Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific 9004512977, 9789004512979

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This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce. Edward Boyle, Ph.D. (2018), Hokkaido University, is Associate Professor at Nichibunken, and editor of Japan Review. He has published widely on the borders of Japan and the region, Northeastern India, and Palau, including Geo-politics of Northeast Asia(Routledge 2022). Steven , Ph.D. (2014), London School of Economics and Political Science, is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Economics Kyoto University. His research examines socio-economic change in Northeast Asia, particularly in port cities and Japan’s former-colonial empire.

EAST AND WEST Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions 16 2467-9704 brill.com/ewcd

Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Paci��c Edward Boyle and Steven(Eds.)

Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and re��ect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory.

EAST AND WEST

CULTURE, DIPLOMACY AND INTERACTIONS

Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Paci��c

Edited by

Edward Boyle

Steven

Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific

East and West CULTURE, DIPLOMACY AND INTERACTIONS

Edited by Chuxiong George Wei (Shanghai Normal University

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ewcd

Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Pacific Edited by

Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Apex of the Hateruma-no-hi on the island of Hateruma, the southernmost inhabited island of Japan. The monument was constructed in 1972 to memorialize the return of Hateruma and the rest of Okinawa to Japanese administrative control. Photograph by Edward Boyle. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boyle, Edward (Edward Kieran), editor. | Ivings, Steven, editor. Title: Heritage, contested sites, and borders of memory in the Asia Pacific / edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: East and West : culture, diplomacy and interaction, 2467-9704 ; volume 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023019714 (print) | LCCN 2023019715 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004512979 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004512986 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Historic sites–Political aspects–Pacific Area. | Collective memory--Pacific Area. | Pacific Area–Historiography. Classification: LCC DU28.11 .H47 2023 (print) | LCC DU28.11 (ebook) | DDC 918.2/309–dc23/eng/20230515 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019714 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019715

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2467-9704 isbn 978-90-04-51297-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-51298-6 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For Yamamoto Kunihisa and Elisabeth Grillenberger, In loving memory of those whose early support was indispensable.

Contents Acknowledgements  List of Figures, Maps, and Table  Notes on Contributors  Introduction: Heritage Sites and Borders of Memory 1 Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings

Part 1 Heritage Practices Regional Language as Mnemonic Practice: Stewarding Place through Storytelling in Rural Japan 31 Joshua Lee Solomon The Chineseness of Chinatown in Singapore: Chinese New Year Celebrations in a Multiracial Heritage Site 56 Ying-kit Chan Negotiating War Memories at the Edge of the Former Japanese Empire: Two Japanese Veterans’ Projects in Palau, Micronesia 80 Shingo Iitaka Hidden Christians Made Visible: An Ethnography of Tourism in a World Heritage Property of Japan 107 Raluca Mateoc

Part 2 Material Matters Art in Former Military Sites: Spectres of Geopolitics in the South China Sea 139 Gabriel N. Gee Framing Negative Heritage in Disaster Education: School Memorials after 3.11 165 Julia Gerster and Flavia Fulco

Marketing the Semi-Colonial as Cosmopolitan: Treaty Port Heritage and the Remaking of Hakodate 190 Steven Ivings Politics of Heritage: Karatsu’s Takatori-tei as a Meiji Status Symbol, Monument of Modernity, and Symbol of Regional Identity 216 Arisha Livia Satari

Part 3 Layered Memories At the Border of Memory and History: Kyoto’s Contested War Heritage 245 Justin Aukema The Legacy of Shinto Shrines at the Borders of Imperial Japan 270 Karli Shimizu Memorials to Korean Migrants in Kyushu: Overlapping Medieval and Jason Mark Alexander 13

Okinoshima, Universal Heritage and Borders of Memory 328 Edward Boyle Conclusion: Borders, Heritage and What Next? 353 Philip Seaton Index 363

Acknowledgements This volume began life as a workshop organized at Kyushu University to explore ‘Heritage, Conflicted Sites and Bordered Memories in Asia’, which was held online over two non-consecutive days, July 18 and 31, in 2020. In addition to the contributors to this volume, it also featured papers from Dasom Lee, Kaori Yoshida, and Huong Bui; thank you to these scholars for presenting their rich and fascinating work, as well as to Jonathan Bull and Shumei Huang for their comments on many of the papers. The workshop was sponsored by the Japan Chapter of the British Association of Japan Studies (BAJS) and took place with the support of the International Program of the Faculty of Law, Kyushu University, thanks to Robert Aspinall, Ai Nagao, and Yuka Watanabe. It had been initially envisaged as one component of a larger conference looking at Identity Politics and the Challenges of Cultural Diversity Across Contemporary Asia. Planning had got underway in January 2020—by March, it was obvious that there was no possibility of hosting a large in-person conference that summer, and the conference was postponed to the following year. However, the decision was taken to proceed with the Heritage, Conflicted Sites and Bordered Memories workshop online. Thanks to Edward Vickers for his initial support and flexibility here (the original conference would also ultimately take place online, between January and March 2021). The July 2020 workshop signalled the start of a flurry of work on the borders of memory concept, including a graduate student workshop and large international conference in November of that year, as well as the development of a project website at bordersofmemory.com. Thanks to Kyushu University’s Asia Week / UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Program, which funded some of these later activities. All these events depended and greatly benefitted from cooperation being fostered within the university, and particular thanks are due in this regard to Ellen Van Goethem, Caleb Carter, Ashton Lazarus (now at Utah), Anton Schweizer, and Yu Yang at the IMAP program, and to Chisako Masuo and Nobuhiro Aizawa at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies. The notion of borders of memory, which provided the organizing principle and framework for both the 2020 workshop and for this volume, was originally introduced for a conference at Kyushu University in 2016, on Borders of Memory: National Commemoration in East Asia. This was supported by the War Memoryscapes in Asia (WARMAP) project, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Association for Borderland Studies Japan Chapter. One outcome of that conference was a special issue on Borders of Memory in the Japan Forum thanks to the journal’s editor, Chris Gerteis, and to Bill Mihalopoulos for their support in pushing that through to a successful conclusion. Conference and

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special issue alike were supported by the Kyushu University Progress Top 100 Grant, “Borders in Northeast Asia” (Lead: Akihiro Iwashita) and by JSPS Project No. 16K17071. The production of the current book was supported by JSPS Projects No. 20H01460 and 23H00881, and the Kyushu University QR Program “Resilient Material: The role of built structures in post-disaster recovery” [Tsubasa Project no. 02101]. Steven Ivings would like to acknowledge the support received from the JSPS Project No. 20K13540 and the wonderful people at the Kyoto University Research Administration. The concept and book have taken shape in discussion with a great many people, more than is possible to list here. They do however include Mark Fenwick, Steven van Uystel, Toshiyuki Kono, Ren Yatsunami, Rob Lindner, Jiro Hasumi, Kaoru Izumi, Stephen Lyth, Ian Neary, and Ran Zwigenberg in Kyushu; Daniel Milne, Andrew Elliott, Matsugi Hiromi, Yukari Takai, John Breen, Yoshi Igarashi, Kurosawa Takafumi, Till Knaudt, Kishi Toshihiko, Ayako Kusunoki, Yasui Manami, and Laura Ortiz in Kyoto; Jonathan Bull, Naomi Chi, Furukawa Koji, Kishi Motokazu, Shikoda Toru, and Iwashita Akihiro elsewhere in Japan; and Shumei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, Nathan Hopson, Mark Frost, Sophie Whiting, Paul Richardson, Vicky Young, Ed Pulford, and Harald Fuess in various far-flung parts of the world. We would also like to extend our particular gratitude to the series editor, Chuxiong George Wei, as well as to Qin Higley, Stephanie Carta, Kayla Griffin, and all at Brill. Additional dollops of thanks are owed to each of Tamara, Devin, Hikaru, Kana, and Meg for their love, support and bountiful patience during the pro duction of this volume, and in all things.

Figures, Maps, and Table Figures 2.1 Members of Wa no Mukashiko at Hirosaki University 33 2.2 Satō Tsuri performing folktales on stage 34 2.3 Mt. Iwaki overlooking the Tsugaru region 44 3.1 Pagoda Street Chinatown street market 62 3.2 A float at Chingay 74 4.1 Angaur ireihi built by Funasaka in 1968 92 4.2 An abandoned pillbox on Angaur’s seashore 97 4.3 Angaur Memorial Park and relocated memorials 98 4.4 The cenotaph to the ‘Liberation of the People of Angaur’ 101 5.1 Graveyard, Sotome area 116 5.2 Egami church 118 5.3 Stonewall along Ono church 119 5.4 Stone shrine, Kasuga village 127 6.1 John Low’s studio at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 144 6.2 John Low, Ink painting 145 6.3 History table in John Low’s studio at NTU CCA Singapore 146 6.4 Yao Jui-Chung, Long live, 2011 152 6.5 Yao Jui-Chung, Phantom of history series, 2007 154 6.6 Qijin Kitchen, Taiwan 157 6.7 Qijin, wall painting 159 6.8 Wu Mali in an interview at Qijin, April 2019 160 7.1 The ruins of Arahama Elementary School in Sendai City 173 7.2 The ruins of Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki City 174 7.3 Plates outside of the building show the reach of the tsunami 176 7.4 The debris has been cleared but pictures show the direct aftermath of the disaster 176 7.5 Clock from the former gymnasium that stopped at 15:55, when the tsunami hit the school 177 7.6 Exhibit of emergency goods: blankets, emergency food, water, and an emergency toilet 178 7.7 The lost homes project. A plastic model depicts the Arahama area before the Great East Japan Earthquake 179 7.8 A kataribe on the hill next to the Okawa Elementary School 180 7.9 One moment of the kataribe tour 182 7.10 View of the interior of the school building 183 View of Okawa Elementary School yard 184

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8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 10.1 10.2

The historic Motomachi waterfront area 191 A poster for the 1948 edition of the Minato Matsuri 199 The Former British Consulate Building 204 The Tachikawa Family House and Store 206 The Chinese Memorial Hall 209 Front entrance of Takatori-tei 220 Floor plan of Takatori-tei 221 The private Noh stage assembled in 1904 227 Side view of Takatori-tei’s front entrance 228 Close up of the Western-style salon exterior 231 Contemporary street signs showing the 16th Division’s legacy today 249 The distinctive red brick former headquarter building of the 16th Division 254 The 1968 monument to the Kyoto Artillery Regiment 258 Hokkaidō Jingū remains a popular tourism spot today 276 Taipei Grand Hotel on the former site of Taiwan Jinja 285 National Revolutionary Martyr’s Shrine on the site of Taiwan Gokoku Jinja 286 Tungxiao Martyr’s Shrine, former Tsūshō Jinja 287 Taoyuan Martyr’s Shrine, former Tōen Jinja 287 Koxinga Ancestral Shrine, former Kaizan Jinja 288 Koxinga Ancestral Shrine’s amulet and Hayashi Department Store’s Shrine amulet pouch 289 Zhongyi Elementary School Library, the former Tainan Jinja 290 The Korean Goodwill Trust Missions Memorial in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture 301 Statue of Shimazu Yoshihiro on Horseback, Kagoshima Prefecture 303 Monument of Yi Sam-Pyung (Lee Sampei), Pioneer of Arita Porcelain, Saga Prefecture 304 Trilingual signpost in the center of Miyama, Kagoshima Prefecture 307 Statue of Yi Sam-Pyung near Arita kaolin quarry, Saga Prefecture 310 Tawaraguchi Monument and Gratitude Memorial, Fukuoka Prefecture 316 Sign saying ‘Protect human rights for a bright society’, Fukuoka Prefecture 317 International Exchange Plaza and Hibiscus Hall, Fukuoka Prefecture 320 Memorial stone inscription for Hibiscus Hall, Fukuoka Prefecture 320 Shinpōkan museum at Munakata Taisha 339

10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8 12.9 13.1

Maps Geographical coverage of the heritage sites examined in this volume 3

Figures, Maps, and Table  4.1 Palau’s islands 85 4.2 Angaur Island 96 5.1 ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ 109 13.1 Okinoshima UNESCO nomination 332

Table 

Chronology of selected Kyushu Korean Memorials and the Korean migrant groups they memorialize 323

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Notes on Contributors Jason Mark Alexander is a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the Department of Sociology and is in the Affiliate Program at the East-West Center. He holds an M.A. in International Humanities from Kyushu University and a B.A. in History and Japanese from Colgate University. His current research foregrounds the welfare of communities in Asia and the Pacific from a scholar-activist standpoint, investigating decolonial social movements, transindigenous futures, Japan-Burma Relations, demilitarization, and environmental justice. Justin Aukema is an historian of modern Japanese history and is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of Economics at Osaka Metropolitan University. He completed his Ph.D. in Japanese Studies at Sophia University in 2020. Over the past decade, Aukema has researched the Asia-Pacific War in history and memory and has authored numerous articles on the subject including “The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids: The Literature of Saotome Katsumoto” in The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (Routledge, 2016) and “Cultures of (Dis)remembrance and the Effects of Discourse at the Hiyoshidai Tunnels” in Japan Review, No.32 (Feb. 2019). Aukema’s current research investigates the prewar origins and postwar fates of Japan’s Asia-Pacific war sites throughout Japan and the Asia-Pacific, as well as Japanese veterans’ memories of the conflict. Edward Boyle is associate professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, and editor of the Japan Review. He conducts research at the boundaries and borderland spaces of Japan, the wider Asia-Pacific, and Northeast India, focussing on issues relating to maps and representation, scalar governance, territoriality, infrastructures, memory and heritage, and history in order to understand the construction and transformation of borders, as well as the larger networks within which such liminal spaces exist. This volume is a key output from the larger project investigating the role of borders of memory in East Asia, for more details see www.bordersofmemory.com. Ying-kit Chan is an assistant professor at the Department of Chinese Studies, National Uni versity of Singapore. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from Princeton

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University, and was formerly a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, and a visiting scholar at the Center of Chinese Studies (Taiwan), Thammasat University, and the University of Brunei Darussalam. His latest book is Southeast Asia in China: Historical Entanglements and Contemporary Engagements (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023). Flavia Fulco is an assistant professor at the Social and Human Response Research Division of the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) at Tohoku University, Japan. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies with a disciplinary focus on Humanities and Cultural Anthropology from Università di Roma Tre (Rome). Her research topics include Migration Studies with a focus on Cultural Memory and Identity; Cultural Memory of Disaster through the lens of storytelling and oral narratives. Currently, she investigates post-disaster storytelling in Japan (kataribe), places of cultural heritage cultural memory after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Gabriel N. Gee is associate professor in Art History and Visual Communication at Franklin University, Switzerland. He holds a Ph.D. in contemporary art history from the université Paris X Nanterre (2008). His doctoral research focussed on aesthetics and politics in the North of England from the 1980s onwards. Rooted in contemporary aesthetics, his present research pursues a reflection on historical maritime and global entanglements, with particular case studies in Europe and Southeast Asia, paying attention to the potential of artistic research to open new spaces for cultural dialogue and innovation. Recent publications include a co-edited volume (with Alison Vogelaar) on the Changing representations of Nature and cities: the 1960s–1970s and their legacies (Routledge 2018), and a co-edited refection (with Caroline Wiedmer) on Maritime Poetics: from coast to hinterland combining theoretical essays with artists texts and voices (Transcript 2021). He co-founded TETI Group in 2011 and co-chairs the group’s activities to this day. Julia Gerster is an assistant professor at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) at Tohoku University. She received a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies with a disciplinary focus in Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation explored the impact of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake on the dynamics of social ties and the role of local culture in community recov ery in Miyagi and Fukushima Prefectures. Her main research interests include

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the cultural and collective memory of disasters and (negative) heritage preservation, social recovery processes as well as identity and community building after disasters. Shingo Iitaka is associate professor at the University of Kochi, Japan. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Palau, Micronesia since 2002, where his research focuses on the effects of the Japanese administration and memories of the Pacific War. His publications include ‘Assessing ethnographic representations of Micronesia under the Japanese administration’ (in The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences, edited by David McCallum, pp. 1729–1755, Palgrave Macmillan Singapore, 2022), and ‘Palau Sakura Kai: An association of Palauans of Japanese ancestry’ (in Memories of the Japanese Empire: Comparison of the Colonial and Decolonisation Experiences in Taiwan and Nan’yo Gunto, edited by Yuko Mio, pp. 117–134, Routledge, 2021). His current work examines the entanglement of Pacific War memories among Micronesians, Americans and Japanese. Steven Ivings is associate professor at the Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University and was previously an assistant professor at the Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. His research mainly addresses aspects of the socioeconomic history of the Japan and its former colonial empire, particularly focusing on aspects of labour, migration and economic development in Hokkaido and Karafuto (South Sakhalin). His current project examines the local experience of Japan’s integration into global trade networks during the mid-tolate nineteenth century, providing a micro-history of commercial interactions and the implications thereof at the treaty port of Hakodate. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as the Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Forum, Labor History and Transcultural Studies. Raluca Mateoc is a senior lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Japanese Studies Unit at the University of Geneva. Her research project examines the nexus between cultural heritage, tourism, and infrastructure in the Nagasaki region (Japan), and interests include the connection between technology and religion, industrial heri tage and the practice of landscape / architecture. She conducted research stays at the University of Tokyo, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her latest edited volume proposes an auto-ethnographic incursion on fieldwork in communist and post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.

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Arisha Livia Satari is currently a Ph.D. student in the International Doctorate Program in Japanese Humanities (IDOC) at Kyushu University, where she gained an M.A. in International Humanities. She specializes in Japanese architecture during the Meiji and Taishō periods. Her research focus lies on privately sponsored residences and weekend houses, which she approaches as expressions of social identity reacting to Japan’s comprehensive modernization and cross-cultural exchange. She is also interested in issues of architecture as heritage, and as symbols of contemporary community politics. Philip Seaton is professor in the Institute of Japan Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His two main research areas are Japanese memories of the Asia-Pacific War, and contents tourism (tourism induced by works of popular culture entertainment), with a focus on films and dramas depicting the period 1853– 1945. He is the author/editor of seven books including Japan’s Contested War Memories (Routledge 2007), Contents Tourism in Japan (with Takayoshi Yamamura, Akiko Sugawa-Shimada and Kyungjae Jang, Cambria Press 2017), and War as Entertainment and Contents Tourism in Japan (co-edited with Takayoshi Yamamura, Routledge 2022). He has guest edited special editions of Japan Forum (27.1) and the Journal of War & Culture Studies (12.1). His website is www. philipseaton.net. Karli Shimizu is an affiliated researcher at the Research Faculty of Media and Communication at Hokkaido University. She has recently published the monograph Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), which explores how shrines located outside of mainland Japan have interacted with contemporary conceptions of the secular, religion, and a multi-ethnic empire. She collaborated on the edited volume Japan: Fictions and Reality (Nicolaus Copernicus University, 2021) with Aleksandra Jarosz and Aleksandra Jaworowicz-Zimny, and her research has been published in journals like the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Joshua Lee Solomon is a lecturer and researcher in the Hirosaki University Center for Liberal Arts Development & Practices. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2017 with a dissertation entitled The Stink of the Earth: Reorienting Discourses of Tsugaru, Furusato, and Place. He has publications concerning vernacular Japanese literature, including ‘Fantastic Placeness: Fukushi Kōjirō’s Regional ism and the Vernacular Poetry of Takagi Kyōzō’ (Japanese Studies, Vol. 39 No. 1).

