Heritage is not the past. It is a set of decisions — made by institutions, governments, and cultural intermediaries — about which pasts matter, how they should be presented, and who has the authority to speak for them. Understanding how heritage works helps explain why some histories become visible at sites like Hashima while others remain excluded.

What the Japan-Korea Citizens' Guidebook reveals is that "industrialization as heritage" is never simply descriptive but always political, never innocent commemoration but always ideologically invested narrative work. Heritage-making is a present-oriented political practice that instrumentalizes history in service of contemporary agendas. Whether industrial sites become monuments to progress or memorials to suffering depends on whose memories count, whose suffering demands acknowledgment, and what kind of historical consciousness a society commits to cultivating.

Authorized Heritage Discourse

The scholar Laurajane Smith uses the term Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) to describe the cluster of assumptions, institutions, and practices that define what counts as legitimate heritage. AHD privileges certain things: monumental architecture, national narratives, elite perspectives, and stories that serve tourism and economic development. Voices that do not align with these priorities are marginalized — not necessarily through explicit censorship, but through subtler mechanisms of selection, framing, and institutional gatekeeping.

AHD operates through inclusion and exclusion simultaneously. It determines which histories are deemed appropriate for public presentation and which are treated as "controversial," "political," or "inappropriate." In contested heritage contexts, this often means that celebratory narratives of national achievement are authorized while histories of exploitation, violence, or injustice are bracketed as external to the site's "real" significance.

Collective Memory vs. Historical Consciousness

The historian Amos Funkenstein distinguishes between collective memory and historical consciousness. Collective memory serves present identity needs. It tends to be what Funkenstein calls "monumental" — insensitive to historical complexity, focused on particular places and events as prototypes of national virtue. Historical consciousness, by contrast, embraces chronological nuance and acknowledges uncomfortable truths.

Critically, Funkenstein emphasizes that collective memory is not organic or unconscious. It is subject to "conscious manipulation." As he observes: "If language can be consciously manipulated, all the more so collective memory." Heritage institutions do not simply reflect existing memory; they actively construct it through strategic decisions about what to remember, how to frame that memory, and what to forget or minimize.

Strategic Forgetting and Selective Memory

Selective memory refers to the deliberate foregrounding of some past events over others. Strategic forgetting refers to the active processes by which uncomfortable aspects of the past are minimized, displaced, or reframed.

At Hashima, selective memory highlights technological achievement, managerial benevolence, and the tight-knit community that once lived on the island. Strategic forgetting downplays exploitative labor regimes and the island's entanglement with Japan's wartime empire. The result is a heritage narrative in which coerced labor appears, if at all, as a regrettable but minor detail — external to the site's "real" meaning.

This is not an absence of memory. It is a product of deliberate choices about what to show and what to leave out.

How Institutions Produce Silence

Heritage governance operates through several mechanisms visible in the Hashima case:

Control over designation and interpretation

Official bodies determine what sites are recognized as heritage and how they are presented to visitors. UNESCO's inscription of the Meiji Industrial Revolution sites conferred international legitimacy. Japan's subsequent management of interpretation at IHIC shaped how that legitimacy translates into public narrative.

Access and resource allocation

Institutions control access to sites, archives, and funding. Projects that align with authorized narratives receive support; critical projects face obstacles. This gatekeeping is often indirect — not an explicit ban, but a pattern of delayed responses, withdrawn permissions, and partnerships that never quite materialize.

Conferral of legitimacy

A heritage project without official endorsement may struggle to secure distribution, media coverage, or audience trust. Institutions can confer or withhold legitimacy without directly engaging the content of a project's historical claims.

The language of "balance" and "risk"

When institutions resist critical content, they rarely frame their objections as censorship. Instead, they invoke "balance," "sensitivity," "appropriateness," or "reputational risk." These terms function as governance techniques, defining the boundaries of acceptable interpretation without explicitly defending historical erasure.

The Hashima Case: IHIC and the Architecture of Denial

The Industrial Heritage Information Center (IHIC) in Tokyo illustrates these dynamics. Established to fulfill Japan's UNESCO commitments, the center was meant to provide contextual information on all 23 Meiji Industrial Revolution sites and to memorialize victims of forced labor.

Instead, IHIC has become a venue for what scholars describe as historical revisionism:

• Exhibitions emphasize Japanese engineering achievements and narratives of harmonious company communities
• Testimonies that deny discrimination and coerced labor receive prominent placement
• Evidence documenting abuse is absent or framed as "groundless"
• The center's director has publicly claimed that Koreans worked "as a harmonious workforce like a family"

UNESCO's 2021 monitoring mission concluded that IHIC "falls short of international best practice" and lacks any display that could be said to memorialize victims. The World Heritage Committee expressed "strong regret" — unprecedentedly strong language — yet interpretive practices remain largely unchanged.

Why This Matters for Digital Heritage

Digital and immersive media do not dissolve Authorized Heritage Discourse. They extend it into new contexts. Institutions can sponsor digital projects that align with authorized narratives. They can control access to data, archives, and partnerships. They can confer or withhold the legitimacy that digital projects need to reach audiences.

HashimaXR encountered these dynamics directly. Local authorities and heritage organizations expressed enthusiasm for XR as a technology of virtual access. They did not express enthusiasm for XR as a medium for critical historical representation. The next modules examine what the project attempted — and how its critical content was blocked.