Hashima Island—a coal mining facility off the coast of Nagasaki—sits at the centre of an unresolved dispute over how Japan commemorates sites where Korean and Chinese labourers were forced to work during World War II. The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015 as part of Japan's "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution" after Japan acknowledged that "a large number of Koreans and others" were "brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions" at multiple component sites including Hashima (UNESCO World Heritage Committee 2015, 2021). Subsequent interpretive practice, particularly at the Tokyo-based Industrial Heritage Information Center, has remained contested, and UNESCO has repeatedly found Japan's response inadequate (UNESCO World Heritage Committee 2021; Dionisio 2023; Johnsen 2021).

Hashima (Gunkanjima) is small enough to be grasped in a single glance, yet historically large enough to condense a century of industrial capitalism, imperial expansion, wartime mobilization, postwar prosperity, and postindustrial decline into a few engineered hectares. That compression is not merely geographic. It is administrative and interpretive. Because the island was expanded by landfill, protected by seawalls, and governed as a Mitsubishi company town, its built environment functioned as a technology of concentration that organized labor, housing, provisioning, and social life within hard boundaries. Those same constraints make Hashima unusually susceptible to selective representation. The island's story can be told as engineering triumph, as community, or as photogenic ruin, each of which is partly true, and each of which can be narrated in ways that either foreground or displace coercion, hierarchy, and responsibility.

1. An Industrial Island (1880s–1945)

Coal extraction around Hashima predates the island's most famous concrete skyline, but early operations were vulnerable to the sea and to logistical fragility. The decisive pivot was corporate consolidation. In 1890 Mitsubishi acquired mining rights and began scaling production by treating Hashima as an integrated industrial ecology: the mine, the docks, the seawalls, and the housing were components of a single system designed to stabilize output under marine constraint. The island's land itself was manufactured through landfill and maintained through protective infrastructure, so "place" here was not simply inherited geography but engineered capacity.

Two spatial facts structured everyday governance. First, the seawalls did more than keep water out. They made life depend on regulated maritime transport for food, supplies, and personnel, and they fixed the island's perimeter as both protection and containment. Second, the island could not expand horizontally in response to workforce growth. It grew vertically. Hashima's reinforced-concrete apartment blocks, including the 1916 high-rise often cited as a landmark of early Japanese high-rise construction, were not built primarily as monuments to modernity. They were built as a pragmatic solution to labor concentration, a way to warehouse and reproduce a workforce on minimal ground. By the mid-twentieth century the island's density was globally striking, but density should be read as a governance condition. Where bodies are concentrated, circulation is routinized, and the boundary between "work" and "life" is thin, corporate authority can operate through infrastructure as much as through explicit rules.

This is the context in which celebratory imagery, including early commercial postcards and corporate publicity, acquires analytic weight. Such images foreground smokestacks, modern amenities, and bustling community life. They document real achievements, including medical facilities and robust public services. They also model a public language for the island that treats industrial modernity as self-explanatory, inviting admiration without demanding questions about how labor was recruited, disciplined, and differentially valued. The absences in these images are not simply missing facts. They are early evidence of how industrial spaces are narratively stabilized as heritage before anyone uses the word heritage.

2. Wartime Labor Mobilization (1939–1945)

Hashima's most contested history is inseparable from imperial mobilization in the Asia-Pacific War. From the late 1930s, Japan expanded legal and administrative mechanisms for directing labor to strategic industries, including mining. Coal was a war resource, and the demand to sustain output intensified the extraction of labor under conditions that normalized coercion across the empire. Historical scholarship and survivor testimony have documented the presence of Korean and Chinese workers at sites within Japan's wartime industrial system, including Hashima, and have described discriminatory treatment, harsh underground labor, malnutrition, violence, and elevated mortality.

