This module examines how social media platforms have transformed the Hashima controversy from a bilateral diplomatic dispute into a distributed, ongoing, and deeply personal form of memory activism. Unlike the soft gatekeeping explored in Module 08, social media introduces new dynamics: algorithmic amplification, visual virality, the mobilisation of nostalgic counter-memories, and the strategic deployment of personal testimony as political evidence.

The Digital Battleground

In July 2017, the South Korean blockbuster film Battleship Island (군함도) opened in cinemas across Asia. Within weeks, it had become the focal point of an intense digital memory war. Japanese politicians, activists, and bloggers mobilised to counter what they characterised as historical distortion. Korean civic groups amplified testimonies of forced labour. YouTube filled with competing video testimonies. Twitter hashtags in Japanese, Korean, and English drew users into transnational debates about what really happened on Hashima Island.

The Hashima Digital Ecosystem

Hashima Island exists simultaneously in multiple digital spaces, each presenting a distinct version of the site's history. Understanding how these spaces interact reveals the architecture of digital memory contestation.

The Ruin Aesthetic: Visual Virality Without History

Search for "Gunkanjima" or "Battleship Island" on Instagram, TikTok, or Pinterest and you will encounter thousands of images emphasising the island's dramatic decay. This visual circulation operates largely independent of historical context. The ruin aesthetic positions Hashima as a site of sublime decay, inviting contemplation of transience and abandonment. The island becomes what scholars call "ruin porn" — visually compelling precisely because it has been stripped of difficult history.

This is not accidental. The visual framing of Hashima as photogenic ruin serves particular interests. It aligns with tourism promotion, with the Gunkanjima Digital Museum's emphasis on technological nostalgia, and with Japan's official heritage narrative that celebrates Meiji-era industrial achievement while bracketing the wartime period. When users share dramatic images of Hashima, they participate — often unknowingly — in a mode of circulation that depoliticises the site.

Gaming and Virtual Heritage

In January 2025, the city of Nagasaki and the Heritage Databank project announced that Hashima had been recreated as an explorable environment in Fortnite's creative mode. The "Gunkanjima Archive" was presented as a form of digital preservation, allowing users to explore areas normally off-limits to physical visitors.

The Fortnite recreation exemplifies how digital heritage can reproduce the silences of physical heritage interpretation. Players can explore the island's architecture in unprecedented detail while encountering nothing about the Korean and Chinese workers who died there. The platform's emphasis on exploration and play naturalises this absence. Users experience Hashima as an atmospheric environment, not as a site of historical atrocity.

YouTube: The Testimony Wars

If Instagram and gaming platforms depoliticise Hashima through aesthetic framing, YouTube has become the primary battleground for competing historical claims. A search for "軍艦島" (Gunkanjima) or "Hashima forced labor" reveals a fragmented landscape of historical interpretation.

On one side, Korean broadcasters, documentary filmmakers, and civic groups have uploaded testimonies of forced labour survivors, historical analyses, and responses to Japanese denialism. The release of Battleship Island generated extensive Korean-language content, including historian Choi Tae-sung's widely viewed lecture contextualising the film within scholarly research on wartime mobilisation.

On the other side, Japanese conservative commentators, the National Congress of Industrial Heritage, and the "Hashima Islanders for Historical Truth" have produced extensive counter-content. The website "The Truth of Gunkanjima" (gunkanjima-truth.com), operated by the National Congress, hosts video testimonies from former Japanese residents asserting that no discrimination occurred.

A 2020 investigation by Korea Bizwire found that searching Japanese terms for "forced laborers" on YouTube returned videos presenting denialist narratives, some with hundreds of thousands of views. Such content benefits from YouTube's algorithmic tendency to recommend increasingly extreme material to engaged viewers.

Memory Activism in the Platform Age

The Hashima case illuminates how social media has transformed memory activism — both progressive efforts to recover suppressed histories and reactionary efforts to reassert nationalist narratives.

Counter-Memory Mobilisation

For Korean civic groups and descendants of forced labourers, social media has provided tools to contest Japan's official heritage narrative. The 2017 release of Battleship Island was accompanied by an extensive digital campaign. CJ Entertainment released supplementary educational content, including interviews with historians and activists. The hashtag campaigns surrounding the film helped transform Hashima from an obscure industrial site into an internationally recognised symbol of Japanese wartime atrocities.

Social media has also enabled the circulation of survivor testimonies beyond their original archival contexts. Clips from documentary interviews, excerpts from oral history projects, and statements from elderly survivors have been shared across platforms, often with translations that enable transnational circulation. This democratisation of testimony distribution challenges the institutional gatekeeping that previously controlled access to survivor voices.

Production Values as Credibility

Social media amplifies the asymmetry between different types of testimony. The polished production values of the National Congress videos contrast with the often lo-fi quality of older survivor interviews. The former are optimised for platform circulation; the latter were recorded for archival purposes. The visual grammar of digital content — high resolution, professional editing, compelling narrative structure — becomes an informal marker of credibility, regardless of historical accuracy.

Transnational Circulation and Platform Governance

The Hashima controversy demonstrates how heritage disputes are increasingly shaped by transnational digital flows and the governance decisions of platform companies.

Language Boundaries and Filter Bubbles

Despite the global reach of social media, the Hashima memory war operates primarily within linguistic communities. Japanese-language content circulates among Japanese users; Korean-language content circulates among Korean users. English-language content, while smaller in volume, serves as a bridge — and a contested space where both sides seek to influence international opinion.

This linguistic fragmentation means that users in different countries encounter radically different versions of Hashima's history. A Japanese user searching YouTube is likely to encounter nostalgic testimonies and critiques of Korean "fabrication." A Korean user searching the same platform will find survivor testimonies and historical documentaries. Neither is likely to encounter the other's content unless they actively seek it.

Platform Responsibility

The role of platform companies in mediating this memory war raises difficult questions. YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms have developed policies regarding hate speech, misinformation, and historical denialism — most notably in relation to the Holocaust. But these policies have not been consistently applied to Japanese wartime atrocities.

Content denying the forced labour history of Hashima remains widely available across platforms. Unlike Holocaust denial, which is explicitly prohibited in many jurisdictions and flagged by platform moderation systems, forced labour denial operates in a regulatory grey zone. The testimonies presented by the National Congress are framed not as denial but as alternative memory — a framing that exploits the legitimate complexity of oral history while serving denialist purposes.