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He also works on Japanese-language literature from Manchuria/Manchukuo, including ‘Maboroshi no chō wo oikakete: Takagi Kyōzō, Manshū, Mainā bun gaku’ in Aomori no bungaku sekai: ‘Kita no bunmyaku’ wo yominaosu (2019). His research focuses on the theme of place and the literary construction of ‘home’. He has also written about folk music in Tsugaru and Tsugaru-jamisen.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Heritage Sites and Borders of Memory Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings Abstract This introduction describes the heritage boom that has gripped Asia and the Pacific in recent decades, a result of socio-political change, globalization, and cycles of ­economic expansion and decline. In this region, too, the rise to prominence of heritage has brought to the fore local, national, and global contestations over the historical narratives and memories which inhere to heritage sites and practices. The intersection of varied actors, networks, and scales of governance at individual sites gives rise to a heritage cut through by borders of memory, which emerge and are redefined over the course of contestation which arises at specific heritage sites, and the larger narratives through which their meaning is made. Drawing on insights from the interdisciplinary border studies field, this introduction asserts the importance of reflecting on heritage as a process within which borders are demarcated, constituted, produced, and policed between different social actors and memory communities. The editors then outline and contextualize the contributions of the individual chapters that make up this volume, which collectively look to interrogate how the significance of heritage sites and practices comes to be contested along their borders of memory.

Keywords Asia – Pacific – heritage boom – local heritage – heritage policy – scale – contact zones – dissonant heritage

In 2001, the Japan Times carried an article that highlighted the ‘heritage boom’ beginning to grip Asia. Coming soon after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the article trenchantly asserted that the recent attention Asian states and societies placed on heritage represented a cultural reaction to modernity. A greater focus on the preservation and conservation of their ‘traditional’ built environ ment was indicative of people’s desire to retain some sense of cultural identity © Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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and authenticity in the face of a rapidly globalizing world (Mansfield 2001). The growth of heritage, in this interpretation, emerges as a social response to the dislocations of contemporary life, with certain material and cultural legacies of the past serving as a nostalgic antidote to the pressures induced by itself modernity. Viewed two decades later, the article appears remarkably prescient in its attention to the ‘boom’ within Asia to conserve and preserve aspects of the past. The chapters in this collection trace out the processes by which sites within Asia have been designated as heritage, and in doing so, shed light on the contested politics of heritage production in the region. Shining a spotlight upon the politics of heritage formation is a necessary endeavour, as the two decades since the article was written have not seen any abatement in this explosion of heritage. In this introduction, we set out the significance of Asia’s ongoing ‘heritage boom’ and seek to position the work showcased here in relation to previous studies of heritage. We then move on to explain the concept of borders of memory, applied by many of the chapters in order to make sense of the growing significance of heritage to the region. The concept builds on innovations within the interdisciplinary field of border studies in order to explicate the complex, multiscalar realities that attend to how sites of heritage are understood today. Recent advances in the study of borders have emphasized that they should be understood as ongoing processes of division rather than as static, linear demarcations of tangible difference exclusively drawn and associated with the state. The focus has switched to borders as ‘mechanisms,’ ‘structural entities [which] can generate different effects in different circumstances. They can enclose as well as relate; they can form barriers as much as frontiers; they can facilitate their crossing as well as enclose and divide’ (Piliavsky 2013, 41; also cited in Sidaway 2015). Borders of memory draws on this processual ­understanding of borders to demonstrate how the creation of social, spatial and temporal connections and divisions is necessary for the production of heritage. The notion usefully emphasizes how the designation of material sites as heritage exposes the distinct, and frequently contested, ways in which such sites are understood by different memory communities. In its application of the notion of borders to sites of heritage, this volume challenges the general association of borders with the state and its physical boundaries—although as many of the chapters show, perceptions of the spatial and temporal extent of states structures the mnemonic borders run ning through the heritage sites themselves (Boyle 2019). The collection also interrogates our understanding of borders in the geographical diversity of the sites being examined. Many of the sites of heritage under examination are in Kyushu, reflecting the volume’s origins in a conference held at Kyushu

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University in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 restrictions. However, neither prefectural-level emergency measures nor the closure of Japan’s international borders limited the collection’s content or concepts, and the volume’s coverage expands out over not only the rest of Japan, but out into the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia (see Map 1.1). As such, the volume as a whole ‘uses

Geographical coverage of the heritage sites examined in this volume Map created by Megumi Sasaya, designed by the editors

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knowledge of a variety of places and a variety of disciplinary approaches in order to elucidate problems that cross boundaries. In doing this, it accepts the need to draw its own maps’ (Morris-Suzuki 2020). Collectively, it interrogates how historical and future relations within Asia (primarily Japan, China, Korea) and between Asia and the West are interpreted and contested at heritage sites throughout Asia and the Pacific, and does so while challenging the national and regional borders which frequently structure areas of scholarly investigation (see also Lewis and Wigen 1997). 1

Situating Heritage in Asia

The chapters in this collection constitute a series of studies into the means or processes by which particular objects come to be designated and contested as heritage. Consequently, there is no need to adopt a restrictive definition of heritage itself, as it is an inherently broad term used to ‘describe everything from buildings to cooking styles, songs to personal belongings, ethnicity to religion’ (Harrison 2013, 14). It is taken as given here that heritage encompasses an immense variety of ways through which aspects of the past come to be emphasized and asserted in the present. The collective scope offered in what follows is correspondingly broad, encompassing dialect poetry, festivals, human remains, and art exhibits as well as physical structures; a series of objects and practices that may be understood as representing a variety of heritages: sacred, industrial, architectural, war, and disaster. What unites these disparate modes of heritage is that they are all used by particular groups, ­operating at scales ranging from small communities to national states and transnational ­institutions, to make particular, subjective claims about the past. The focus is on the relations between these communities, which emerge and are ­channelled through the heritage itself, as well as on how the contours of their contests and connections come to be demarcated through the process of ­heritage recognition. The celebration of heritage in Asia today is ubiquitous, and this is reflected in the increasing attention it has received from academic inquiry. This book c­ontextualizes Asia’s heritage through the ‘boom’ Stephen Mansfield ­highlighted twenty years previously in order to emphasize how the study of memory and heritage has developed in the intervening period. Both the ­practice and study of heritage within Asia has involved the adoption and adap tion of ideas and governing frameworks initially employed elsewhere, most notably in North America and, particularly, Europe. Yet while many of the trends visible within heritage in Asia have antecedents or parallels elsewhere,

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there are regional specificities which influence the ways in which particular sites and spaces of memory come to be understood as heritage. Three that are f­requently highlighted as having particularly shaped the production and reception of ­heritage in Asia and the Pacific are outlined below. First, the greater political stability experienced from the 1980s onwards by many of the region’s postcolonial states encouraged them to pay greater attention to heritage policies as a means of fostering an integrated national history and identity. The ending of the Cold War accelerated this development, but it had long been noted for Japan, and was clearly visible in states as varied as ­Singapore and the People’s Republic of China from the early 1980s (Frost, Vickers, and Schumacher 2019; Aygen and Logan 2015). Second, the region’s economic dynamism has particularly incentivized communities and their states to market heritage as a cultural resource in order to compete for finance and attention. This has been facilitated by the adoption of governance frameworks from elsewhere, as well as the expansion of institutions like UNESCO (Brumann and Cox 2009; Matsuda and Mengoni 2016; Akagawa 2014). Third, and in contrast to Europe, the continued absence of regional political institutions in Northeast Asia, in particular (Boyle and Iwashita 2021; Iwashita and Boyle 2022), has meant that heritage contestation has become a key feature of international relations. The result is that heritage is frequently weaponized and used by the region’s states as a means of attaining both domestic and international legitimacy (Akagawa 2016; Nakano 2018; Nakano and Zhu 2020). Each of these features are shaped by the international political situation within the region. However, they also impact the role of heritage in domestic, as well as transnational, settings. The chapters in this volume trace out the complex processes through which heritage is produced, and pay particular attention to contestation which emerges between actors operating within distinct networks and at a variety of scales. In order for us to be able to appreciate this contestation, and the borders of memory to which it gives rise, it is necessary to recognize that heritage must be understood as a complex process dependent upon a wide variety of forces and factors operating on multiple levels. This combination of the multiscalar production together with ­explosive regional significance constitute the domestic and international environment within which heritage-making, and contestation over heritage, occurs; together they have ensured that Asia’s heritage boom is a notably loud one. The next section examines this contemporary emphasis on heritage in Asia more closely, and details how sites and spaces of h ­ eritage are constituted through the activities of actors operating at different scales. The fol lowing section then clarifies the significance of border studies to reflecting on heritage, and demonstrates how the notion of borders of memory is a

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crucial one for thinking about heritage in the region. Important for our purposes is how the differences and contestation between different groups and communities which emerge over these heritage sites come to be reflected in the borders of memory that cut through them. Finally, the structure of the book and the individual contributions that make up the collection will be introduced. 2

Points of Contact—National, Global, Local

Mansfield’s article on Asia’s ‘heritage boom’ sought to distinguish between the heritage policies of states and other administrative organs on the one hand, and heritage as authentic community expression on the other. This is clearest towards the end of the article, which draws a distinction between the ‘gentrification’ of Singapore’s Chinatown versus the unplanned preservation of authentic community life in Little India, with the heritage value of the latter contrasted with the former’s absence of authenticity (Mansfield 2001). This distinction, which provides a useful starting point for emphasizing heritage’s role as a space in which local, national and global threads are knotted together, invokes heritage as an authentic repository of local cultural traditions, which is positioned in opposition to the rampant modernization promoted by ambitious Asian development states. This perspective implies that while states and other administrations have increased their interest in heritage and implemented policies to preserve it, this has been for secular, cynical reasons; as the article has it, ‘preservation is analogous with the promotion of tourism’, and thus a means of bolstering state or administrative coffers. As states are rarely interested in the cultural value of heritage for its own sake, the results of state initiatives are often lamented by cultural commentators and the upholders of cultural traditions. Singapore’s Chinatown, for example, has become a sterile pastiche of heritage, rather than a true expression of a diverse cultural community. The true repositories of traditional heritage, in this interpretation, belong with the local, and the state should seek to preserve their cultural practices and values as heritage. The Japan Times article offers several terms—’nostalgia’, ‘rediscovery’, and ‘self-awakening’—that contrast local heritage to the state, but this distinction is rarely so straightforward in practice (see Solomon’s contribution on this point). The understanding that heritage exists in opposition to modernization emphasizes conservation rather than the production of heritage, and thus its backward-looking, nostalgic character. However, the emergence of heri tage as a distinct policy arena for governments today suggests that such an

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understanding is a partial one. Its growing prominence here clearly shows that heritage policy developed as an institutionalized means of interpreting inherited objects through the concerns of the present (as Satari’s chapter shows). Associated in its modern form with the centralizing European states of the nineteenth century, heritage may be understood as a state project taking its ‘cue from the grand narratives of Western national and elite class experiences, [reinforcing] the idea of innate cultural value tied to time depth, monumentality, expert knowledge and aesthetics’ (Smith 2006, 299). Historically, and today, heritage was a means through which the diverse particularisms of pre-modern social orders were to be welded into a coherent national society. Therefore, while often presented as a romantic drive to preserve and restore monuments of value and quaint cultural practices to the nation, heritage must also be seen as a key component in the creative project of constructing modern states out of diverse localities and communities (as shown for Singapore by Chan’s chapter). The ‘heritage boom’ thus reflects not only the desire of more local communities for authentic expression, but the efforts of Asia’s states to ‘negotiate their national histories and how they appropriate cultural pasts and natural environments within strategies of governance and identity making’ (Winter and Daly 2011, 4). The role of heritage in the national project is clear from the establishment of formal heritage institutions in Asia, which occurred in conjunction with the development of self-consciously modern states. In Japan, for instance, broad-ranging efforts after the Meiji Revolution of 1868 to have the government recognized as the sovereign equal of the West included the rapid emergence of heritage as a site of state intervention (Takagi 2012), and of a political framework within which it would be preserved. These initial efforts to establish heritage legislation and institutions occurred within a broader conservationist agenda inspired by the European and American experiences, and which would eventually also incorporate the sites they inspired or left behind (see Gee’s chapter on this point). The Proclamation for the Protection of Antiques and Old Properties of 1871 was the first in a long line of legisla tion that would culminate after the Second World War in the 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. The latter rearticulated the content of the various cultural property protection laws which had been promulgated down to 1945 through an expansive conception of ‘cultural property’, adding the notion of intangible cultural products to the material sites and objects with which European heritage legislation was traditionally concerned (Trifu 2017). This institutionalized system of heritage protection would be further extended on several occasions. While the meaning of preservation and its role in relation to other policy objectives has of course shifted over time, what has remained consistent is the state’s desire to establish governance over heritage.

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Japan’s experience provided an influential model for legislation elsewhere and has found echoes in other Asian countries. For nations emerging from the disruptions of colonialism and independence, Japan offered an important reference point, an example of how cultural heritage could be utilised to build a modern state. The effects of this have been obvious from the 1980s, where conflicts over heritage has been drawn into the broader ‘history wars’ characteristic of international relations in East Asia, in particular. As such, Japan’s government, and other Asian states, could hardly be accused of a merely instrumental interest in heritage as an exploitable economic resource. These ongoing contests make clear the ways in which heritage processes enable states to assert their legitimacy on the global stage, and in dialogue with international institutions. The legitimacy of heritage policies domestically has been strengthened through UNESCO’s world heritage programme, while national policies of heritage preservation are shaped by participation in international forums like UNESCO and ICOMOS (see the chapter by Mateoc). Although the ideals which underpin these cultural heritage programs are cosmopolitan and inclusive, in reality a system under which states nominate and assert their own heritage as possessing Outstanding Universal Value means that particular sites and examples of heritage come to be seen as properties of the nation, and thus another means through which states are able to assert themselves against one another within international society (as Boyle’s chapter demonstrates). The importance ascribed to heritage by both states and society in the region is emblematic of how heritage is never solely concerned with the conservation or preservation of the past, instead seeking to use its legacies as a resource with which to respond to the present. Operating alongside ‘the rush to replace the old’ in this economically-dynamic region is a recognition of the importance of preservation for the project of constituting the nation. Here, local and national priorities frequently align. In Japan, revisions to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 2018 granted more freedom for preserved cultural properties to be used as resources for tourism, in order to free up local authorities to maximize their appeal. Increasingly, amidst the dynamic growth that has come to characterize Asia, there are localities faced with decline that have sought to mobilise and rebrand heritage for the purpose of fostering regeneration (as Ivings details for Hakodate). In areas afflicted by disaster, the preser vation of local heritage and its promotion as a tool of regeneration represents a policy goal with broad-reaching support, whatever the specific conflicts that may arise over the role of this heritage (as Gerster and Fulco show). Consequently, throughout the region, the celebration of the local operates within national frameworks—legislative, financial, and discursive—which make drawing a clear distinction between the two difficult. They are both

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imbricated at individual sites of heritage. While states do not unilaterally shape or control heritage, they are often its most prominent exponents. This means, however, that the power of non-state actors is not always recognized when reflecting upon the links that exist between the collective memories, their role in the reformulation of national identities, and relations across ­borders (as shown in the chapter by Alexander). Attention to such phenomena ­demonstrate the ways in which domestic contestation over heritage impacts upon conservation efforts overseas (see Iitaka here), and how the interpretation of heritage at home is shaped by its connections across borders (as Aukema demonstrates), in ways which resonate with recent protests over post-imperial heritage elsewhere in the world. The recent focus on the connections of heritage with protest has emphasized that the meaning ascribed and associated with heritage are not fixed, but are open to being altered and transformed. This may reflect a transformation in the political context within which heritage is understood, but it also highlights the fact that the meanings made at particular sites of heritage are themselves the outcome of wider social processes (as Shimizu shows). Instead of a backward-looking social concern with the past and its preservation, or an instrumental concern of the state with heritage as a source of either identity or finance, heritage here will be emphasized as a productive process that reflects the efforts of states, institutions, and societies to utilize it as a means of shaping their futures. This process brings together networks and forces operating at distinct scales within as well as beyond the boundaries of contemporary nation-states (Lähdesmäki, Zhu, and Thomas 2019), which come to be reflected and refracted through the narrow confines of particular heritage sites. In order that this heritage contestation be opened up to examination, this collection will make use of the notion of borders of memory. 3

Contact, Dissonance, and Borders of Memory

To understand the contestation that occurs over heritage, it is important to consider the way in which multiple scales of governance and imagination overlap and are entangled at specific sites of heritage. Oftentimes this involves the intervention of and interaction between multiple actors operating at particular scales, ranging from intensely local examples of heritage practice by individuals and local communities through to the involvement of national del egations at international institutions of heritage governance. It is also the case, though, that these varied scales are not passively reflected in the recognition of heritage, but is absolutely fundamental to the heritage process (Harvey 2015).