For this learning resource, the key point is not only that coercion occurred, but that the wartime years are routinely made difficult to hold in view within public interpretation. A visitor can be invited to appreciate engineering ingenuity, community order, and the drama of undersea shafts without being brought into contact with the colonial conditions that made wartime production possible. This is the first place where "silence" should be understood as a mechanism rather than a gap. When contested histories are acknowledged only as fleeting reference, framed as controversy rather than as historical responsibility, or displaced into the language of "balance," institutions can appear to include everything while operationally limiting what becomes sayable.

3. Decline, Abandonment, and Ruin (1945–2000s)

After 1945 Hashima continued as an operating mine under transformed political conditions, but its underlying logic as a concentrated, corporate-managed industrial environment persisted. The island's population peaked in 1959, when housing, schooling, medical services, and provisioning were calibrated to sustain a dense community in a hostile marine setting. Then the national energy regime shifted. As Japan moved from coal to oil, the mine's economics became untenable. Mitsubishi closed operations in January 1974, and residents departed rapidly. What remained on the island was an accidental archive of everyday life: furniture, desks, appliances, and signage caught in the speed of exit, alongside industrial infrastructure built for permanence and then abandoned.

Over subsequent decades, salt corrosion and typhoons turned the island into a modern ruin. The same reinforced concrete that once symbolized durability became an aesthetic of decay. "Battleship Island" became a name that travels easily in tourism promotion and popular media, and the ruin image now dominates visual circulation of the site. This aesthetic is not politically neutral. Ruins invite contemplation of impermanence and technological hubris, and they can be ethically seductive because they encourage a form of looking that treats history as atmosphere. The viewer can mourn abandonment without confronting wartime coercion, colonial hierarchy, or the unequal distribution of risk and suffering.

Here time becomes a political instrument. The ruin aesthetic pulls attention toward the late 1950s and 1970s, toward peak community life and sudden exit, while allowing the 1940s to recede. That temporal staging is one reason why high-fidelity reconstructions, whether photographic, cinematic, or interactive, can coexist with historical silence. Silence can be produced by what a narrative lingers on, not only by what it omits.

4. UNESCO Inscription and Contested Memory (2015–Present)

Hashima's current interpretive landscape is inseparable from UNESCO World Heritage governance. In 2015, Japan secured inscription of the serial property "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining." The listing process also formalized an international dispute over wartime labor. In that context, Japan acknowledged that "a large number of Koreans and others" were "brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions" at certain component sites and committed to interpretive measures enabling visitors to understand the "full history" (UNESCO World Heritage Committee 2015).

Since then, the dispute has been institutionalized as an interpretive compliance problem rather than a purely historiographical disagreement. UNESCO monitoring and Committee decisions have repeatedly returned to whether interpretive strategies, including institutional exhibitions and related informational measures, allow understanding of coerced labor and whether "appropriate measures to remember the victims" are present. In 2021, following a UNESCO/ICOMOS mission concerning the Industrial Heritage Information Centre, the World Heritage Committee expressed "strong regret" that relevant decisions had not yet been fully implemented and requested that Japan take the mission's conclusions into account (UNESCO World Heritage Committee 2021; UNESCO and ICOMOS 2021).

For this learning resource, the point is not to adjudicate every institutional claim. It is to clarify the environment in which any public representation of Hashima now operates. UNESCO decisions do not directly regulate private or university-based XR projects. Yet they shape reputational risk calculations, acceptable vocabularies, and institutional incentives around "balance," controversy, and liability.

5. Extended Reality (XR) Technologies and the Public Mediation of Difficult Pasts

Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term that includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). In cultural heritage, XR is often justified as a tool for access. It can simulate spaces that are physically dangerous, restricted, or no longer intact, and it can offer visitors a sense of presence and agency that conventional exhibition formats cannot easily reproduce. The same features that make XR attractive, however, intensify the ethical stakes of representing difficult pasts. When an experience feels immersive, the user's confidence in what is being shown can increase even when the representation is selective, and the design of what users can do, where they can go, and what the system treats as actionable becomes a quiet form of interpretation.

