emerge from mine darkness into Building 30—Japan's oldest reinforced concrete apartment (1916). Competing voices guide interpretation as users encounter the 1905 typhoon and the shrine choice.
Episode 02Typhoon!
The 1905 disaster that destroyed half the residential housing and prompted Mitsubishi to transition to reinforced concrete—a pivotal moment in the island's architectural evolution.
Building GUNKANJIMA
Watch the island transform from rocky reef to "Battleship Island"—its silhouette resembling the Tosa-class battleships built in Nagasaki's Mitsubishi Shipyards.
Songs from the Coalfields
Hear what workers carried in memory: Sōran-bushi from Hokkaido, Bandaisan from Aizu, Okesa from Sado—folk songs revealing the regional cultures that converged on Hashima.
Episode 05The Company Town
Navigate the self-contained community: school, cinema, swimming pool, three public baths, mom-and-pop restaurants, open market, Buddhist temple, and Shinto shrine—an integrated space where no part could function alone.
In the Depths of the Abyss
Descend via the cage into No. 2 Mine—ride the pit railway, acquire mining tools, and encounter veteran makkuro papa (coal-blackened fathers) who share their stories from tunnels extending a kilometre underground.
Sanjinsai
Experience the annual Mountain Gods Festival celebrated every 3 April—the omikoshi (portable shrine) procession navigating hyper-dense streets while residents perform regional dances from their home prefectures.
Walking Tour
Follow Nakamura-sensei, a former resident, through present-day ruins with historical overlays revealing what each crumbling structure once contained.
Four episodes reached full storyboard completion in the Game Design Book; the remainder existed as detailed synopses with scene-by-scene walkthroughs. The narrative arc would have taken users from initial disorientation—emerging without memory into an unfamiliar space—through historical understanding to critical reflection on how heritage is constructed.
Development Timeline
HashimaXR was developed between 2020 and 2025 by an interdisciplinary team of historians, game designers, and developers based in the United Kingdom and Japan.
Project Launch
Funding secured. Initial partnerships established with heritage institutions based on the project's technical ambitions—the visual reconstruction, the immersive experience, the preservation work.
Technical Milestones
Detailed reconstruction of the island as it appeared in the early 1970s. Narrative systems for presenting multiple perspectives. In-game archive of historical documents. Prototype completed and demonstrated at workshops.
Production Development
Game Design Book expanded to 98 panels across eight episodes. Character profiles, building database, and production board documented professional-grade infrastructure. Storyboards specified voice lines, camera angles, and emotional beats.
Institutional Engagement
As the project's critical framing became clear, the trajectory changed. This part of the story is told in Module 08: Why the Project Stayed Unreleased.
What Survives
The production materials document what the team built—and what institutional conditions prevented from reaching the public.
The Cast of Characters
HashimaXR didn't just reconstruct buildings—it populated them. The Game Design Book includes detailed profiles for nineteen characters spanning different eras, social positions, and perspectives on island life:
1970s Residents
A wizened grandmother and grandfather who remember the island's earlier days. An old miner and his widow. Grade school children—one boy, one girl—who know no other home. Housewives from both blue-collar and white-collar families, managing household finances in company housing.
Workers Across Eras
Male miners from both 1970 and the pre-1930 period. Female miners and coal sorters from before mechanisation changed the workforce. Day labourers, clerical workers, public school teachers. A female marketplace hawker. Each with distinct costume specifications and backstories.
Nakamura-sensei
A former island resident whose guided tour forms the basis for Episode 08. The team built a MetaHuman avatar using the Unreal Engine, scripted from recorded virtual tours, with transcripts enabling translation into English, Korean, and other languages.
The Player
Users could select gender and age, exploring in first or third person. A chatbot interface was planned for delivering content questions and survey instruments—making the experience both educational and research-enabled.
Why This Matters
HashimaXR matters for two reasons that this learning resource explores in sequence.
First, the project demonstrates what immersive media can do for contested heritage. XR isn't just a visualisation tool—it's a historiographical medium that makes certain kinds of arguments possible. The design choices documented in the Game Design Book show how a team of historians and designers tried to create an experience that would centre everyday life while refusing to separate that life from the coerced labour that official heritage excludes.
Second, the project's trajectory—from enthusiastic partnership to conditional support to effective obstruction—reveals how heritage governance actually operates. The fact that HashimaXR was never released is not a story of failure. It is evidence of the institutional mechanisms that shape what can be publicly remembered.
The modules that follow develop both strands. Module 01 provides historical context for Hashima itself. Module 02 introduces how heritage becomes authorized. By Module 07, you'll understand not only what HashimaXR was, but why the conditions required for its release made critical interpretation effectively impossible.
What Happened Next?
The HashimaXR project achieved substantial technical milestones. But technical achievement wasn't enough. Module 08 tells the story of what happened when the project's critical framing became clear—and why non-release was ultimately the ethically responsible choice.
Skip to Module 07: Why the Project Stayed Unreleased →Key Takeaways
- HashimaXR was a collaboration between historians, architects, and game designers using immersive VR to preserve the history and cultural heritage of a unique undersea coal mining community.
- The experience centred lived experience—not architectural tourism but the rhythms of shift work, regional festivals, marketplace sounds, and multi-generational family life on the world's most densely populated real estate.
- Gameplay blended exploration, puzzle-solving, and storytelling: portal mechanics linked different eras while ghostly echoes provided hints and context from figures of the past.
- Production reached professional-grade completion: 8 episodes designed, 98 storyboard panels, 71 buildings documented with 3D reconstructions, 19 character profiles with costume specifications and MetaHuman avatars.
- The production materials survive as evidence of what was built—and what institutional conditions prevented from reaching the public.
📝 Cite This Module
Gerteis, Christopher. "Module 00: The HashimaXR Project." HashimaXR Learning Resource. SOAS University of London, 2025–2026. https://hashimaxr.netlify.app/learn/module-00/.
For other formats, see How to Cite · Full Bibliography