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Relations between distinct scales of governance and memory are ­essential to the work of ascribing and memorializing heritage. Naturally, these relations incorporate contestation both within and between scales, as these reflect disagreements over the ‘particular set of values that we wish to take with us into the future’ (Harrison 2013, 4). This contestation over values is not one that involves only those local to particular sites of heritage, or particular states within which the sites are located, but may involve international and transnational actors too. Thinking in terms of borders of memory allows for us to understand how the aims and activities of these actors become entangled in the production and maintenance of particular heritage sites. Through this process of entanglement, the positions of the actors are defined relative to one another, with the result that borders of memory come to be demarcated through the site of heritage itself. Emphasizing the notion of a border of memory as a crucial concept for the study of heritage builds upon two decades of work within the interdisciplinary border studies field. The concept reflects the fact that studies of borders have seen ‘a shift away from legalistic boundary drawing and cross-border economic trends’ and towards the ways in which borders come to be constituted as and through processes, performances and practices (Salter 2012). This builds upon three well-documented changes in the ways borders are understood. One is the proliferation of agents involved with the process of bordering, and the diversity of actors contributing to the ways in which borders are created, shifted and transformed in everyday life (Brambilla 2015). A second is a recognition that sites of bordering now occur throughout the state, rather than merely at its territorial edges (Balibar 2002, 75–86). A third has been recognition of the complex temporalities associated with borders, ‘their ability to appear or disappear, to materialize at certain times or for certain groups of people with sudden intensity; to morph, or acquire the quality of permanent fixtures’ (Reeves 2014, 7). Our invocation of borders here emphasizes the way in which these borders of memory that cut through heritage are produced through the designation of sites and activities, and how it is that these borders of memory materialize, shift, harden and ameliorate as heritage comes to be processed, performed and practiced. The borders that emerge at such sites of heritage may therefore be productively understood as ‘sites of cultural encounter’ (Rumford 2012) ­ through which shifting borders of memory run. A related notion drawn upon by several of our contributors is of heritage sites as ‘contact zones’, Mary ­Louise Pratt’s term for those spaces where ‘cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of

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the world today,’ and particularly in places where the movement of people and commodities has historically brought about such contact (Pratt 1991; 2007). Pratt’s emphasis is on the transformation in identity that emerges through these dynamic spaces, and may be productively used for thinking about the ways in which heritage shapes the memorialization of these ‘cultural encounters’, as well as the borders to which they give rise. However, rather than concentrating on shifts in identity that emerge out of this process, the focus of borders of memory remains on those contested elements of narrative which receive definition in relation to other actors, and thus to where particular understandings of the extent or meaning of heritage clash and rub up against those of other groups. The contestation which frequently emerges at and across borders of ­memory partially echoes the argument of Tunbridge and Ashworth for the ‘dissonant’ character of heritage, through which they emphasized the inherently contested nature of heritage production, as well as the possibilities that exist for the emergence of ‘consonance’, or harmony (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). We would certainly agree that the authority to control which stories are told about the past means that individual heritage sites emerge as resources. It is this which gives rise to contestation, for it is control over such resources which authorizes the right for particular stories to be heard. However, while dissonance may be harmonized through minor changes in key, the notion of borders of memory reflects that shifts within individual claims to heritage will not be sufficient to overcome the mnemonic borders staked out between different memory communities. These are comprehended in relational terms, in dialogue with what is on the other side of the border. It is only when such communities are brought into dialogue across the border, with the border itself transformed into a zone of contact rather than a marker of separation, that the possibility of overcoming the borders of memory present at such sites emerges (Boyle 2019). In that respect, the concept of borders of memory is closer to Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen’s adaptation of Chantal Mouffe’s work on the inherently contested nature of the political (Mouffe 2013) to questions of heritage and memory (Cento Bull and Hansen 2016). As in their understanding of ‘ago nistic heritage’, the recognition granted to the borders of memory which exist at sites of heritage is not to argue that these are permanent, nor to claim that the mnemonic cleavages which they demarcate are necessarily irreconcilable. The term is utilized here in order to delineate the site or practice through which the heritage claims of a variety of groups come into contact. The competing claims made for the mnemonic significance of the site in question means that these groups seek to assert their authority over the site. In so doing, sites of heritage

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are spaces that come to be defined by both the spatial and temporal boundaries of the heritage being memorialized, while being cut through by borders of memory. These borders represent divides between distinct communities—political, social, memorial—and thus serve to guarantee that the role and presence of a heritage site within wider narratives is always a provisional and contested one. 4

Outline of this Volume

The pieces in this collection focus on the processes through which particular sites of memory have come to be memorialized and transformed into ­heritage today. These sites of heritage are geographically diverse, some are concentrated in south-western Japan whilst others are located across a great swathe of Asia and out into the Pacific Ocean (as shown by Map 1.1). The individual contributions reveal the varied scales, disparate actors and complex spatialities ­associated with heritage, which through the process of being memorialized, and as an outcome of that process, have generated contestation between groups that finds reflection in and at the site itself as borders of memory. The twelve chapters are arranged into three sections, which successively stress the role of heritage practices in constituting sites of heritage cut through by ­borders of memory, the ways in which borders of memory operate at recognized sites of heritage, and the ways in which these borders appear, harden, ameliorate or disappear over time at particular heritage sites. The first section, Heritage Practices, details a variety of means through which sites of heritage are brought into being. The four contributions here all lay particular stress upon the ways in which acts of remembrance come to constitute sites of heritage and memory, but taken collectively they emphasize the varied scales at which these heritage practices operate. The first piece, by Joshua Lee Solomon on ‘Regional Language as Mnemonic Practice: Stewarding Place through Storytelling in Rural Japan’, provides a detailed examination of the role of vernacular rural storytelling in the Tsugaru region, a historical designation referring to the western half of contemporary prefecture of Aomori at the far northern end of Japan’s main island of Hon shu. Solomon focuses our attention on a group of storytellers who perform both traditional tales and adaptions of modern stories, crucially all in the local dialect. The sites at which the mnemonic practices associated with this group occur are local cultural institutions: schools, libraries, radio stations, but the heritage site constituted through this practice is the geographic and cultural entity of Tsugaru itself, invoked through the use of vernacular language and the appearance of historical and geographical markers within the stories. The

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activities of this group of enthusiastic amateurs are motivated by a perceived imperative of conservation. Members of the group strive to preserve old stories associated with their own rural childhoods, and in doing so contribute ‘to the healing of communal ruptures wrought by cosmopolitan modernity by, in part, reminding elderly listeners of the language of their place of origin and teaching the youth of today that aspect of their heritage’. It is tempting to view this as simple nostalgia, a backward-looking celebration for a mode of local speech and communication, and therefore community, on the verge of disappearance. However, in situating the activities of this group within a longer local tradition of efforts to preserve regional identity through vernacular language, Solomon calls attention to ways in which the heritage site (Tsugaru) is continuously memorialized and reconstituted. As a practice, this storytelling appears unashamedly local, grounded in the lives and speech of the inhabitants of the region rather than in the e­ xoticising imperatives of the nation’s tourist infrastructure and its fetishized furusato cultural complex. However, understanding this as merely a celebration of the local opposed to the unifying imperatives of a Tokyo-centred cosmopolitan nationalism is also insufficient. The recent valorisation of local dialects, which Solomon notes, speaks to the changing meaning and relations between understandings of national and local heritage in Japan, an ongoing ­contestation also visible in the participants’ own invocation of their vanishing dialect as the untainted original language of the Japanese people. The borders of memory running through national and local are not impenetrable, as through their storytelling, the group’s members are memorializing Tsugaru in order to make sense of their present as well as celebrate the past, neither of which are entirely bounded by the heritage site of Tsugaru which their mnemonic practice invokes. Solomon’s careful account shows how the positions and meanings of local and national in heritage are not fixed, but are themselves (re)negotiated through practice over time. This role of heritage practices in shifting and transforming memorial ­communities is also visible in Ying-kit Chan’s contribution examining ‘The ­Chineseness of Chinatown in Singapore: Chinese New Year Celebrations in a Multiracial Heritage Site’. Here, in contrast to Solomon’s local, lived exploration of the role of practice in the constitution of heritage, the emphasis is on the state’s efforts to adapt one specific practice, the Chinese New Year, or ­Chingay, parade, and use it as a celebration of and for the multiracial city-state of ­Singapore. The site with which the festival was associated, Singapore’s tradi tional Chinatown, was in the latter half of the twentieth century transformed from an area of residence for multiple distinct dialect groups who emigrated from China into a space of heritage for the state’s dominant ethnicity, one of

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the three races that officially constitute the majority of the Singapore’s population. As was noted earlier in the introduction, this particular state intervention became a byword for the artificiality of state efforts to promote heritage in the absence of any real connection with people’s daily lives. What emerged was a ‘global’ yet artificial Chinatown, one which borrowed motifs and inspiration from elsewhere in the world, yet with little connection to the lives of the district’s former inhabitants. This trend bled into the state’s establishment of an official New Year Festival and Parade which took place in Chinatown, and became a sanitized mishmash of local traditions repackaged as a multicultural celebration of the state, rather than of any particular community. The Chingay festival, like Chinatown itself, was the object of state policies that sought to overcome community division at two scales. The first was within the dialect communities that would come to constitute Singapore’s Chinese population, while the second was that between the Chinese and other races of Singapore. In order to reinterpret festivals associated with various Chinese communities as a secularized expression of a ‘multiracial’ nation, the Chingay parade was institutionalized with much of its original religious and spiritual meaning as heritage bowdlerised. What remained was a multiracial celebration of the state itself. As a result, ‘Chingay has become a victim of its own success’, with little heritage significance for the population. Solomon and Chan’s contributions show how heritage practices may be used to either assert or dissolve the borders of memory that define memory communities. Shingo Iitaka’s ‘Negotiating War Memories at the Edge of the Former Japanese Empire: Two Japanese Veterans’ Projects in Palau, Micronesia’ also traces the emergence of borders of memory through mnemonic practice, and in this instance shows how the memorial activities of both state and sub-state actors are able to be ‘displaced’ and situated across national borders. Iitaka examines Japanese commemoration activities associated with Palau, the small Pacific nation whose largest settlement, Koror, formed the administrative centre of Japan’s South Seas Mandate from 1922 until Japan’s defeat in 1945. During the course of the war in the Pacific, the islands of Peleliu and Angaur, to the south of Koror, were captured by U.S. forces following brutal battles. Iitaka’s account focuses on the postwar memorial practices on the smaller island of Angaur, particularly those associated with two veterans of the battle, Funasaka Hiroshi and Kurata Yōji. Funasaka is famous for his efforts to develop and lead tours, and repatri ate the remains of deceased Japanese combatants from Second World War battlefields. From the latter half of the 1960s, he promoted private tours for this purpose, operating alongside, and in competition with, efforts from the

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Ministry of Health and Labour. In the course of these tours, he also sponsored and organized the erection of memorials to deceased Japanese troops, often financed by prefectural or other organizations in Japan. While dependent upon local intercessors, such memory work largely took place without local participation. Funasaka’s efforts inscribed borders of memory present between different Japanese groups into monuments erected beyond its borders, on Palau’s islands. The less well-known Kurata moved to Angaur thirty years after Funasaka’s activities began. In dialogue with the local population he sought to support the community itself and the memorials erected to Japan’s former presence there. Although Kurata’s efforts can be presented as more inclusive, as Iitaka hints, they are no less ‘national’ than Funasaka’s. In order to truly transcend the borders of memory here, it is necessary to not only act beyond the nation’s borders, but in negotiation and dialogue with other actors. Otherwise what results is merely a form of ‘offshore heritage’ (Huang and Lee 2019, 148) that remains firmly within a memorialization framework transplanted from elsewhere. Iitaka’s articulation of the difficulties for a genuinely transnational memorial practice is echoed in Raluca Mateoc’s ‘Hidden Christians Made Visible: An Ethnography of Tourism in a World Heritage Property of Japan’ Mateoc follows the convoluted process by which the Christian Sites of ­Nagasaki were added to the UNESCO cultural heritage register in 2018, three years after an initial application had been rejected. In the application, the Christian history of Japan prior to the modern era is rendered universal by emphasizing the cultural adaptation of the Hidden Christians in the face of religious persecution and a narrative that asserts the universal values of ‘endurance, resilience, strength, and creativity’. Coming to represent that history in material sites was a process that involved a surfeit of actors, including local and regional administrations, the Church, and bodies associated with UNESCO. In addition to these, village communities, tourist agencies and local guides have all been involved in the tourist practices which constitute the heritage sites today. Mateoc’s careful ethnographic investigations of these disparate actors reveals the contestation involved as these sites were constituted as heritage. The ‘little traditions’ of local and regional bodies were treated as resources by prefectural administrations, themselves encouraged by the national gov ernment to develop tourism as response to aging and depopulation. The respective cosmopolitan, transnational imperatives of the Catholic Church also proceeded to influence the constitution of the site. The initial bid, the component parts of which were predominantly churches, was rejected in 2015 because of the gap between the history of the Hidden Christians and the sites themselves, constructed once they were no longer hidden. ’s

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recommendations led the nomination to subsequently focus on communities as repositories of a still-living Hidden Christian tradition. However, geographically dispersed as the component parts of the associated sites are, they can only be understood as a single site of heritage through capture and branding by the recognition UNESCO provides. Mateoc’s chapter details the operations of heritage at a global scale, ­supplementing the attention to local, national, and transnational practices in the three earlier chapters in this section. It explicitly draws attention to the distinct layers of memory which come to be expressed or excluded from particular heritage sites, in this case through the exclusion of Christian places of worship from the inscription. It also emphasizes that the distance between World Heritage Committees and the actual sites under their consideration (Brumann and Berliner 2016, 9), and suggests that the narration of these layers within an acceptable story may be more important than the physical sites themselves. The chapter suggests how a local and, perhaps inherently, marginal region of Japan is granted global significance through the heritage process. All four chapters in this section emphasize the importance of scale when considering heritage practices in operation, but Mateoc’s contribution underlines the importance of focussing on the operations of these different scales in relation to one another. The first chapter of the section on Material Matters also emphasizes the importance of scale, tracking its significance across perspectives, in a piece that moves from the top-down materialization of heritage, focussing on how global culture comes to be localized and grounded at particular heritage sites, to the bottom-up assertion of universal values. In ‘Art in Former Military Sites: Spectres of Geopolitics in the South China Sea’, Gabriel N. Gee initially takes us on a tour of repurposed military sites in Singapore and Taiwan, and tracks their transformation from repositories of one global culture, of militarized colonial control, to another, a modern artistic sensibility he associates with the White Cube. Gee is interested in the interplay between the conversions of these militarized sites into artistic spaces, and the artistic practices that take place or are associated with them. The Chinese ink painting of John Low provides the aesthetic antithesis of the state-led heritage process highlighted in Chan’s chapter earlier. Chan’s analysis of the Chingay Parade revealed how the Singaporean state utilizes heritage space and practice as a means of developing a unitary Chinese iden tity out of distinct kinship and dialect groups. Ink painting, a Chinese heritage practice, in Low’s account is indigenized through the objects it represents, and is therefore able to stand for Singapore-Chinese heritage in the present. A universal aesthetic form was adapted to its new locale, and today exists to represent the locale itself. This heritage is produced in the repurposed former

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military barracks of the Centre for Contemporary Art, transformed from a globalized node of colonial control into a site for local heritage expression. In Kinmen’s bunkers too, the artistic production detailed by Gee pulls and prods at the borders between Taiwan and the mainland, although the precondition for the site’s emergence as an artistic space was a sadly brief reduction in tension between the two. It is at another repurposed military site, the Qijin Kitchen, where the ‘spectre of geopolitics’ is put to rest, as the entanglements of memory and identity are narrated in dialogue with the diverse origins of the food made there. Located on an island across from the city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, the site is identified as a slice of real Taiwan populated by people from everywhere. In celebrating the quotidian practice of food preparation through ingredients drawn from all quarters, the site of memory stands for the society it exists in, assembling memories from beyond the borders of the nation. While the White Cube, like the industrial and military settings they take over, imposes the global on the local, here the local finds itself constituted and celebrated through global connections materialized in the everyday setting of the kitchen. While Gee’s chapter examines the adaption of superfluous structures and their reconstitution into heritage sites, in ‘Framing Negative Heritage in Disaster Risk Education: School Memorials after 3.11’ Julia Gerster and Flavia Fulco explore the transformation of two school buildings into sites of heritage which commemorate the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, but in different registers. While the school at Arahama is an example of a successful disaster response, that of Okawa provides the reverse, an exemplary account of what might happen when the correct procedures and structures are not in place. Irrespective of this contrast in their histories, though, the material remains at both sites have been converted into heritage that plays a positive didactic role. Particularly striking in both cases is that irrespective of the contestation which occurred over the preservation of these specific ruins, both can be seamlessly slotted into the broader narrative of Tohoku recovery and the importance of the disaster risk education, or Bosai, which has increasingly been pushed as a Japanese contribution to international development in the aftermath of the 3.11 disaster. Rather than heritage serving to recover the past, it is the rupture provided by the disaster which is emphasized in its sites of memory, shorten ing the time horizon and potential layers of memory available to be bound up within material sites. This is clearly the case for the schools, which have no history, and no relationship to the present, outside of the disaster which has rendered them repurposed as heritage. The turn of disaster memorialization toward providing lessons to the world invites comparisons with Hiroshima, as mentioned by both the authors and

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residents of the region. In the case of Hiroshima, its didactic role has invited criticism as victimization, and promoted an unwillingness to understand the reason for the disaster itself. It is noticeable that the same trend seems prevalent in Tohoku too, irrespective of the very different histories of the sites. While the process through which the school at Okawa was conserved as a site of memory was contentious, in being preserved as ‘a useful tool for disaster risk education’, any question of responsibility is absolved by the site’s didactic role. The framing of these sites as lessons for the future appears to depoliticize them, even as responsibility for the disaster itself remains a source of dispute in and for the region. This propensity for designations of sites as heritage to ‘smooth’ (Winter 2019) over the borders of memory is also present in Steven Ivings’ account of Hakodate, entitled ‘Marketing the Semi-Colonial as Cosmopolitan: Treaty Port Heritage and the Remaking of Hakodate’. Ivings focuses on a longer and broader transformation of Hakodate from Hokakido’s principal commercial port city into a ‘port of heritage’. A former treaty port and gateway to Hokkaido, the city boomed in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries together with the northward expansion of the Japanese empire and colonisation of Hokkaido. Following the collapse of Japan’s empire, Hakodate gradually provincialized as the port’s role as a commercial and transportation hub for northern fisheries weakened and efforts to pursue heavy industry met with local opposition. The ensuing contest over how best to regenerate the city produced a resolve to develop Hakodate as a tourist destination which boasted a rich urban heritage and cosmopolitan ambiance. Here, the city and other stakeholders sought to mobilise a particular narrative of Hakodate’s history as a cosmopolitan port city (in contrast with nearby Tsugaru covered in Solomon’s chapter), and as such emphasised the somewhat weak former connections with the West, whilst simultaneously overlooking substantial cosmopolitan connections with China and Japan’s own former ­colonies. In so doing, the selective narrative presented to market Hakodate’s heritage has placed a positive spin on the semi-colonial treaty port past in which Japan’s sovereignty had been undermined by Western imperialism, and has essentially purged the memory of Japan’s own imperial expansion. Although the port’s period of economic efflorescence was predicated on colo nial connections with an expanding Japanese empire and the Asian continent, this is essentially bordered out of the heritage which the city seeks to offer. While seemingly a case of cosmopolitan memory and heritage, by cleansing the narrative of its colonial blemishes—both Western and Japanese—and stressing Western connections over those with China, Ivings shows how cosmopolitan memories are also cut through with such borders.

