This module addresses how digital media — VR, AR, games, and immersive reconstructions — function as forms of historical argument. It then surveys the existing digital landscape around Hashima, revealing patterns of visual sophistication combined with interpretive silence.

Part One: XR as Historiography

Immersive reconstruction as historical argument

Extended reality — VR, AR, and immersive digital environments — is often presented as a technology of access: a way to visit places you cannot physically reach, to see things as they once were, to experience the past. But XR is not a neutral window onto history. It is a form of historical argument. Every reconstruction makes claims about what matters, whose perspective counts, and what the past means.

Reconstruction Is Argument

A digital reconstruction of Hashima in the 1970s involves thousands of decisions: which buildings to model, how to light the scene, what objects to place in apartments, what sounds to include, where the user can and cannot go. Each decision shapes interpretation.

Consider a simple example: an apartment interior. The designer chooses furniture, arranges objects, sets a time of day. The result feels "authentic" — it looks like a real space from the period. But authenticity to what? To the material culture of the era? To the experience of a particular resident? To the tourist imaginary of mid-century Japan?

Now consider what is not shown. Are there objects that indicate the occupant's ethnicity or origin? Is there evidence of the company-town structure that governed life on the island? Are there traces of the mine — the dust, the fatigue, the injuries? Is there any indication that, decades earlier, Korean and Chinese workers lived in segregated, inferior housing on the same island?

The reconstruction makes claims through inclusion and exclusion, through what it renders visible and what it leaves out. These claims may be implicit — the designer may not have consciously intended them — but they are claims nonetheless.

Material Authenticity vs. Interpretive Accountability

Heritage scholars distinguish between different layers of authenticity:

• Material authenticity: accurate reconstruction of objects, spaces, and surfaces
• Social authenticity: representation of social relations, practices, and identities
• Experiential authenticity: whether the experience as a whole supports historically informed understanding

A reconstruction can achieve impressive material authenticity — getting the architecture right, the furniture period-appropriate, the lighting realistic — while failing at social and experiential authenticity. It can simulate the look of a place without representing the labor relations, power structures, or contested histories that shaped life there.

This distinction matters because material authenticity is often what institutions demand and what audiences perceive. A visually convincing reconstruction feels "real." It creates what researchers call a "sense of place" — an emotional and cognitive connection to a location. But if the reconstruction omits key aspects of a site's history, it produces a partial or distorted sense of place.

Interpretive accountability asks something different: not "does this look right?" but "does this represent the historical relations that structured life here, including the difficult ones?"

The Power of Immersion

Immersive media differs from films, books, or museum panels because it situates the user within the scene. You do not watch a representation of Hashima; you move through it. This has implications for how historical claims register.

Researchers distinguish between intravirtual effects (what happens within the simulation) and extravirtual effects (what happens to real people and institutions as a result of the simulation). Even if the events depicted are virtual, their effects on historical understanding, public memory, and real communities are entirely real.

A VR experience of Hashima that reproduces the island's architecture while omitting coerced labor may leave users with the impression that they have encountered the site's complete history. The visual realism makes the interpretive gaps harder to perceive. Users do not see what is missing because the simulation feels comprehensive.

This is what makes omission in immersive contexts ethically significant. Withholding key aspects of a site's history, while presenting an experience as authentic, undermines users' capacity for informed historical judgment.

Mechanics as Historical Claims

In interactive media, mechanics — the rules that govern what users can do — are themselves a form of argument. A game or XR experience makes claims not only through what it shows but through what it allows.

Consider the difference between:

• An experience where you can go anywhere vs. one where certain areas are blocked
• An experience where information is freely available vs. one where you must search for fragments
• An experience where all voices are equally accessible vs. one where some testimonies are harder to find
• An experience that ends with resolution vs. one that leaves questions unanswered

Each of these design choices makes a historiographical claim. Blocking access to certain areas can simulate the experience of restricted knowledge or enforced silence. Requiring users to piece together fragments can model the difficulty of recovering marginalized histories.

HashimaXR's design documents describe mechanics intended to make silence and constraint legible to users. Moments when voices trailed off, when certain questions remained unanswered, when physical spaces were present but their histories inaccessible — these were not failures of content but deliberate attempts to represent the politics of historical omission within the experience itself.

Authenticity as Gatekeeping

The historian Esther Wright argues that terms like "historical accuracy" and "historical authenticity" often function as gatekeeping mechanisms. Different stakeholders invoke these terms to evaluate — and control — how the past is represented, but the terms mask underlying power dynamics.

The critical question, Wright insists, is not whether a representation is "accurate" in some objective sense but rather: whose accuracy? Accuracy to which version of events? Who gets to decide?

In contested heritage contexts, disputes over accuracy frequently stand in for deeper conflicts over responsibility and justice. Institutions can reject representations by calling them "inaccurate," "unbalanced," or "inappropriate" without explicitly defending historical erasure. The vocabulary of authenticity provides cover for political judgments.

Part Two: The Digital Ecosystem

Hashima in virtual space: a comparative survey

This section surveys the digital landscape around Hashima — the VR experiences, photogrammetric archives, games, and interactive installations that present the island to audiences who may never visit in person. Each project represents technological achievement. Each also makes historiographical choices about what to show and what to omit.

A Taxonomy of Digital Hashima

Digital representations of Hashima fall into several categories, distinguished by technology, institutional backing, and interpretive approach:

Common Patterns

Across this ecosystem, several patterns recur:

What UNESCO Demanded

The 2021 UNESCO World Heritage Committee decision expressed "strong regret" that Japan had not implemented interpretive measures to present the "full history" of the Meiji Industrial Revolution sites. The decision specifically called for:

• Recognition that "a large number of Koreans and others" were "brought against their will and forced to work under harsh conditions"
• Interpretive strategies that "allow an understanding of the full history of each site"
• Displays that could be said to "memorialize the victims"

None of the digital projects surveyed here meet these requirements. The digital ecosystem around Hashima replicates, in virtual form, the same interpretive failures that UNESCO criticized in physical heritage interpretation.

What HashimaXR Attempted

HashimaXR was designed to occupy a different position in this ecosystem:

• Reconstruct the island as a living community, not a ruin
• Center everyday life while making space for coerced labor histories
• Use a "two-voice" narrative system that juxtaposed different perspectives and periods
• Build an in-game archive of documents, testimonies, and images that users would assemble through exploration
• Design moments of silence, interruption, and incompleteness as historiographical interventions

This was XR as critical heritage practice — an attempt to use immersive media not for celebratory reconstruction but for engagement with contested, uncomfortable history.

This positioning threatened authorized narratives not by arguing against them directly but by demonstrating that alternative approaches were possible. The next module teaches you how to read the institutional positions that shaped this landscape.