This is not an argument against XR. It is an argument for treating XR as public mediation rather than as neutral display. XR systems typically rely on production pipelines that include asset creation, scene design, review and QA cycles, platform constraints, licensing of imagery and sound, and institutional approvals for release. Each of these stages can become a governance surface. In heritage settings, these surfaces often reward visually convincing reconstruction while discouraging interpretive confrontation, particularly where a past is politically contested or legally sensitive. A useful baseline here is Innocente et al.'s review of headset-based XR in cultural heritage, which emphasizes that immersion, sense of presence, and perceived agency are core to the medium's appeal while also foregrounding unresolved design and implementation issues that shape what can be effectively communicated (Innocente et al. 2023).

Those tradeoffs matter most when the past is difficult, because the ethical burden is not only accuracy of objects and architecture, but the intelligibility of violence, labor regimes, and unequal vulnerability. A faithful-looking mine shaft that cannot name coercive labor regimes, or that treats exploitation as ambient hardship, does not merely omit information. It participates in a public settlement of meaning. This is why, in later modules, the unreleased HashimaXR project will be approached as a governance problem rather than a product story. The central question is how procedural conditions, partnership expectations, and rights regimes can shape what becomes narratable in immersive form, including by halting development before contested history becomes publicly playable.

6. What Is at Stake

Hashima is not simply a historical site. It is an active arena of memory politics where industrial achievement, colonial violence, national identity, and international accountability are negotiated through infrastructure: official interpretation, tourism promotion, museums, and digital products. That negotiation is rarely expressed as an explicit denial. More often it appears as a managed distribution of emphasis. Engineering innovation is foregrounded, coerced labor is acknowledged in minimal or contested terms, responsibility is reframed as debate, and memorialization is displaced by claims of neutrality.

Digital representation amplifies these tendencies. High-fidelity reconstructions can make the island present, even intimate, while keeping the hardest histories procedurally out of frame. Because immersive realism can compress critical distance, it can turn a selective narrative into a felt certainty. This is precisely why an unreleased XR project can matter historically even before one narrates its internal development. If a project attempted to make space for historiographical conflict and coerced labor within an immersive environment, then the question of why it did not reach public release becomes a question about governance, partnership conditions, and disclosure discipline, not merely technical failure or ordinary attrition.

The next modules build from this case by explaining how heritage functions as an authorized practice, and why "silence" in digital heritage is often produced through workflow and institutional conditions rather than through overt narrative prohibition.

References

Dionisio, Agnese. 2023. "Memories of Bathtubs and Apples: Touring the Industrial Heritage Information Center, Tokyo." The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 21 (7), no. 3 (December 21). https://apjjf.org/2023/21/7/Agnese-Dionisio/5782.

Innocente, Chiara, Luca Ulrich, Sandro Moos, and Enrico Vezzetti. 2023. "A Framework Study on the Use of Immersive XR Technologies in the Cultural Heritage Domain." Journal of Cultural Heritage 62 (July–August): 268–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2023.06.001.

Johnsen, Nikolai. 2021. "Katō Kōko's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Forgetting Forced Labour to Celebrate Japan's World Heritage Sites." The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (23), no. 6 (December 1). https://apjjf.org/2021/23/Johnsen.

Kim, Jihon, and Andrew D. Gordon. 2025. "Changing Politics of East Asian Colonial and Wartime Memory in UNESCO." International Journal of Asian Studies 23 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591425000063.

UNESCO and ICOMOS. 2021. "Report on the UNESCO/ICOMOS Mission to the Industrial Heritage Information Centre Related to the World Heritage Property 'Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining' (Japan) (C 1484), 7 to 9 June 2021." https://whc.unesco.org/document/188249.

UNESCO World Heritage Committee. 2015. "Decision 39 COM 8B.14: Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining (Japan)." https://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/6364/.

UNESCO World Heritage Committee. 2021. "Decision 44 COM 7B.30: Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining (Japan)." https://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/7748/.