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The attention Ivings grants to how heritage making privileges certain histories and conceals others is also shown in the final chapter of this section, Arisha Livia Satari’s examination of the ‘Politics of Heritage: Karatsu’s Takatori-tei as a Meiji Status Symbol, Monument of Modernity, and Symbol of Regional Identity’. Satari documents the history of the Takatori-tei, a residence constructed by a local industrialist in the late-nineteenth century, and explores its uses and meaning from the time of construction until the present. Satari discusses the fusion of Western and Japanese elements in the building’s construction in order to bring out the complex accretions of influences which came together in the site, before examining its subsequent recognition as a site of heritage possessing both local and national significance. Currently an ‘Important Cultural Property’, the Takatori-tei is a central site in Karatsu’s contemporary heritage landscape. The structure’s mixture of Western and Japanese architectural elements suggests a seamless fusion of traditional and modern, as well as national and international. Satari’s account, however, points to a more conflicted story of tension between the modern capital and backward provinces, as well as between and within certain social classes. The Takatori-tei was above all a demonstration of the owner’s social and cultural capital by adopting the western-inspired architecture in vogue in Tokyo at the time, albeit in this case with a design several years behind the latest trends in the capital. The building’s stature today as an example of cosmopolitan heritage glosses over a series of dislocations that were necessary for the architectural and cultural fusion it demonstrates. These were not only architectural; the lifestyle and mode of a Meiji industrialist necessitated the adoption of cultural elements from both Europe and Japan’s own past, as represented in the Takatori-tei’s Western Salon and Noh stage, respectively. As Satari reveals, however, the design itself suppressed significant divergences, particularly between the provinces and capital, which are present in the architecture but absent in its presentation as heritage. The story of the building’s actual construction reveals not a Japanese ­mastery of Western architectural techniques, the standard narrative applied to similar examples of such Meiji-period architecture, but instead how the diffusion of the latest styles and building techniques to the provinces was much delayed. While the Takatori-tei’s adoption as heritage revels in its role as ­representative of the development and progress of the Japanese nation after the Meiji Restoration, the building itself highlights the divisions that are repre sented in its creation. Here, as in the other sites examined in this section, the process through which the Takatori-tei was transformed into heritage enabled the borders of memory present at the material site itself to be smoothed over—and also glosses over the contingency of the process by which the site

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was transformed into heritage, as a result of the family’s inability to retain the residence as a private dwelling. The four sites of heritage examined in the Material Matters section ­demonstrate how the adoption of material structures as heritage encourages the borders of memory that striate these mnemonic structures to be deemphasized through their incorporation into broader national and international narratives. The final section, on Layered Memories, builds on this insight to highlight the ways in which temporal referents established around material sites of heritage may escape the borders of memory within which such sites are contained and contextualized. In ‘At the Border of Memory and History: Kyoto’s Contested War Heritage’, Justin Aukema offers us a detailed account of the fate of the garrison of the 16th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was based in Kyoto, and analyses the memorialization of the Division that takes place there. He details the various ways in which groups connected with the garrison after the war, including veterans, bereaved family members, and those who inherited the site, and how they positioned themselves in relation to its heritage as the home of the garrison. This initially manifested itself as either nostalgia or a desire to reuse the site as the foundation for recovery, with the site understood solely within the context of Kyoto itself. As also shown in Iitaka’s chapter earlier, insular patterns of memorialization were gradually altered, in this instance through a combination of Japan’s reengagement with its former empire, changing international circumstances and generational shifts. As a result, the heritage of the 16th Division in Kyoto transcended the local and came to be connected with the actions of its soldiers elsewhere in Asia. Whilst the abandoned division barracks had previously been viewed as a resource to be readapted or built over, they now became ruins to, as one peace activist has it, ‘speak about the truth of history’. For this section of the Japanese population, seeking to memorialize what Japan had done overseas rather than what it had experienced at home, the garrison’s remains could narrate the past presence of the military and connect them with those soldier’s actions abroad. Earlier patterns of memorialization which had acknowledged the garrison’s former presence in Kyoto and decimation in the Battle of Leyte shifted to a mode of remembrance that attempted to tie this particular site to sites of memory elsewhere. As Aukema notes, this attempt to repatriate such memories across borders was not entirely successful, and today the few remaining buildings associated with the garrison have drawn on them for their phys ical properties, rather than their inherently contested mnemonic significance. This returns the garrison’s built remains to the role they had in the immediate postwar period, as sites to be reused or built over. While the material geography of the site remains the same, today borders of memory have been demarcated

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that run right through this site, borders that will inevitably be resurveyed in the future. The potential for such borders to shift with time is apparent from ‘The Legacy of Shinto Shrines at the Borders of Imperial Japan’. Here, Karli Shimizu traces the post-colonial histories of Shinto Shrines in Hokkaido and Taiwan, building on a growing interest in the connections between religion, heritage, and sacred space recently visible in relation to Japan in particular (Teeuwen and Rots 2020, and see also Mateoc’s chapter). Here, Shimizu examines the changing uses and meanings of shrines in these two very different political contexts and the transformation in both form and significance that has occurred at what were originally conceived to be sites of public ritual for Japan’s expanding empire. Shinto’s role as an arm of the Meiji state is particularly clear in Hokkaido, where it replaced the Tokugawa’s utilization of Buddhist temples as a representative of assimilatory policy in the lands formerly associated with the Ezo, or Ainu. The establishment of protector shrines and their enshrinement of pioneer kami was bound up with Meiji state’s claims to the territory of Ezo (present day Hokkaido), which in addition to being surveyed, measured and incorporated on the map (Boyle 2016) was being sacralised at Sapporo Jinja, in particular. This means of asserting control was subsequently adapted to Taiwan after 1895, exporting the colonial triumph of Hokkaido to new lands. Shimizu’s account emphasizes that Hokkaido and Taiwan provided not only laboratories of rational colonial governance but also spaces which would come to be sanctified as Japanese under the aegis of the state. Shimizu elucidates the distinct and contested legacies of this past process by examining these Shinto Shrines as sites of memory today. The fact that Hokkaido remains Japanese territory, whilst Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China, has clearly determined the uses and meanings granted these sites through to the present. While the shrines constructed in Hokkaido still function, those in Taiwan are largely no longer shrines, and in many cases no longer standing. While it took a surprisingly long time for these material reminders of Japanese rule to be replaced by the Guomindang, when they did so, it was frequently in order to materialize a different set of symbols atop the same site. Gauche hotels and martyr’s shrines, like Shinto spaces before them, may be seen as the assertion of state claims to control the island. In both Hokkaido and Taiwan, however, these shrine spaces are today con tested and cut through by borders of memory. In Japan, this is part of a larger demand for Ainu recognition, which seeks an acknowledgement of the role of shrines as agents of Ainu dispossession. In Taiwan, by contrast, these Japanese shrines have become part of an insurgent localism against the state’s broader

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pretensions, as shown most clearly by the indigenous re-adoption of Japan’s colonial-era shrines as their own heritage. The example of Taiwan illustrates how the borders running through such sites are open to shifting in response to external, contingent factors. Jason Mark Alexander’s contribution, examining ‘Memorials to Korean Migrants in Kyushu: Overlapping Medieval and Modern Experiences in Local Communities’, also looks at local sites linked to Japan’s overseas expansion, although in this instance all located on what is considered one of Japan’s ‘home islands’. Alexander focuses on various sites in Kyushu associated with the Korean diaspora, whose presence there is particularly associated with two waves of forced migration—as captives during Hideyoshi’s attempts to invade Korea in the late-sixteenth century, and as forced labourers towards the end of the Japan’s Pacific War—while also incorporating a longer period of voluntary or semi-voluntary migration in the first half of the twentieth century. The contribution is particularly effective in highlighting the mnemonic layers which have been materialised in these towns, where the memorialisation and celebration of this earlier period of migration began as links with Korea and the presence of Korean migrants both expanded from the late-nineteenth ­century onwards. The political imperatives of the time obviously shape the ­historical attention paid to this earlier cycle of migration (Clements 2020), and the memorialization which occurs focusses on the contributions of Koreans to Japan. This celebratory narrative is then overlain with memorials to more contemporary migration, erected for similar, celebratory, reasons. The narrative used to frame both layers of memorialization is one obviously open to contestation in the present, and the tensions to which this gives rise are evident from the sites in Miyama, Arita, and Chikuhō analyzed by Alexander. David Lowenthal has pointed out how, in general, ‘diasporas are notably heritage-hungry’ (Lowenthal 1998, 9), and that their participation in heritage and memory making may be controversial as the narratives they present often conflict with those favoured officially or by powerful stakeholders in society. This has been apparent in the postwar period, where the narratives recounted about these sites of memory have sought to underline Korean suffering. How ever, the chapter also shows that there are different interpretations of the past within Japan’s Korean diaspora, which reflects different attitudes held by individuals and groups towards their current place and future in Japan. More recently, the border of memory has shifted and a less antagonistic memory narrative that stresses “a vision of future-oriented coexistence between Korea and Japan atop their centuries of shared experiences” has emerged at the grassroots level.

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Alexander skilfully utilizes these successive layers of memorialization as an organizing framework through which to demonstrate the linkages between past and present patterns of memorialization, and the ways in which they give rise to borders of memory at the same material sites. The final ­chapter by Edward Boyle also looks to trace out the connections which exist between past and present patterns of memorialization, by excavating the layers of ­heritage-making which have occurred at a single site. Focussing on ‘Okinoshima, Universal Heritage and Borders of Memory’, it describes the contestation over the borders of memory demarcated around the Sacred Island of Okinoshima and the wider Munakata Taisha shrine complex, which was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2017. The chapter uses the objection made by South Korea’s UNESCO representative to images of a festival associated with Okinoshima as a starting point from which to analyse contests over Okinoshima’s spatial and temporal boundaries. The spatial and temporal extent of Japan’s original nomination was disputed by UNESCO’s own advisory body, who insisted that many of the components listed by Japan in their nomination possessed only national, rather than universal, significance. The recommended solution was to spatially and temporally restrict the nomination, limiting Okinoshima’s heritage to artefacts deposited on that island between the fourth and ninth centuries, but this was ignored by members of the UNESCO Committee in Krakow. The chapter details how from the outset the nomination process was ­characterized by a tension between the universal significance of Okinoshima’s rich archaeological treasures, which materially represented an era of peaceful intra-Asian cosmopolitan exchange, and Munakata Taisha’s status as a site of worship in the present. It also compares the course of the Okinoshima nomination with two other recent heritage nominations centred on Kyushu to reveal how these contests reflect the variety of actors involved in the nomination process. It is argued that this contestation reflects the emergence of borders of memory between different actors and scales of heritage governance, which then shape the heritage site itself. The comparison shows that in the case of Okinoshima state institutions, as well as particular actors like Munakata ­Taisha, were invested in having UNESCO recognize the site’s contemporary significance, in addition to its importance in the past. Japan’s insistence on the integrity of the site, and the UNESCO committee’s ultimate acceptance of the original nomination, reveals fixing meanings at particular sites may institutionalize various borders of memory at and through them. Examining the UNESCO recognition process is a particularly effec tive means of highlighting these borders, as the discrepancies visible in the

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narratives about sites produced for distinct audiences—local, national, and international—bring the borders of memory that enable heritage sites to operate at various, distinct, scales into focus. It is these borders, and contestation over them, which shape and channel the meanings ascribed to such sites today. This focus on how narrative and material sites are brought into line within heritage production reflects many of the borders of memory examined in this volume. The difference between history and heritage is clear here, as while ­history, at least as an academic discipline, is able to conceive of multiple ­perspectives on the past, it remains unclear how a singular heritage site or practice is able to be effectively narrated from a variety of opposing viewpoints. ­Heritage denotes the parts of history—often manifested in cultural production and physical sites—that people feel, or are made to feel, they have inherited from the past and over which they retain a sense of stewardship, often entailing a responsibility to maintain and pass on that heritage to future generations. As such, heritage is often celebratory and highly selective. National heritage is officially approved/recognised historical properties that the people of a particular nation are said to collectively own and have a duty to maintain. Yet while the national patrimony that heritage represents may include heritage which is dark, difficult, or traumatic, much of what is labelled ‘national’ heritage is in fact privately owned and is determined by the state—by ­providing funds, compiling lists and granting designations—rather than the people collectively. David Cannadine, for one, has bemoaned “the cult of national heritage” which he saw as “frequently blinded by nostalgia and distorted by snobbery” (­Cannadine 2002, xi). What is ostensibly deemed national heritage and presented as our past is often in practice much narrower and largely confined to the properties and artefacts of yesteryear’s ruling elite—their country houses, fine garments and art collections. The creation of national heritage is an inherently discriminatory enterprise, whose continued operation in the present remains characterised by private and sectional interests, as many of the chapters in this collection discuss (see also Ehrentraut 1993, 276–277 in particular). Leaving questions of historical objectivity aside, however, and it is clear that heritage and history overlap and share similarities. Both are drawn from sources and artefacts which reflect the uneven survival of the properties and testimonies of specific social classes. Both involve a selection process in designating which objects and materials are deemed particularly valuable. Because it is usually taught through publicly funded national education systems, his tory, just like heritage, involves the disposition of public funds and is subject to the state’s regulatory framework and ideological inclinations. Thus, both history and heritage have been mobilised by the state to foster social cohesion and a shared identity, as well as to legitimise state authority.

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With the stakes so high then, it is little wonder that both history and heritage are frequently saturated by social, political and cultural contestation. Indeed, as Philip Seaton’s conclusion on ‘Borders, Heritage and What Next?’ points out, such contestation may be vital to the continued relevance, both to the public and institutionally, of particular sites of heritage. Greater public prominence for heritage sites and practices inevitably means that heritage often becomes the battleground for clashes over the historical narrative at local, national and/or international scales. The chapters in this volume collectively interrogate such battlegrounds in Asia, examining the reasons why and processes through which actors mobilize to make heritage, sites of ­memory that aspire to objective significance yet which are frequently replete with ­borders of memory. References Akagawa, Natsuko. 2014. Heritage Conservation and Japan’s Cultural Diplomacy: ­Heritage, National Identity and National Interest. Abingdon: Routledge. Akagawa, Natsuko. 2016. ‘Japan and the Rise of Heritage in Cultural Diplomacy: Where Are We Heading?’ Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, 13 (1): 125–39. Aygen, Zeynep, and William Logan. 2015. ‘Heritage in the “Asian Century”’. In A ­Companion to Heritage Studies, 410–25. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Balibar, Étienne. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. London & New York: Verso. Boyle, Edward. 2016. ‘Imperial Practice and the making of modern Japan’s territory: Towards a reconsideration of Empire’s boundaries.’ Geographical Review of Japan (Series B), 88 (2): 66–79. Boyle, Edward, and Akihiro Iwashita. 2021. ‘Bordering and Scaling Northeast Asia.’ Asian Geographer, 38 (2): 119–138. Brambilla, Chiara. 2015. ‘Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept.’ Geopolitics, 20 (1): 14–34. Brumann, Christoph, and David Berliner. 2016. ‘Introduction: UNESCO World ­Heritage-Grounded?’ In World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives, 1–34. New York: Berghahn. Brumann, Christoph, and Rupert A. Cox. 2009. Making Japanese Heritage Routledge. Cento Bull, Anna, and Hans Lauge Hansen. 2016. ‘On Agonistic Memory.’ , 9 (4): 390–404. Clements, Rebekah. 2020. ‘Daimyo Processions and Satsuma’s Korean Village: A Note on the Reliability of Local History Materials.’ Japan Review, 35: 219–30.

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Ehrentraut, Adolf. 1993. ‘Heritage Authenticity and Domestic Tourism in Japan.’ Annals of Tourism Research, 20: 262–278. Frost, Mark R., Edward Vickers, and Daniel Schumacher. 2019. ‘Introduction: ­Locating Asia’s War Memory Boom: A New Temporal and Geopolitical Perspective.’ In Remembering Asia’s World War Two, 1–24. Abingdon: Routledge. Harrison, Rodney. 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. Abingdon: Routledge. Harvey, David C. 2015. ‘Heritage and Scale: Settings, Boundaries and Relations.’ International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21 (6): 577–93. Huang, Shu-Mei, and Hyun-Kyung Lee. 2019. ‘Difficult Heritage Diplomacy? Re-­ Articulating Places of Pain and Shame as World Heritage in Northeast Asia.’ ­International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25 (2): 143–59. Iwashita Akihiro and Edward Boyle. 2022. ‘Conclusion: Reflecting on Regional Community in Northeast Asia.’ In Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia, edited by Iwashita, Yong-chool Ha & Boyle, 214–226. Abingdon: Routledge. Lähdesmäki, Tuuli, Yujie Zhu, and Suzanne Elizabeth Thomas. 2019. ‘Introduction: Heritage and Scale.’ In Politics of Scale: New Approaches to Critical Heritage Studies, 1–18. New York: Berghahn Books. Lewis, Martin and Kären Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mansfield, Stephen. 2001. ‘Asia’s Heritage Boom: Preservation Is Not as Easy as It Looks.’ Japan Times, 28 February 2001. Matsuda, Akira, and Luisa Elena Mengoni, eds. 2016. Reconsidering Cultural Heritage in East Asia. London: Ubiquity Press. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2020. ‘Anti-Area Studies Revisited.’ In On the Frontiers of History: Rethinking East Asian Borders, 7–24. Acton ACT: ANU Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. Nakano, Ryoko. 2018. ‘Heritage Soft Power in East Asia’s Memory Contests: Promoting and Objecting to Dissonant Heritage in UNESCO.’ Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia, 17 (1): 50–67. Nakano, Ryoko, and Yujie Zhu. 2020. ‘Heritage as Soft Power: Japan and China in International Politics.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26 (7): 869–81. Piliavsky, Anastasia. 2013. ‘Borders without Borderlands: On the Social Reproduction of State Demarcation in Rajasthan.’ In Borderland Lives in Northern South Asia: ­Non-State Perspectives, edited by David Gellner, 24–46. Durham: Duke University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. ‘Arts of the Contact Zone.’ Profession Pratt, Mary Louise. 2007. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Abingdon: Routledge. Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. Border Work. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Rumford, Chris. 2012. ‘Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders.’ Geopolitics, 17 (4): 887–902. Salter, Mark B. 2012. ‘Theory of the / : The Suture and Critical Border Studies.’ ­Geopolitics, 17 (4): 734–55. Sidaway, James D. 2015. ‘Mapping Border Studies.’ Geopolitics, 20 (1): 214–222. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Takagi, Hiroshi. 2012. ‘Fabricating Antiquity in Modern Nara.’ Zinbun Teeuwen, Mark, and Aike P. Rots. 2020. ‘Heritage-Making and the Transformation of Religion in Modern Japan.’ In Sacred Heritage in Japan, edited by Mark Teeuwen and Aike P. Rots, 1–17. London: Routledge. Trifu, Ioan. 2017. ‘Reform in Late Occupation Japan. The 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties.’ Zeitschrift Für Japanisches Recht, 22 (43): 205–230. Tunbridge, J. E., and G. J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Winter, Tim. 2019. Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Winter, Tim, and Patrick Daly. 2011. ‘Heritage in Asia: Converging Forces, Conflicting Values.’ In Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia, 1–35. Abingdon: Routledge.

PART 1 Heritage Practices

CHAPTER 2

Regional Language as Mnemonic Practice: Stewarding Place through Storytelling in Rural Japan Joshua Lee Solomon Abstract This chapter examines the mnemonic practices of Wa no Mukashi-ko, a group of amateur storytellers from the Tsugaru region of northern Japan. It argues that their flexible approach to adapting heritage in the form of vernacular language and oral performance offers a dynamic reinterpretation of furusato discourses of home/origins, reconnecting communal memory with present experience. The group is contextualized with a century of local regionalist thought and vernacular literature, and in the process, I attempt to complicate their location within the conservative-liberal political spectrum. The chapter concludes by arguing that intangible heritage maintained through practice is a method of stewarding place and creating a bulwark against the flattening effects of modern cosmopolitan liberalism.

Keywords folklore – dialect – place – orality – Tsugaru – furusato – home

Technological progress has afforded, among countless other developments, a displacement of oral culture in the everyday. Where once storytellers ­transmitted wisdom through the spoken word across generations, now we tend to read books and watch visual new media in pursuit of information. Yet, some still attach deep value to the memory of oral practice, identifying the intimate telling of folktales, for example, as an important part of communal heritage. In the Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture, Japan, one group of amateur storytellers called Wa no Mukashi-ko is comprised of such people. This chapter investigates their approach to storytelling as a mnemonic practice of place. But first, it ought to be contextualized within the larger project of this  © Joshua Lee Solomon, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_003

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One of the fundamental problems this volume seeks to address is the formation of ‘cosmopolitan’ sites of memory, so-called ‘mnemonic objects’, which cross spatial and temporal borders in the process of constituting ‘heritage’ (See Boyle and Iving’s introduction to this volume, 6–8; Boyle 2019). The present chapter is somewhat anomalous in that the heritage it examines is not connected to a specific physical ‘cosmopolitan’ site, but rather a combination of imagined place and bodily practices which function as mnemonic events. Yet it still clearly addresses shifting borders of memory across a kind of generational contact zone imbricating historical place-based identity (formed through authentic experiences of the wartime/early postwar generation) and contemporary cosmopolitanizing modernity. The place in question, the Tsugaru region, is an unofficial political/cultural demarcation based on a ­feudal domain, which still deeply influences the conscious identity of many contemporary inhabitants. As such, the practice of oral storytelling studied here is less a mnemonic site memorializing an event, and more of cultural events as mnemonic practice memorializing (maintaining) place. To state the subtext of the following argument succinctly, I find that the ­cosmopolitanism experienced by a locally oriented community is not simply that of liberating deterritorialization, but potentially a caustic reterritorializa tion which threatens local identity. Mnemonic practice is a tactic employed against this tidal force. More than the horizontal movement of crossing national borders, in this instance I am concerned with the crossing vertically between discursive scales—from the global to the national to the local. I refract the topic of heritage through an early to mid-century regionalism movement local to Aomori Prefecture, and then consider it in relation to the key concepts of furusato—a signifier of ‘home’ applied to the Tsugaru region from the national level—and place. Finally, I conclude by returning to apply that perspective to the contemporary group of storytellers, Wa no Mukashi-ko. Wa no Mukashi-ko First formed in 2003, Wa no Mukashi-ko is a group of amateur storytellers, or kataribe, who perform in and around Hirosaki City in the heart of the Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture. Their most distinctive characteristic is the use The information given in the following pages about Wa no Mukashi-ko is based on a series of recording sessions conducted on April 8, 2019; May 2, 2019; February 20, 2020; and March 13, 2020; as well as interviews conducted by Tada Megumi and the author with interviewees Satō Tsuri, Saitō Midori, Ono Miyoko, Ono Michiko, and Miyamoto Hisae on February 20,

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of esoteric local vernacular to relay their stories. They perform regularly on local radio stations including Radio Aomori Broadcasting, FM Apple Wave, and FM Jaigo (Country) Wave and they perform live in schools, public facilities, 15 different assisted living facilities, and various other venues and events. The group’s activities are conducted almost exclusively within Hirosaki City and the immediately surrounding municipalities. Wa no Mukashi-ko has recorded two CD s called Tsugaru-ben no mugashi-ko (Old Stories in Tsugaru Dialect) through Apple Wave (http://www.applewave.co.jp/cd). The group was initially founded by local television personality Shibutani Hakuryū and is now led by the master storyteller Satō Tsuri, the central informant for this study. Satō hails from neighbouring Hirakawa City but holds a regular seminar for her students in the Hirosaki NHK Culture Centre. There were about thirty students at the time of this study, nearly all of whom are women of middle age or above, with the exception of three men. Approximately ten students perform in public ­regularly (see Figure 2.1).

Members of Wa no Mukashiko, at a recording session for researchers at Hirosaki University. Shibutani Hakuryū is on the far left and Satō Tsuri is in the center Photograph by Tada Megumi, May 2, 2019 2020; and Satō Tsuri, Shibutani Hakuryū, Kudō Kaoru, Kasai Fumie, and Toki Fujie on March 13, 2020; and a letter written by Satō Tsuri on August 18, 2020.

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By definition, the mukashi-ko stories told by the group are set in the past. Many of them feature magical animals like talking trickster foxes, ogres, or include scenes of divine intervention into the lives of the pious. They are often set in recognizable regional locales or explain the origins of place names. Some tales are humorous and some scary, some include dialogue with play-acted voices, singing, or verse, and many present a clear moral, often spelled out in the end. Each story can last anywhere from two to more than ten minutes. They are, in a word, your archetypical non-modern folktales. Their leader Satō is a sprightly woman of quick wit and ironical disposition which belie her eighty-seven years of age (see Figure 2.2). Her students

Satō Tsuri performing folktales on stage Photograph used with permission of Satō Tsuri, March 13, 2012

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commend her vivacity and remarkable power of memory in performance, although they all rely on written scripts during rehearsal. She began telling folktales on the local Apple Wave radio station in the year 2000 and continues to this day. Shibutani is likewise an interesting character whose rotund appearance earned him the nickname ‘Hippo’ when traveling overseas as a young man. He now signs that name, in English, on the many watercolor and India ink cartoons he creates for Wa no Mukashi-ko and his television work. He has a predilection for telling bawdier stories, and his sense of humour is put to good use in his role on local television in which he solicits comedic verse (senryū) from viewers at home and comments on their use of vernacular vocabulary. The name ‘Wa no Mukashi-ko’ tells us something of the nature of their vernacular language. The words might be translated as ‘Our Old Stories’, but that does not capture the full nuance of the name. In Tsugaru vernacular, wa 吾 is, or historically was, commonly used as a first-person (masculine) pronoun. Thus, in hearing the name Wa no Mukashi-ko spoken aloud, one assumes that the wa no is first-person possessive, followed by mukashi-ko, a vernacular abbreviation of mukashi banashi, meaning folktale or old legend. However, in written material, wa is represented by the character 和, a word with some complex associations. The native Japanese reading nagoyaka means soft, gentle, or peaceful, certainly an emotional state in accordance with the nostalgic mode of the storytelling activity. But the primary association of this character is as a signifier of Japan or ‘Japanese’. In an interview with Satō, she commented on wa in further detail. Rather than speak to the kanji—which she says she ‘loves’— she interpreted the issue through an oral filter, listing significant words and ideas connected to the sound wa. These include not only the wa in wafuku 和 服 (Japanese style clothing), which she encourages her students to wear both in performance and everyday life, and nagoyaka 和やか; but also watashi 私 (a contemporary, somewhat more feminine first-person pronoun), wa 輪 (circle or ring, often a metaphor for community), and Reiwa 令和 (the current imperial reign name). In further commenting on the experience of wearing ‘Japanese style clothing’ in public, one of her students (perhaps unintentionally) subsequently introduced the exclamatory ‘wa’ indicative of emotional excitement into the discourse. On a separate occasion, Shibutani offered a sim ilar explanation, bridging the oral and literary: ‘ in Tsugaru dialect means “me” ... when written in kanji, it is the from heiwa [peace], so we made the Wa no mukashi-ko’. Wa no Mukashi-ko’s activities are a mixture of oral and written vernacular, and this seems to be reflected in the way its members discuss their language itself. Satō’s name card tells a bit more of the story. The back of the card reads in part ‘I volunteer at assisted living facilities every month performing old tales of

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Tsugaru as a part of my lifework as a Tsugaru mukashi-ko storyteller’. By identifying the telling of these stories as her ‘lifework’, Satō signals the deep value she places in the mukashi-ko and suggests the importance of her role as teacher as well. She provides additional insight into her feelings in a short introduction text, writing ‘Stories handed down from mothers and fathers to their children: a gentle, welcoming orally transmitted folklore left to us by our ancestors. In order to pass on our Tsugaru vernacular storytelling culture to future generations, we storytellers offer volunteer services’.2 These words emphasize the orality of folk tales and the intergenerational process of ‘handing down’ this lived culture from parent (or grandparent) to child. The pedagogical aspect of this performance goes beyond Satō’s literal teaching of storytelling technique to her students, extending to the audiences and others who must ‘pass on our Tsugaru vernacular storytelling culture to future generations’. This is an important point which I will return to in the conclusion of the chapter. Wa no Mukashi-ko’s member name cards, illustrated by Shibutani himself with a cartoon portrait of each storyteller, are further instructive regarding the point of the orality of their practice. The notation for mukashi-ko used on Satō’s card is 昔コ, combining the Chinese character for mukashi (old, from long ago) with the Tsugaru noun-marking suffix ko written in the katakana s­ yllabary. The card of another group member is written as 昔っこ, changing the vernacular suffix both by switching to the hiragana syllabary and inserting a sokuon (geminate consonant) resulting in an alternative pronunciation. While there is no substantive difference in meaning engendered by these variations, they do signal the organic nature of vernacular speech. Although the Tsugaru region is quite limited in a geographical sense, there is a large variation in pronunciation and vocabulary depending on one’s home village, gender, age, social context, etc. And, it goes without saying that this vernacular language changes over time as well. Therefore, the alternative written form of something so crucial as the performing group’s name informs us about its perspective on language. I’ll offer one more linguistic example of the plasticity of this regional lan guage before moving on. Each Wa no Mukashi-ko the teller reciting the phrase ‘the end’ and giving their name. The word used to indicate the end of the performance is tottsubare, possibly derived from dotto harae (to clear something away all at once), as if clearing the air of the tale just told. This word has become formalized as the way to conclude a story in Tsugaru vernacular. That said, what is of interest is the wide From an unpublished manuscript written by Satō Tsuri.

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variety of pronunciations used by the storytellers. It seems nearly every one of the tellers has a unique pronunciation, ranging from tottsubare to tochibare to totsuppare, sometimes combined with the noun-marking suffix ko (with or without the sokuon). As with the notation on the business cards, we can hear in this variation an insistence on the organicity of oral tradition. Lest the reader receive the impression that these performers operate completely in a primary-oral mode bereft of any written texts, it bears repeating that they rely on scripts to study for their performances. Satō and Shibutani have adapted the lion’s share of the works, although in at least one instance I observed a member borrowing text from what appeared to be a commercial publication. The scripts, which number over one hundred, are meticulously handwritten or typed adaptations. Many, although not all, include a citation of the work’s genealogy following the concluding tottsubare. This reveals a layered authorship and complex ownership of the tales. One example, ‘How the Octopus Lost His Bones (Story of the Monkey’s Raw Liver)’ (Tago no honenashi (saru no ikigimo)) contains the following notes on authorship: ‘original story’ = Kita Shōsuke, ‘composition’ = Shibutani Ryūichi (Shibutani Hakuryū) in Nihon no mukashibanashi vol. 1, ‘script version’ = Shibutani Ryūichi. In the case of my audio recording, the storyteller adds her name, Gotō Yukiko, to the text in performance (Solomon 2020, 19). This leads to two somewhat contradictory results. First, the performer (or researcher) with access to the physical document is made aware of a certain degree of the historicity of the story and some of the evolutions it has undergone. We understand that the performance is an adaptation of adapted work traceable back to a single author, who presumably based their writing on a communal property. But second, in performance the teller takes ownership of the tale through her oral interpretation and signoff at the end, leaving the audience to interpret the issue of authorship themselves. A defining property of folk stories is their communal ownership and assumed lack of individual authorship: the storyteller or folk artist is treated as a conduit for communal memory. The general understanding in ‘­primary oral’ tradition is that these contents being transmitted are not word-for-word ­reproducible texts like a modern novel. Rather, they are a series of tropes and patterns interpreted and reinterpreted through the mediumship of the s­ toryteller. The performances of Wa no Mukashi-ko by definition are practices of ‘secondary orality’ in that they are dependent upon print for their contemporary form (Ong 2002, 2, 23–5). Yet, the storytellers simultaneously connect to a lin eage of primary-oral culture produced by non-modern subjects. The issue of ownership of culture and its mode of transmission is, as I argue below, fundamental to Wa no Mukashi-ko’s project and potential.

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2 Views on Vernacular Language and Precedents in Vernacular-Language Literature Wa no Mukashi-ko did not spring into existence fully formed and without precedent. To the contrary, the group’s lineage can be traced clearly back through the Tsugaru ‘dialect poetry movement’ (hōgenshi undō) to its progenitor, Fukushi Kōjirō’s (1889–1946) philosophy of ‘regionalism’ (chihōshugi). And this history of Tsugaru vernacular-language literature took shape before an evolving backdrop of attitudes towards non-standardized speech in the country. Japan lacked any top-down coordinated unification of language until the modern period. Believing ‘national language’ to be a requisite to entering the global political arena as a modern nation-state, the Meiji government began instituting the ‘unification of spoken and written language’ (genbun itchi) policy, making written Japanese more accessible to a wider audience. The spread of written Japanese, based on Tokyo vernacular, sowed the seeds for large-scale linguistic homogenization. Such a policy was instituted more aggressively by the early Shōwa government (1926–1989), introducing the idea of a ‘standardized language’ (hyōjungo) expected to be spoken by all Japanese citizens. This policy resulted in the valorisation of an ‘educated’ centre—those who had mastered the Tokyo tongue—and the ‘ignorant’ country bumpkins (and ­subjects of empire) who had not. Such attitudes were reinforced by caustic policies like the ‘dialect extermination movement’ (hōgen bokumetsu undō) and the spread of batsu fuda or hōgen fuda placards which teachers would hang from students’ necks as punishment for using vernacular speech (Yeounsuk 1996, 237; Inoue & Hirata 2002, 82). Such dreams of a linguistically-homogeneous Japan are not simply things of the distant past; nor can they be divorced fully from their nationalistic roots: as recently as 2005, Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Aso Tarō declared that Japan has ‘one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race. There is no other nation (that has such characteristics)’ (The Japan Times, 2005). Yet users of non-standardized speech still abound—particularly in the aging countryside—with linguistic variation to the degree that such speakers will often be subtitled when appearing on television. One historical consequence of standardized language policies has been widespread prejudice against speakers of dialect. Such sentiments ran deep and contributed to the development of serious psychological problems among dialect speakers during the postwar period. Institutionalized shaming resulted in the proliferation of a so-called ‘dialect complex’ in which (urban) sufferers engaged in anti-social behaviour resulting in the most extreme cases in vio lence and even death. This situation continued as late as the 1970s. Tanaka

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demonstrates, however, that with the spread of radio and television in the postwar period, an increasing number of people throughout the country had access to media using standardized speech, leading to an overall expansion of the number of proficient speakers and attendant fall in the prestige associated with the once exclusive language and decrease in the prevalence of anti-­ vernacular prejudice. In recent years, the ability to speak authentic ‘dialect’ has become progressively rarer, leading, she argues, to a reversing of attitudes and re-evaluation of vernacular language and even prestige connected to it (Tanaka 2014). While much of Tanaka’s research is interested in mass media (dialect use in Taiga TV dramas) and its effect on young girls (their appropriation of s­ tylized ‘faux dialect’ in cell phone text communications), it still speaks broadly to a context which informs the work of Wa no Mukashi-ko and their literary forebears. Our storytellers approach vernacular speech from the perspective of nostalgia for lived experience in their youths, as opposed to the fetishization by urban middle schoolers of a language presumably largely or even entirely novel to them. That said, broader societal trends positively re-evaluating vernacular speech certainly boost Wa no Mukashi-ko’s performance opportunities and audience sympathies. This is in stark contrast to the environment in which Tsugaru literary vernacular was first imagined. It was amidst the profoundly anti-vernacular sentiment of the late Meiji era that Fukushi Kōjirō launched his campaign of ‘regionalism’ in the 1920s. Fukushi was born and raised in Aomori, but made a name for himself among the then rising vernacular free verse (kōgo jiyū shi) poets of Tokyo. These men used contemporary, accessible spoken Tokyo vernacular to pen introspective works on the cutting edge of the poetry scene. In the early 1920s, Fukushi ­experienced an epiphany and returned home to Tsugaru. There, he began encouraging his peers to engage in a consciously localized literary praxis based on his theories of ‘traditionalism’ (dentō shugi) and ‘regionalism’. He emphasized the value of ‘spirit’ (seishin, tamashii esprit) posited in stark opposition to the burgeoning cosmopolitan values he observed among his urban peers. He continued to be a powerful leader and influential mentor to the local literary establishment until his death in 1946. Fukushi’s proposed path toward the future of Japanese tradition, culture, or language was to be built in part upon a regional literary foundation. He thus orchestrated a ‘dialect poetry movement’ (hōgenshi undō) centred around the Hirosaki City local literary establishment (chihō bundan) in the Tsugaru region, first mentoring Takagi Kyōzō (1903–1987) and then building a small cohort of writers notably including Ichinohe Kenzō (1899–1979), Ueki Yōsuke (1914–1971), and Kon Kan’ichi (1909–1983). Takagi published Japan’s first book-length work of vernacular poetry Marmello: Poems in Dialect in 1931. Ueki began printing

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the dialect poetry coterie journal Kagawara in 1935 and Ichinohe published the book of verse Neputa the following year. These works and others were collected in 1964 in the volume Poetry of Tsugaru: A Collection of Poems in Dialect, which has gone through a number of editions and remains the definitive collection of works in the genre (Ichinohe et al 1964). Some of these works are performed by Wa no Mukashi-ko founder Shibutani Hakuryū. Poetry of Tsugaru and other works by this generation of poets has two salient themes in common with the performance tradition of Wa no Mukashi-ko. First, and most obviously, is the deployment of vernacular speech as literary medium. Just as the kataribe storytellers have translated spoken vernacular into printed or handwritten scripts which are then re-translated in oral performance, so did the poets begin with their natural spoken language and translate it to printed words on the page. Furthermore, these works are understood to be manifestations of spoken language, and may commonly be encountered in spoken performance, such as in recordings played in the Hirosaki City local literature museum, readings conducted at the annual ‘Tsugaru dialect day’, and commercial CD s. One of the earliest examples of this practice came from ­Takagi himself, who in the postwar period took to giving live performances and readings on the radio, and published plastic Sonosheet records (flexi discs) accompanying newer editions of Marmello and other publications (Takagi 1990, 109). Furthermore, the practice of translating speech to text generated a number of creative solutions to the problems created when eliminating the sonic dimension of the language. Each poet experimented with mixing various orthographies—hiragana, katakana, and kanji—to represent their unique voice. Literary historian Ono Masafumi’s introductory notes to Poetry of Tsugaru explains: By nature, dialect poems are things to be taken in through the ears, aurally; however, for the time being, we are appealing with visual effect by employing compound kanji words. For example, for the dialect word ‘odenki’ (weather), a great difference in nuance is created by choosing between お天気 [o-tenki, weather], 晴天 [seiten, clear weather], 快 晴 [kaisei, fair weather], and 麗日 [reijitsu, glorious spring day]. This is not attaching pronunciations to kanji, but rather the poet’s individual style is created through the selection of which kanji to use to represent the [­dialect word] pronunciation. This type of notation generates the same linguistic impression as when one attaches western-language pro nunciations to kanji; it gives a novel impression, as if dialect were a foreign language, and the use of written characters makes it possible for readers unfamiliar with the dialect to approach understanding. (Ono 1967, 174–5)

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Ono interprets the written medium as a mere vessel for oral language, and orthographic choices to stand in for the intonational variation of the spoken word. Additionally, the written text acts as a handhold for ‘foreign’ readers. Such choices made in writing poetry, while perhaps more extensive, resemble those on the Wa no Mukashi-ko name cards, in the various story scripts, and in Shibutani’s calligraphic comic verse. More importantly, perhaps, is the recognition of difference in itself: as asserted above, regional vernacular contains a wide range of internal difference, and therefore it is of no surprise that vocal variation should be a common theme amongst instances of vernacular literature. This aspect of internal variation united by an irrational categorization as ‘Tsugaru’ certainly aligns with Fukushi’s concept of ‘spirit’. The second theme these two groups hold in common is that of ‘regionalism’ in terms of subject matter and attitude. Locality is represented in both poems and stories in the form of local place names, fauna and flora, and occasionally historical figures and events. They also serve as archives of emplaced experience: this is how Tsugaru children play(ed), this is what Tsugaru people eat (ate), this is how Tsugaru people till(ed) the fields, etc. Certain poets, like Ueki Yōsuke, may have had a predilection for more abstract, modernistic works, but overall these writers tended to use their art to describe aspects of everyday life, often from childhood memory. This remains the case in contemporary examples as well (e.g., Fukuchi, 2010). Prominent works of Tsugaru dialect literature are backward facing in the sense that they contain an inherently nostalgic element. Most Tsugaru literati who studied with Fukushi left or attempted to leave Tsugaru at some point or another—even the quintessential work of dialect poetry, Takagi’s Marmello, was published when its author was living in the imperial satellite state of Manchukuo. The Wa no Mukashi-ko storytellers are not such physical migrants, but temporal ones. The kataribe have been displaced in time through the pro cesses of modernization and globalization, making the Tsugaru of memory foreign. Whereas the vernacular poets identified their tongue as a geographic property, today dialect is coded both geographically and temporally: it is a thing out of time, in the past. The invocation of this language is part of an act conjuring the spirit of something called Tsugaru into the present moment. Tsugaru as Place To understand the ‘Tsugaru’ being eroded, it is necessary to understand what kind of place it is. I deliberately describe Tsugaru as a ‘place’ and consider ‘place’ to incorporate aspects of heritage. I use the term following what Ryden

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calls an ‘invisible landscape’ and what Massey describes as an ‘envelope’ of space and time (Ryden 1993; Massey 1994, 3). In this sense, place is opposed to space, an empty geographical descriptor. Conversely, place is populated by the invisible and intangible stuff of humanity: history, culture, language, etc.: things which are ‘invisible’ to the naked eye, but potentially extremely tangible to the subjects inhabiting that space. Because history, culture, and experience are necessarily accumulations over time, place must be thought of as containing both spatial and temporal dimensions. Thus, while Tsugaru might be technically locatable on a map, its shape and meaning have changed over time. Tsugaru only exists as an object of understanding through the virtue of human activity and function of memory. It is in this way a form of lived heritage, a social ‘imaginary’ which is recognized by its participants de facto in an un-rationalizable, non-delimitable manner (Castoriadis 1987). Should the performance of Tsugaru—through vernacular speech or other bodily techniques, etc.—be conducted beyond its geographical borders, it could be recognized as the creation of a temporary, hybridized Tsugaru place. The Tsugaru region is physically located in Aomori, the northernmost ­prefecture on the main island of Honshū. Aomori is mostly rural and has one of the lowest population densities in the country. Traditionally, agricultural workers engaged in dekasegi, or seasonal migrant labour, meaning that a not-insignificant segment of the modern Aomori population travelled regularly to the metropolitan centre. Conversely, due in part to a well-documented Japan Rail advertising campaign, Aomori has been featured heavily in national tourism literature. Such representations of the countryside in Japan linked it to a pure, authentic, or unsullied historical ‘Japan’ called furusato, an imagined ideal built on discursive constructs—a simulacrum—of one’s (mis)remembered childhood home, native place, or origins (Ivy 1995; Tanigawa 1978). Some tension plays between the places of ‘Tsugaru’ and ‘Aomori’. The ­contemporary national gaze perhaps most strongly identifies ‘Tsugaru’ with the eponymous 1944 novel by the renowned writer Dazai Osamu, Ishikawa Sayuri’s legendary enka ballad ‘Tsugaru Straits, Winter Scene’ (Tsugaru kaikyō fuyu geshiki), and a musical style called Tsugaru-jamisen. Yet the Tsugaru region is quite palpable to the everyday consciousness of many locals. Tsugaru is ‘real’ within lived local consciousness, but it is not an official contemporary political unit or municipality. There are north, south, east, west, and central Tsugaru counties (gun) containing Goshogawara City, Kuroishi City and Hirakawa City, Aomori City, Tsugaru City, and Hirosaki City, which may be considered to comprise the modern-day Tsugaru region, but their grouping is not functional in a political or policy sense (similar to larger regions made up of clusters of prefec tures, like Tōhoku and Kansai).

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The foundations of the contemporary Tsugaru region lie in the ­Tokugawaperiod (1603–1868) domain of the Tsugaru feudal lord (daimyō), and ­therefore might better be conceived of as a holdover of premodern values connecting place, culture, and identity. The diachronic lineage of Tsugaru carries significant historical baggage into the present day. Positive identification with Tsugaru is as often as not an oppositional consciousness toward Nanbu, the similarly informally organized region covering the eastern half of Aomori Prefecture and stretching into Iwate to the south. Historically, Tsugaru and Nanbu were enemies, and a certain sense of rivalry continues to this day. Tsugaru and Nanbu further meld together as the lens is pulled back to view the region of ‘Northern Tōhoku’. Then, again, when posited in opposition to the southern regions of Honshū including Kantō (Tokyo area) and Kansai (Ōsaka and Kyōto area), one tends to think of Tōhoku as a comprehensible unit. As with Tsugaru and Nanbu, these regional labels reflect historical boundaries. Tōhoku roughly aligns with the premodern Ōu region, a word still used to describe some local institutions. Similarly, the area currently occupied by Aomori Prefecture was once referred to as Mutsu—which might be ­liberally translated as ‘the end of the road’—a word which survives not only in the g­ eographic features of Mutsu Bay and the Mutsu peninsula, but also the ­prefecture’s second-largest newspaper, the Mutsu shinpō. The historical establishment of the Tsugaru domain was rooted in ­geographic realities which remain to the present day. Bordered on the east by the Hakkōda mountain range, to the south by the Shirakami mountains, and to the north and west by the coast, Tsugaru is hemmed in on all sides by natural boundaries. But to live in Tsugaru is primarily to live under the shadow of Mt. Iwaki (see Figure 2.3). The mountain, surrounded by plains, dominates the Tsugaru ­skyline and is featured in a number of Wa no Mukashi-ko stories. In a paean to his hometown, Ichinohe Kenzō begins by mentioning this benevolent presence: No matter where we go, for us there’s no place like Shirosagi! Watched over by Mt. Yuwaki, Our quaint city spreads out around the castle3

3 This poem is written in the local vernacular, in which ‘Hirosaki’ may be pronounced Shirosagi’ and ‘Iwaki’ may be pronounced ‘Yuwaki’. Ichinohe et al, 11.

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Mt. Iwaki overlooking the Tsugaru region, from the vantage of Hirosaki University Photograph by the author

In this work, Ichinohe refers to Mt. Iwaki (Yuwaki) with the honorific suffix ‘sama’. Elsewhere, one often encounters an additional honorific prefix, as in o-Iwaki or o-Iwaki-sama. The personification of the mountain as an honorable and benevolent entity aligns with animistic folk-religious beliefs in which the mountain itself was synonymous with the kami or divine spirits which dwell therein. This is metonymized by the Iwakiyama Shrine, the central shrine of the Tsugaru domain, which sits near the base of a path which leads all the way up the mountain. The centrality of Mt. Iwaki to Tsugaru identity is one reason why it and the god of Akakura, one of Iwaki’s peaks, play prominent roles in several of the Wa no Mukashi-ko stories. These include a fable about how an ogre was responsible for building the mountain up into its iconic triple-peaked form, and several others wherein the god of the mountain saves the braggard daimyō from the consequences of his own boasting. 4

Tsugaru as Furusato

One word often used to describe Tsugaru is furusato. Furusato (sometimes kokyō), translated variously as ‘old village’, ‘home’, ‘native place’, etc., is used most literally to refer to the place one was born, but has subsequently moved away from. As with the German heimat or American ‘small town America’, however,

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the literal denotation of furusato is superseded by the powerful connotations accrued through its discursive history. Those connotations are quite similar to the German and American parallels: one associates furusato with simple living, vernacular speech, good food, and closeness with nature and religion. It is a pastoral-landscape image, full of nostalgia, characterized by ‘forested mountains, fields cut by a meandering river, and a cluster of thatched-roof farmhouses…’. The word when depicted in Chinese characters (古里), points to its spatio-temporal construction: ‘The temporal dimension is represented by the [first character] furu(i), which signifies pastness, historicity, senescence, and quaintness […] The spatial dimension is represented by the [latter character,] sato, which suggests a number of places inhabited by humans: a natal household, a hamlet or village, and the countryside (as opposed to the city)’ (Robertson 1991, 13–14). Furusato is therefore always receding into the past. As it fades away, it inevitably becomes an object of desire. Furusato studies have traditionally interpreted their object in terms of ­modern metropolitan desire. For example, Jennifer Robertson’s seminal work discusses how furusato has been appropriated and commodified by governmental and commercial forces (Robertson 1998). Her perspective, grounded in a centralized view of Japan, offers insight into the dynamic of furusatofor-­nation. Marylin Ivy’s landmark study, Discourses of the Vanishing, gives a more specific address to the postmodern mobilization of furusato. ­Looking to postwar tourism campaigns, including the now-(in)famous Japan-Rail ‘Discover Japan’ ad campaign, she reveals Japan’s desperate need to recover a desire for desire, its nostalgia for nostalgia (Ivy 1995, 10). This reading closely resembles Tanigawa Ken’ichi’s earlier analysis, in which he describes furusato as discursive ‘phantasm’ (yōkai) (Tanigawa 1978). The influential ad campaign essentially suggested that authentic ‘Japanese identity’ was waiting to be (re) discovered in the furthest peripheries of the Tohoku region, of which Tsugaru is the most remote. Discover Japan was a property of Tokyoites, and therefore Ivy and Tanigawa’s analyses of it provide insight into Tokyo’s furusato. Japanese furusato scholarship finds a similar equivalency in popular consciousness between furusato as home/origins, and its anti-modern desiring. One scholar describes it as pre-cultural (genshiteki), an irrecoverable loss of modernity. This denial contributes to the mystique of lost origins, reinforcing the often utopian representation of the countryside (Matsumura 1999, 46–7). Return to such a furusato would entail a return to something akin to the Laca nian Real, a kind of pre-subjective mode of existence. As such, furusato, like its German and American counterparts, is frequently fetishized in fascistic rhetoric. The objectification of the ‘country’, including Tsugaru, in this manner transforms it into a symbol addressing the needs of the modern nation for

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a(n imagined) homeland is to me clearly problematic for this reason. Satō ­Tsuri’s admission in an interview that mukashi-ko will most likely disappear as a lived practice not long after her death certainly speaks to concerns for disappearing origins. The strong associations she and her students build between the mukashi-ko storytelling and their distant childhoods are thanatotic in the same sense that Matsumura describes the broader category of furusato as precultural, like the Lacanian Real. Such fetishization of form has been explicitly criticized by Deleuze and Guattari in their work on minor literature wherein they accuse ‘the revival of regionalisms, with a reterritorialization through dialect or patois, a vernacular language...’ of being anti-revolutionary (Deleuze & Guattari 1986, 24). Duyvendak has similarly critiqued the ‘culturalized notion of citizenship’ engendered by ‘thick’ conceptions of place as exclusionary and regressive (2011). Appeals to the cult of tradition were historically biased toward the wartime political climate: Fukushi too briefly flirted with political fascism near the end of his life. Yet, the futility, and perhaps undesirability, of a totalitarian return to non-modern regional tradition has become increasingly apparent, especially in the postwar, postmodern world of today. This suggests that contemporary dialect literature and the work of Wa no Mukashi-ko may adopt what Edward Said calls ‘late style’, ‘what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality’ (Said 2006, 9). But what ‘reality’ are they facing? During the early twentieth century, modern nationalism paired with a push toward cosmopolitanism among the intellectual class, resulting in a de-­placing (or re-placing) of Tokyo, the capital and stand-in for Japan. These were the c­ onditions which inspired Fukushi’s project in the first place. Take his debate with Narita Yoshikuni over the merits of Esperanto: he argues that linguistic antiquity is self-legitimating, and that Esperanto’s lack of historicity makes it unnatural and ill-suited for conveying nuance and literary thought. He goes on to illustrate the intrinsic ties between communication and place. Abandoning Japanese tradition for an artificial, ahistorical lingua franca (kokusaigo) would undercut the nation’s potential for future global development (Fukushi 1925). If Japan adopted Esperanto, it would lose its ‘spirit’. The same went for cosmopolitan scientific rationality and logic. The new international culture lacked the ineffable spirit, the ‘irrationality’ (higōrisei) of specificity of place (Fukushi 1967 66–7). This argument is drawn from a similar place as Watsuji Tetsurō’s more famous musing on climate, in which he argues that cultures can be broadly defined based on monsoon, desert, and meadow-style climates (Watsuji 1961). Watsuji developed his thesis between 1927 and 1928 by adapting Heidegger’s philosophy of to describe society rather than the individual

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(Watsuji 1961, v–vii). Watsuji’s theory participated in major contemporary debates about Japanese national identity and imperial possibilities (Oguma 2002, 282). However, whereas Watsuji was interested in describing Japan-­ as-nation, Fukushi was more introspective, recognizing the granularity and ­irrationality of place-consciousness (Solomon 2019). Yet, Japan has continued to globalize and cosmopolitanize, particularly with the postwar spread of mass media. As a result, the Japanese provinces have been progressively stripped of difference as they are bifurcated into the furusato simulacrum and belatedly developing cosmopolitan satellites of the capital. Over the long term, signifiers of Japaneseness have grown emptier over time through their reappropriations by the international and domestic tourism industries and increasingly massified media. To counteract this, local actors have striven to encourage a Japan ‘co-eval’ with global modernity, a mode of social being formed out of respect for the specificity of place and consciously homegrown tradition (Harootunian, 2000, preface). This regional-nationalism aims for the fostering of the deep cultural ‘Japanese’ tradition. In other words, regionalism is a belief that heritage must be cultivated via a close connection to a specific place, inculcating the population with living memory. And so, the lived reality acknowledged by our contemporary storytellers is this: cosmopolitanism and modernization are not the opposite of regionalization; rather, they are phenomenologically similar forms of reterritorialization. From the viewpoint of a local actor, these globalizing trends have a tendency to reproduce patterns and ensembles, a ‘thin’ concept of place in which the language, bodily techniques, and social values of liberal modern subjects grow globally more uniform. The living practice of vernacular literature in this study is conversely an example of a regionalism grounded in a flexible, evolving, and inclusionary heritage; not an inflexible reproduction of extant political relations in service to a state authority only interested in oppositional identity politics. To sum up, furusato is an imagined topos of origin layered upon and embedded into the place of Tsugaru. Rather than adopt a national gaze when ­analysing Tsugaru and Wa no Mukashi-ko, novel scholarship of Tsugaru could alternatively rely primarily on listening to local voices speaking to their imme diate surroundings. What we find when listening to Wa no Mukashi-ko directly is a combination of reverse importation of this discourse—an identification of ‘real’ Tsugaru with childhood and romanticized simpler times—and localized creative actions taken to cope with the losses inherent to cosmopolitanism and modernity. In this way, the actions of Wa no Mukashi-ko and their forebears in the local literary establishment have deployed tactics to cope with these losses and to recoup furusato for themselves, if perhaps without naming it directly.

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Wa no Mukashi-ko and Regionalism as Memory Practice

While Wa no Mukashi-ko’s incessant citation of the past may smack of ­illiberalism, in the spirit of inclusionary heritage, their actual performance practice offers a number of concessions to both the contemporary audience and storyteller. First, as mentioned in the initial description, the storytellers stand before their audience and illustrate their telling via some restrained ­gesticulations. According to their teacher, Satō Tsuri, even the shifting of one’s gaze over the heads of the audience can help one imagine the scene, perhaps of high cedars towering above. They also may choose a costume suited to the particular story they plan to tell: a fancy kimono to represent a female protagonist, or samue working clothes for a story about a farmer or wild animals. Finally, the storytellers will effect different voices for different characters to ‘match with [the demands of] current times’. Such techniques were specifically developed to address the stories to the more visually-oriented contemporary audience whose attention appeared to wane when presented with the purely aural experience she recalled hearing from her grandmother. Satō stresses that the heightened drama of her contemporary performances differs from her memory of folktales, which she and several of her students identify with stories told by their parents and grandparents in extremely intimate settings. The act of translating storytelling to the stage also pushes it further away from that initial status as a marginal art in everyday life. At the same time, it is partially recuperating a disappearing cultural practice which informed the childhood experience of these storytellers of Tsugaru-as-place. It seems that Wa no Mukashi-ko’s ideal effect would be the transmission of this cultural practice to the future, although Satō confesses that she is resigned to the mutation and perhaps inevitable extinction of the practice after she passes away. The textual authorship and language of performance is also subject to adaptation. I mentioned Shibutani Hakuryū’s role in gathering folktales and Satō’s converting them into scripts for performance, above. Yet, when learning to perform a new story, the teller will often write notes on the script—not only memos related to which words to emphasize or which lines to sing, but also additions and deletions to the body of the script. In other words, in a very literal sense, Wa no Mukashi-ko views folktales as a mutable property of the community to be adapted to the language of each performer.4 with any natural language, there is a great variety of internal variation within Tsugaru vernacular based on the area within the region, gender, and age of the For an example of such editing, see Solomon 2020, 27.

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speaker. In this way, the storytellers’ editing of the tales preserves the synchronicity and orality of their practice. Furthermore, the choice of texts reveals more than a blind interest in ­preserving Tsugaru ‘tradition’. While many of the tales are harvested from localized collections of folktales or recalled from Satō’s and Shibutani’s youths, they also occasionally perform adaptations of stories which originate beyond the borders of Tsugaru. Two striking examples are ‘The Snow Lady’ (Yuki-onna) and ‘The Crane Returns a Favor’ (Tsuru no ongaeshi). Yuki-onna is a common snow phantom haunting folktale told throughout northern Japan, but Satō’s script is clearly attributed to the version penned by Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), published in his 1904 collection of English-language short stories Kwaidan. In performance, the story text is adapted to portray the events occurring in the Shirakami area of the southern part of the Tsugaru region, the protagonist being a matagi mountain-man. The latter is another example of a popular magical folk story from western Japan. Satō performs two versions, one of which is specially adapted to radio performance with musical accompaniment on the shakuhachi (she also mentioned performing with a koto and synthesizer on other occasions). Both of these appropriations of non-Tsugaru texts further suggest that the work of Wa no Mukashi-ko is adaptive, that the furusato/heritage it seeks to access is open to change, and that the place of Tsugaru itself can incorporate non-’native’ elements. It seems therefore that in practice, Wa no Mukashi-ko is engaging in actions which are simultaneously mnemonic and pedagogical, both introverted and extroverted processes of maintaining place. And as an investment in both the temporal and geographical dimensions of place, they tend to be strongly ­nostalgic in nature. Wa no Mukashi-ko storytelling certainly hearkens back to the childhood furusato memory. Indeed, Satō’s students Kasai Fumie and Kudō Kaoru both reflect, invoking the same language, that ‘we were raised on Tsugaru dialect’. But the openness to adaptation suggests they are engaging in what Svetlana Boym calls ‘reflective nostalgia’, as opposed to ‘restorative nostalgia’. Restorative nostalgia refers to a ‘national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity’, whereas reflective nostalgia is based on a fragmented, network-like ‘social memory’ encompassing multiple nonteleological possibilities for different futures (Boym 2001, xviii). Even Fukushi’s early traditionalism was oriented toward the incubation of future possibilities. Thus, I believe this regionalism rehabilitates Tsugaru through a program of stewardship—a process carried on by a variety of actors by developing and maintaining eclectic cultural h ­ eritage— and the thickening of the definition of place. This is the work that the vernacu lar poets engaged in and that Wa no Mukashi-ko continues to this day.

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The Tsugaru region, as a furusato-object of the national gaze and locality under globalized modernity, has suffered a rupture from the past. This rupture takes form in part through the attrition of past bodily techniques and linguistic practice. By citing locally-specific language, history, mythology, and other markers of locality, Wa no Mukashi-ko attempt to draw diachronic connections which synthesize into synchronic community experiences. They do so in part by reproducing elements of the generalized furusato narrative, in part by adapting it to local needs and interests. Satō has two short texts introducing her group which touch on this issue. The first, mentioned above, is called ‘Tsugaru mukashi-ko handed down the generations’ (katari tsugu Tsugaru no mukashi-ko). The second, simply entitled ‘What is Tsugaru mukashi-ko?’ (Tsugaru no mukashi-ko ha), is a reduction of the former into something like a sparse prose poem—so sparse as to be difficult to parse as a silent written text, but more naturally comprehensible in oral form. Both emphasize the diachronic linkages of the practice. On the same note, another of Satō’s students, Toki Fujie, explained that she became interested in mukashi-ko when she started living with her grandchildren, expressing a clear desire to pass the stories down to the future generation. There are some continuities between this and contemporary storytellers in other contexts. One analogue is the community of younger Okinawan storytellers who have inherited older narratives and memories of their community’s wartime experience, and now practice ‘personalized war stories’ adapted to the needs and understanding of Okinawan and mainland Japanese audiences (Boyle 2019, 304). Nelson writes of the regional significance of this practice some years earlier: Reassembling these practices [of traditional storytelling] could not ­recreate the prewar form of Okinawan society; however, it could begin the process of reintegrating survivors into relationships with their ­ancestral spirits, and reestablishing a productive sense of community in what had become a mere contiguous collection of households and ­individuals. (Nelson 2008, 40) The Okinawan communities devastated by war and occupation find meaning and healing through shared practices of storytelling and memory. A similar process is shown in the chapter by Gerster and Fulco in this volume, in which kata ribe in post-tsunami Miyagi Prefecture play a role in transmitting an emotional narrative to a community literally ruptured by natural disaster. While difficult to compare directly, the communal loss Wa no Mukashi-ko addresses is an invasion of cosmopolitanism, liquifying modernity, which alters the place and memory of

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Tsugaru. These mnemonic practices bring community together by reaffirming a combination of diachronic and synchronic linkages between people and place. Thus, the memory practice of Wa no Mukashi-ko is not merely a static ­preservation of historical experience and wisdom, although it certainly contains elements of it. Shibutani attempts to justify the preservational side of his project by begging the question: partly by highlighting a genealogy connecting the local vernacular to the Yamato kotoba ancestral language spoken in ancient Kyoto, and partly by arguing, in response to my direct questioning of why it is important to continue practicing mukashi-ko, that ‘not only with respect to language, it is important to pass down all manner of things from the past’. Note the relation to Ono’s likening of Tsugaru dialect to a ‘foreign language’ in the introduction to Poetry of Tsugaru: if Tsugaru vernacular is truly an authentic remnant of classical Japanese language, then its preservation plays into the furusato trope of archaic national unity based on lost origins. The past may be a foreign country, but it is one we are morally directed to recover to the present, for the sake of the nation. However, as alluded to above, in practice, more than acting as a passive storehouse, Wa no Mukashi-ko actually engage active and intersubjective processes through which the storyteller and audience both adapt and change. In Satō’s words, ‘It’s no good if there isn’t anyone there [to hear the story]. You need a public space (ba) to tell a story’. When performing for elementary school aged children, the storytellers take on the role of cultural guides, teaching the audience background information and important vocabulary words to increase comprehension. On the other hand, the kataribe report that one of the joys of going to assisted living facilities is how the audience members themselves will at times reverse roles, offering their own internalized mukashi-ko, teach some esoteric vernacular terms, or add historical context or an insightful interpretation to the stories they hear performed. So, there is another tension between the conservative impulse toward ­preserving heritage and the necessity for society to grow and change. In their actions, Wa no Mukashi-ko do not reject the latter; rather, they seek to ­temper the flattening effects of cosmopolitanism and the postmodern media ­landscape, placing value on unevenness and difference. In her introductory text, Satō speaks directly to this tension with the following plea: Everything is changing with the technological progress of media. Every thing from the necessities of everyday life to modes of transportation and smart phones are changing Japan and the rest of the world. But especially in such times of great change, wouldn’t you agree that there should be some things that stay the same!

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This will is directed toward the maintenance of place, the humus from which both individual and communal identities spring. Heritage, as shared memory, is built into the fabric of place; therefore, building and sharing heritage is a ­communal, ultimately cross-generational, endeavour. In Satō’s vision, it should not be exclusionary, as charged by Duyvendak, but a desiring for connection. The ideal result of the interactions created by storytelling performance is, in Satō’s words, ‘making them feel an emotional connection, a feeling of unity between the people of Tsugaru’. She continues on the topic of using vernacular language in general: Instead of increasing their knowledge just through the television or internet, couldn’t [the younger generation] ask grannies and grandpas about vocabulary they don’t know? To ask their elders, such storehouses of knowledge, about what the culture or townscape, the buildings were like long ago? Wouldn’t using Tsugaru dialect create perfect opportunities to make connections between these people? In the micro space of the performance itself, all participants are offered this ‘sense of unity’ (ittaikan) in the moment by shared laughter or tears, or through the shared act of recollecting their childhoods. The name for the group originally formed by Shibutani, ‘Tsugaru Mukashi-ko Mura’, further establishes this stance. Mura, literally meaning ‘village’, implies a small, close knit regional community rather than some grand, abstract national body. In the larger context potentialized through vernacular language practice, the recognition of the Tsugaru-ness of one’s identity comes from learning and affirming one’s knowledge of the Tsugaru language, climate and culture, and their deep connections to its history through intergenerational communication. Satō further claims that this sense—not rational ‘information’, but irrational ‘feeling’—cannot be fully communicated in standardized language, that vernacular language is critical to create this sense of unified emotional community and engage in ‘spiritual healing’ (kokoro no iyashi). And, hearkening back to Fukushi’s nation alism, she, like Shibutani, reminds us that Tsugaru dialect is ‘yamato kotoba’, the ethnic-national language of the Yamato (Japanese) people, theoretically untainted by foreign (including Chinese) influence. This echoes Shibutani’s television spot partly entitled ‘okuni kotoba’, or ‘language of the country’, the word ‘country’ ( ) as ambiguous in Japanese as in English. They clearly view this vernacular language as an important heritage with deep roots in Japanese history and their work as in service of its stewardship.

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6 Conclusion The work of Wa no Mukashi-ko creates linkages between this historical aspect of place and the present, potentially contributing to the healing of communal ruptures wrought by cosmopolitan modernity by, in part, reminding elderly ­listeners of the language of their place of origin and teaching the youth of today that aspect of their heritage. This reality clashes to a certain degree with the storytellers’ personal discourses. Shibutani’s statements and attitude in particular seem to evoke a positive valuation of a static past. Satō’s dismay at the presumed looming extinction of her craft similarly shades their practice with a quality of lateness, à la Said. In actuality, I believe this contradictory situation—the maintenance of pastness through future-oriented adaptation and emphasis on community building in the present—demonstrates an important mode of ethical praxis for maintaining intangible heritage. Similarly, the unresolved contradiction between the assumed communal ownership of ‘folk tales’ and the written record of individualized authorship (on the scripts used for performance) and performer adaptation reflects a flexible approach to this stewardship. Wa no Mukashi-ko are in effect conducting inheritance (keishō), not preservation (hozon); in making connections between generations by the passing down of lived memory through secondary orality, not the archiving of inert textual objects. Where the national furusato discourse establishes identity based on a mythic past to undergird a liquid, cosmopolitan modernity, the memory practice of Wa no Mukashi-ko uses fictional folk narratives from the past to give meaning to place-based community in the present. These many adaptations demonstrate how Wa no Mukashi-ko is participating in a form of reflective nostalgia for Tsugaru as place. They inherit the spirit of Fukushi’s project by stewarding the bodily and linguistic practices of the locality through adaptation and synchronicity. And while Satō’s premonitions regarding the future of her heritage practice are unpromising, one may opti mistically interpret the openness and malleability of this mode of stewardship to allow for the possibility of further adaptation and unfolding of some form of localized ‘tradition’ into the future. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep gratitude to Satō Tsuri, Shibutani Hakuryū, and the many members of Wa no Mukashi-ko who have shared their art and experiences so selflessly with my colleagues and myself. In addition, I want to

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thank Edward Boyle, Steven Ivings, and the other workshop participants for their insightful comments and constructive criticism on this manuscript. This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant number 21K00782. References Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by ­Kathleen Blamey. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duyvendak, Jan Willem. 2011. The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Fukuchi Jun’ichi. 2010. Hōgen shishū: Tsugaru, shō. Chōei-sha. Fukushi Kōjirō. 1925. ‘Esuperanto no gaidoku wo setumeisu.’ Hirosaki Shinbun, May 30, 1925 – June 17, 1925. Fukushi Kōjirō. 1967. Fukushi Kōjirō chosaku shū, vol. 2. Edited by Osanai Tokio. Tsugaru shobō. Harootunian, Harry. 2000. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ichinohe Kenzō, et al. 1964. Hōgen shishū: Tsugaru no shi. Tsugaru shobō. Inoue Hisashi and Hirata Oriza. 2002. Hanashi kotoba no nihongo. Shōgakukan. Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lee Yeounsuk. 2010. The Ideology of Kokugo: Nationalizing language in modern Japan. Translated by M. Hirano Hubbard. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Matsumura Tomomi. 1999. ‘‘‘Kisei-ron’: Sōshutsu sareru yūtopia’. Geibun Kenkyū, 77: Nelson, Christopher. 2008. Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa. Durham: Duke University Press. Oguma Eiji. 2002. A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images. Translated by David Askew. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Ong, Walter. 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge.

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Ono Masafumi. 1964. ‘Kaisetsu.’ In Hōgen shishū: Tsugaru no shi, edited by Ichinohe Kenzō, 165–77. Tsugaru shobō. Robertson, Jennifer. 1991. Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robertson, Jennifer. 1998. ‘It Takes a Village: Internationalization and Nostalgia in ­Postwar Japan.’ In Mirror of Modernity / Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos, 110–29. Berkley: University of California Press. Ryden, Kent. 1993. Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Said, Edward. 2006. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon Books. Solomon, Joshua Lee. 2019. ‘Fantastic Placeness: Fukushi Kōjirō’s Regionalism and the Vernacular Poetry of Takagi Kyōzō.’ Japanese Studies, 39 (1): 95–113. Solomon, Joshua Lee. 2020. ‘Shiryō shōkai: Wa no mukashi-ko no katsudō to keishō sareru mukashibanashi 18 hen.’ Hirosaki Daigaku Kokugo Kokubungaku, 41: 16–30. Takagi Kyōzō. 1990. Takagi Kyōzō shibunshū, vol. 3. Tsugaru shobō. Tanaka Yukari. 2011. ‘Hōgen kosupure’ no jidai: nise kansai–ben kara Ryūma–go made. Iwanami shoten. Tanaka Yukari. 2014. ‘‘Hōgen’ ga kachi wo motsu jidai: Stigma kara prestige, soshite….’ Toshi Mondai, 105: 9–18. Tanaka Yukari. 2015. ‘“Za nan-ben” kara “mote–ben” he?’ Kangaeru, 53: 206–7. Tanigawa Ken’ichi. 1978. ‘Furusato to iu yōkai.’ Dentō to Gendai, 55: 15–24. The Japan Times 2005. ‘Aso says Japan is nation of ‘one race.’ October 18, 2005. Watsuji Tetsurō. 1961. A Climate: A Philosophical Study. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas. Japanese Ministry of Education.

CHAPTER 3

The Chineseness of Chinatown in Singapore: Chinese New Year Celebrations in a Multiracial Heritage Site Ying-kit Chan Abstract In the official narrative of the postcolonial Singaporean state, Chinatown is the cradle of Chinese community development, but such a claim can be made only retrospectively. The maintenance of Chinatown in Singapore demonstrates the official desire to establish cultural, ethnic, and historical links between a lived present and an imagined past. By extension, Chinatown is defined as a Chinese cradle on the basis of a constructed and highly essentialized Chinese identity in Singapore. This chapter suggests that an essentially new Chinatown has resulted from the state’s urban redevelopment plans. No longer organic in its growth and composition, the new Chinatown nonetheless has the symbols – pagodas, red lanterns, stone lions, and Chinatown arches – that would strike the casual tourist as being intuitively Chinese. At the national level, the mere existence of the new Chinatown has reduced or simplified the diversity of Chinese communities in Singapore, subsuming the various dialect groups under the Chinese label. The transformation of Chinatown is best exemplified in its Chinese New Year celebrations, which feature the participation of other ethnic groups in Singapore, notably the Indians and Malays. The site and festivities have become multiracial, in line with the official narrative that Singapore is a multiracial and socially harmonious nation. In effect, the new Chinatown has evolved into not only a transnational ­heritage site but also a multiracial showroom of cultural diversity contributing to building in Singapore.

Keywords Chinatown – Chineseness – ethnicity – multiculturalism – Singapore

Although the nation is predominantly populated by ethnic Chinese, Singapore is in a unique position of incorporating a Chinatown, which usually denotes © Ying-kit Chan, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_004

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the urban enclave of a Chinese minority elsewhere in the world. But Singapore was a British colony, and the idea of Chinatown (Anderson 1987), as well as the notion of ‘Chinese’ as a distinct and singular ethnic group, is relatively modern and arguably colonial (Anderson et al. 2019, 61), so it is perhaps unsurprising that a Chinatown would exist in Singapore. In fact, the label ‘Chinatown’ appears to have been first used in connection with the Chinese quarter of Singapore in the nineteenth century, which the British colonial government called ‘China-Town,’ likely a verbatim translation into English of the Malay name for that quarter, ‘kota China’ (Anderson et al. 2019, 61). In the official narrative of the postcolonial Singaporean state, Chinatown is indisputably the ‘cradle of Chinese community development’ (Lim 2019, 77–111). But such a claim can be made only retrospectively. Being Chinese is never absolute, and the question of whether a person is ‘more or less Chinese’ is often measured by an essentialist yardstick of their commitment to so-called traditional Chinese culture and values (Wang 2003, 184). As historian Gungwu Wang (2009, 13) suggests, Chinese overseas tend to preserve essentialist cultural elements in order to ‘defend their descendants from becoming rootless,’ and the maintenance of Chinatown in Singapore demonstrates such a desire to establish cultural, ethnic, and historical links between a lived present and an imagined past. By extension, Chinatown is defined as the cradle of Chinese community development on the basis of a constructed and highly essentialized Chinese identity in Singapore. In this context, then, what kind of Chinatown emerged from the Singaporean state’s urban renewal program? Who helped refashion Chinatown into a key site of Chinese heritage and memory, and what motivated them to do so? This chapter suggests that an essentially new Chinatown has resulted from the urban redevelopment plans. No longer organic in its growth and ­composition, the new Chinatown nonetheless has the (superficial) symbols – pagodas, red lanterns, stone lions, and Chinatown arches – that would strike the casual ­tourist as being intuitively ‘Chinese’ (in the broadest sense possible). At the domestic or national level, the mere existence of the new Chinatown has reduced or simplified the diversity of Chinese communities in Singapore, ­subsuming the various dialect groups under the ‘Chinese’ label. The transformation of Chinatown is best exemplified in its Chinese New Year celebrations, which feature the participation of other ethnic groups in Singapore, notably the Indians and Malays. The site and festivities are thus multiracial, in line with the official narrative that Singapore is a multiracial and socially harmonious nation. In effect, the new Chinatown has evolved into not only a transnational heritage site but also a multiracial showroom of cultural diversity contribut ing to nation-building (sometimes referred to as community-building in the official narrative) in Singapore.

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As a result of this chapter’s focus on the construction of Chinatown and Chinese New Year celebrations into multiracial sites, it analyses accounts in English-language newspapers, which constitute a mutually intelligible ­platform allowing Singaporeans of different races to articulate their views. By covering the activities, concerns, and tensions of Singaporeans and revealing daily bottom-up struggles in nation-building, local newspapers, rather than the foreign Anglophone press, are vital sources of information. Singapore’s newspapers, appearing in a variety of languages such as Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil, are under state control, closely monitored if not heavily censored by the authorities. English-language newspapers, while not direct translations of their Chinese-language counterparts, thus offer similar content and coverage; consulting them alone would not obscure an alternative ‘Chinese’ take or contradict the concept of a bordered memory. On the basis that they provide rich longitudinal data with which to examine public perceptions and hence the social making of Chinatown as a consequence of state actions and directives, this chapter suggests that Chinatown and Chinese New Year celebrations have not only been historicized but also racialized in postcolonial Singapore, whose state has replicated the colonial practice of merging otherwise diverse groups for effective control and governance by manipulating collective and social memories. This chapter comprises five sections. Following a brief overview of ­Chinatown’s history, it explores the process of self-orientalism in the new ­Chinatown and how the Singaporean state has redesigned its layout for tour ist appeal. It then sketches the historical background of the ethnic Chinese multiplicity of Chinese dialect groups in Singapore. The fourth section discusses how different Chinese dialect groups have forged the Chinese New Year celebrations as an event and as heritage. Finally, the chapter examines how the Chinatown of Singapore has become part of a nation-building project codifying the Chinese as one of three key races that constitute the Singaporean nation. Ultimately, the ‘Chinatown-ness’ of Chinatown is intimately tied to its Chineseness, and the dialect groups hailing from Fujian and Guangdong are classified and collectively known as ‘Chinese’ among the races in Singapore. Chinatown at a Glance The history of Chinatown in Singapore has been well documented and does not require much recounting here (Yeoh and Kong 2012; Lim 2019). In the The chapter by Gee in this volume also covers aspects of Chinese identity focusing on art in former military installations in Singapore and Taiwan.

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1820s, the colonial authorities devised a town plan, and a district southwest of the Singapore River was appropriated to accommodate settlers from China. Aware of the various dialect groups (bangs) nested within the broad category of Chinese, the authorities allocated Chinese settlers arriving from different provinces or localities their own subdistricts (Lim 2019, 79). The five major dialect groups were Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Hokkien (the most numerous), and Teochew. Each of these groups set up their own clan associations to promote welfare and mutual aid among themselves. Following China’s defeat by Britain in the First Opium War (1839–1842) and its opening up to foreign maritime trade, coolies from the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong arrived in Singapore in unprecedented numbers. Within years, Chinatown gained notoriety as an overcrowded and unsanitary district. But it also became highly sophisticated in terms of social makeup, variety of occupations, and cultural expression. It continued, somewhat unregulated and unsupervised, to grow in density—though not in size—until 1971, when the newly formed Singaporean government (Singapore gained independence in 1965) announced that about 100,000 people living in Chinatown would be resettled under the urban renewal program. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Chinatown residents (notably the ‘Samsui women’ who hailed from the Samsui District, Guangdong Province, and worked on construction sites), shopkeepers, and street hawkers were relocated to public housing estates outside Chinatown (Lim 2019, 108–9). By the mid-1980s, Chinatown had been hollowed out, emptied of its original— or organic—inhabitants and proprietors, and state attention was redirected to preserve its heritage (whatever remained of it) and redevelop it into a historic district (Urban Redevelopment Authority 1995). To be sure, Chinatown was not the only ethnic district transformed by the state into a heritage site. During the 1980s, the state’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) designated key conservation areas such as Kampong Glam (for the Malays) and Little India (for the Indians) alongside Chinatown to reflect the dominant organizing framework of race in Singapore. As a result of URA’s conservation master plan, all three districts retained their urban form amid the high-rise, high-density built environment of Singapore and were hailed as the nation’s unique heritage sites by the tourism board. Conservation guidelines applied to these sites allowed adaptive reoccupation for new commercial activities, mostly related to tourism, along with older businesses now in decline. While Little India has remained ‘an ethnically bound site articulated and exemplified by the material culture and social practices of an Indian sub-population’ (and is thus considered a more ‘authentic’ site, see Yeo 2020, 184–185), Chinatown and Kampong Glam have become lifestyle enclaves for middle-class Singaporeans and their creative industries. Singapore is sur rounded by supposedly ‘Malay’ neighbours (i.e., Indonesia and Malaysia) and

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feels the need to downplay the potential antagonism between ‘native’ Malays and ‘outsider’ Chinese in the country; the preservation of Little India is thus politically expedient. From the perspective of the state, though, these ‘less authentic’ heritage sites must also exist, regardless of their appeal, in order to ensure that each so-called official race has its own historic site. In preparation for merger with Malaya in the early 1960s, the state had highlighted Singapore’s Malay identity; it has continued to recognize Malay as the national language and preserve Kampong Glam as an ‘authentic’ or ‘organic’ Malay district to showcase its Malay past to Indonesia and Malaysia (Rahim 2009, 1–2). ­Serving less a geopolitically symbolic function than a practical purpose of locating ­ethnic Chinese within the state’s racial framework, Chinatown reflects the demographic reality of a Chinese majority in Singapore—it would be conspicuous not to include it in the conservation plan if Kampong Glam and Little India were embraced or institutionalized as key sites of national heritage. 2

Orientalism in Chinatown

In the wake of independence, the Singaporean government was building new housing estates across much of the island, and the rebuilding of old Singapore gained impetus. The government depopulated Chinatown by relocating its inhabitants to the new estates in phases. But contrary to the common perception among Singaporeans that the government has been indiscriminate in demolishing old buildings, it did take steps to ensure, as far as possible, that sites of historical significance did not disappear (Blackburn and Tan 2015). By the 1980s, however, some Singaporeans had grown concerned about the ­bulldozing and rate of transformation in Chinatown. One of these was chief of the tourism board, who called for the preservation of buildings and lifestyles of old Singapore before they were gone forever (The Straits Times 1980, 6). Like the Singapore River, Chinatown became a ‘veritable symbol of old-world ­Singapore’ (The Straits Times 1982, 16). In revamping Chinatown, the Singaporean authorities sought advice from foreign experts and inspiration from foreign heritage sites. They invited cura tors from Southeast Asian countries to visit Chinatown and other sites and offer suggestions for preserving them (Singapore Monitor 1983, 4). As Singaporeans readily conceded, ‘Chinatown no longer rivals Kowloon [in Hong Kong] as an oriental oasis in the midst of a modern international city’ (Singapore Monitor 1984a, 15). The tourism board thus set up a task force to present Singapore ‘as both the epitome of oriental mystique and a high-tech entertainment centre in a few years’ time’ (Business Times 1984b, 1). According to the task force,

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Chinatown should be ‘given a reprieve from further urban renewal’ (Business Times 1984b, 1). The goal was to turn Chinatown into an area that would give tourists an insight into what life was like for the old Chinese immigrants. But a contradiction existed—a complete restoration of Chinatown (i.e., returning it to the way it was) might not be welcomed by tourists. As a developer suggested, ‘There is a need to paint a new image of Chinatown to tourists because the idea of Singapore Chinatown would immediately conjure up images of dilapidated buildings as seen in the Fifties and Sixties with no proper sanitation’ (Singapore Monitor 1985c, 12). The tourist board noted that ‘while Singapore’s already few historical landmarks were being mowed away, Hongkong, Thailand and Malaysia were aggressively selling their different cultures and way of life to curious foreigners’ (Business Times 1985b, 8). In response, officials decided to create Chinatown according to the following concept: ‘A wealth of quaint little shops can be found in the maze of streets that make up Chinatown; musty old shops tucked away in weathered buildings sell foodstuff, fresh and dried; Chinese pharmacies and their imposing medicine cabinets with hundreds of tiny drawers containing the most exotic cures; peddlers with hand-crafted Chinese opera masks; paper houses and life-sized paper cars sold to be burned at funerals’ (The Straits Times 1988, 35). Within years, Chinatown became known as an Oriental town where ‘­shoppers can look forward to buying oriental goods such as calligraphy, ­traditional arts and craft, and medicine’ (TODAY 2003, 6). An orientalist imagination, articulated in state-controlled newspapers through quaint, reified, and stereotypical representations of Chineseness and Chinatown-ness, has c­ haracterized the fashioning of Chinatown. Much of this orientalization of Chinatown has occurred with the consent and participation of the ethnic ­Chinese themselves (Anderson et al. 2019, 27). In the case of Singapore, ethnic Chinese political leaders, urban planners, and tourism board directors have often inadvertently engaged in a form of self-orientalism to attract foreign tourists, mostly from the developed world of former colonial powers such as Britain and Japan. For them, Chinatown has to appeal to foreign tourists in a universalistic way, such that it can instantly strike them as being Chinese in the broadest sense p ­ ossible. At the same time, however, it has to be distinguished from, for example, other heritage sites in the region or the Chinatowns of ­London and Yokohama so that it can highlight Singapore’s uniqueness as a preferred tourist destination. According to the tourism board, the defining feature of Singapore’s Chinatown lies perhaps in ‘its blend of old and new, with historic temples and traditional medicinal halls sitting alongside bold new bars and trendy lifestyle shops’ (Singapore Tourism Board n.d.). But this is a China town that is vastly different from the one of colonial times. The depopulation

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Pagoda Street, which features Chinatown’s street market Courtesy of Wikimedia

of the old colonial Chinatown deprived the district of an organic community that could otherwise expand and develop along its own trajectory. Chinatown has become a theme park of sorts, geared almost entirely toward attracting foreign tourists and those occasional local Chinese residents shopping for ­Chinese New Year festivities. Its existence, or the validity of its existence, rests on the assumption of a broad, singular, and unified Chinese community in Singapore, which has been actively constructed by the state since independence (see Figure 3.1). 3

Becoming ‘Chinese’ in Singapore

In colonial Singapore, sojourners and settlers from China were organized according to bangs (i.e., groups structured along dialect lines), which maintained geographical affiliations to their own native places. The Straits-born Chinese, whose ancestors hailed from Fujian Province and had lived in Malacca for generations, were grouped with the Hokkiens in the colonial censuses. Throughout colonial history (and to the present), the five major dialect groups remained the Hokkiens, Teochews, Cantonese, Hainanese, and Hakkas. Bang politics were complex and wide-reaching, encompassing both horizontal and vertical intra- and inter-dialect group activities and relationships. They

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included the management of temples, burial groups, kinship and territorial clan associations, and occupational and trade organizations (Lim 2019, 117). A clan comprised people sharing a surname and those originating in the same geographical locality (xiang) who spoke the same dialect. The colonial government made very few provisions for settlers and sojourners alike, so clan associations and other mutual-aid organizations became responsible for their clansmen’s welfare and personal safety, providing a slew of social services on behalf of the authorities. Since independence, however, the role of dialect group associations in the social life of ethnic Chinese has been transformed. Although the Singaporean government has emphasized individual responsibility for one’s provisions in life, the growing prosperity of the nation has allowed it to subsidize if not cover the costs of housing, medical care, and other social services for citizens. As a result, dialect group associations have been reduced to being custodians of heritage, playing only a supporting role in ensuring the welfare of their members. More importantly, the state categorizes all citizens using the CMIO model: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. Essential information on every ­Singaporean’s identity card includes racial classification. Race follows a patrilineal structure and is ascribed at birth. Race is thus reinforced as a grounded and visible identity, with the state insisting that everyone is a ‘hyphenated citizen’ (Reddy 2016, 58). Whether or not people are born or speak Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese, or Hakka, they are classified as ‘Chinese’ on their identity card. The multiplicity within each racial category is not acknowledged by the authorities, and differences within and between the categories are essentialized (Reddy 2016, 59). The ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign,’ launched in 1979, has made the most lasting impact on the sociolinguistic profile of the Chinese dialect groups. After independence, the government decided to ‘nationalize’ the education system by merging all the existing language streams (English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil) into one national stream. Since 1966, education officials have promoted bilingual education, making it compulsory for all students to study both English and their ‘mother tongue’ so that they can preserve their ‘designated’ cultural roots (Kuo 2019, 736). To assimilate all the dialect groups into the ‘Chinese’ category, the government promoted Mandarin to replace the use of dialects. Radio and television stations were restricted to airing Mandarin programs. Major newspapers, already effectively under state control, supported the cam paign with editorials and commentaries. Chinese courses were offered to the public at community centres. Schools were instructed to use the simplified hanyu pinyin in standard Mandarin to spell students’ names. By the time the campaign was launched, the communist threat was

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virtually non-existent, and the loyalty of Chinese Singaporeans was no longer to mainland China, so the government was sufficiently confident in the political stability of the nation to encourage the use of Mandarin. To avoid offending the sensibilities of the Indians and Malays, officials stressed that the campaign targeted only the Chinese. This suggests that although the leaders of Singapore (i.e., Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party) are primarily Chinese, they keep a watchful eye on ethnic issues and strive to reduce ethnic tensions to the minimum (Barr 2014). Barely a decade into the campaign, Mandarin had almost completely replaced dialects to become the common language, and Mandarin has become the language of choice among Chinese Singaporeans (Kuo 2019, 735–754). The illiterate immigrants from China who spoke only local dialects have been transformed into citizen-users of the ‘elite’ Mandarin language (Leong 2016), decisively merging all the dialect groups into the officially unitary ‘Chinese’ community in Singapore. Contemporary Chinatown is a microcosm or symbol of this national merger, as the following discussion on the ‘Sinicization’ of Chinese New Year celebrations will show. 4

Chinese New Year Festival in Chinatown

For the unitary Chinese community in contemporary Singapore, Chinese New Year is the festival or occasion that coalesce and congeal memories about its past as an amalgamation of different bangs or dialect groups. The biggest ­Chinese New Year celebrations are held in Chinatown every year. Unlike ­districts of its kind in other countries, the Chinatown of Singapore hosts somewhat subdued celebrations, most of which are planned by the state’s grassroots organizations. During the 1970s, the government enacted a gradual ban on firecrackers in Chinese New Year celebrations out of concern for public safety (New Nation 1971, 2); the ban became total in 1972. Although there were areas—all outside Chinatown—designated for setting off firecrackers during the Chinese New Year, Singaporeans were reluctant to use them, thereby suggesting the ‘symbolic significance of [place] has deep roots not only in individual emotion but also in tradition’ (The Straits Times 1972, 20). Chinatown remained a premier shopping district of choice for Chinese New Year goodies. It featured an open market for eatables and wearables visited by locals and tourists alike, in line with the tourism board’s packaging of Singapore as a ‘shopper’s paradise, a gourmet’s paradise and a garden city … with unique cultural mix blended har moniously’ (Business Times 1978, 33). The ethnic trappings of the festivities remained: ‘street parades, lion and dragon dances […] costume and masks’ (The Straits Times 1979, 4).

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Street hawking became illegal in 1983, so it was only during the Chinese New Year Festival that food vendors could be seen operating in the alleys and lanes of Chinatown, which became a sight, or spectacle, in its own right. But for many Chinese Singaporeans, Chinatown was no longer the same without the street hawkers. With the hawkers relocated in a new sprawling indoor complex within the district, the streets that had endowed Chinatown with colour and vibrancy became empty, and the area increasingly ‘resemble[d] a ghost town’ unless the Chinese New Year was coming (The Straits Times 1984a, 1). But while the allure of Chinatown had diminished among Singaporeans, it remained popular with foreign tourists. In 1984, the depopulated and revamped Chinatown became Singapore’s most popular tourist attraction. Approximately half of Singapore’s visitors went to Chinatown, according to estimates (The Straits Times 1984b, 12). As a result, for at least a while, Chinatown was accorded top priority in preservation efforts in the government’s ‘all-out bid to woo tourists’ (Business Times 1984a, 1). Community leaders of Chinatown cooperated with the authorities. In 1985, they organized a large Spring Festival fair filled with ‘cherry blossoms from China, Chinese sausages, waxed ducks, bonsai plants, Chinese wayangs, lion and dragon dances […] [complete with] traditional Chinese music piped into the streets’ (Singapore Monitor 1984b, 3). According to these leaders, who included proprietors and residents of the district, they were determined to work closely with the tourism board and ‘revive the gaiety and festive atmosphere of Chinatown, even if only for just a month’ (Singapore Monitor 1984b, 3). Referencing other Chinatowns in the world, the tourism board also erected four Chinatown arches at the ends of two main roads in Chinatown (Singapore Monitor 1985a, 1). Although it is not clear where the tourism board had received its inspiration, that officials created something entirely new in Chinatown—the arches—suggests that they were remaking rather than preserving the district. But the focus of Chinatown preservation efforts did not fall entirely on tourists. Officials and retailers understood the need for Chinatown to stay relevant to everyday life in Singapore and to the so-called heritage of Chinese Singaporeans. The tourism board appealed to locals to help ‘preserve the Chinatown way of life’ by patronizing the shops in Chinatown, which faced competition from the large, airconditioned retail store chains that imported Chinese New Year products in bulk from China (Singapore Monitor 1985c, 2). But trade remained slow for shopkeepers because people increasingly preferred ‘everything in their own housing estates [to save on] transport costs’ (The Straits Times 1985a, 9). Officials did not give up, however, and endeavoured to ‘get people, both tourists and locals, to flock to the streets [of Chinatown] curi ous of the goings-on’ (Singapore Monitor 1985c, 20). They emphasized the

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‘authenticity’ of festivities there: ‘Ladies in authentic period costumes will give us an insight into how Chinese women in the old days dressed’; ‘Mr. Lee Dai Soh, well-known Cantonese storyteller, will tell half-forgotten tales reflecting Chinese customs and beliefs—like how the Chinese used to name their sons and daughters’ (Singapore Monitor 1985c, 20); ‘the celebration of the year for the community, and the operas, dances, drum rolls and display of skills reflect the Chinese way of ushering in happiness, luck and prosperity’ (Business Times 1985a, 6). But as a journalist suggested, ‘You cannot recreate a Chinatown. If you try it ends up being too cosmetic, pristine and artificial. A little seediness adds to the atmosphere and even to the excitement’ (Singapore Monitor 1985e, 4). And as sceptics remarked, the annual crowds that packed Chinatown ‘[did] not necessarily imply a revival of the old times when the Lunar New Year was the event of the year’ (The Straits Times 1985b, 12). Growing affluence meant that luxuries once reserved for the Chinese New Year could be enjoyed all year round. Nevertheless, Chinatown remained important, at least for some journalists and community leaders, to the ‘preservation of the ethnic identity of Chinese Singaporeans’ (The Straits Times 1985b, 12). It was this intangible aspect that the tangible Chinatown would help preserve. As many people observed, Chinatown’s annual test of popularity and significance came after the new year; it failed to retain the attention and crowds once the celebrations were over (The Straits Times 1985b, 12). Despite such discouraging news, the tourism board and community l­ eaders never gave up. In preparation for the 1987 Chinese New Year celebrations, they set up a Chinese cultural town within Chinatown, which showcased a ­potpourri of shops selling antiques, Chinese herbs, bonsai, dim sum, and crafts of vanishing tradesmen. The cultural town was designed to be a ‘quaint,’ ‘­typical bustling Chinese town, [and] each of the 32 shops will be decked with a red banner and carry its own special signboards’ (The Straits Times 1986b, 32). But despite the organizers’ best efforts, ‘the Lunar New Year [in Chinatown] appears to be getting quieter every year as if to give the lie to the Census which also tells us that more than three-quarters of Singapore’s people are of Chinese origin’ (The Straits Times 1987a, 14). In 1989, a ‘Chinatown disco’ was held in conjunction with the Chinese New Year celebrations. Sponsored by the major Singaporean conglomerate Fraser and Neave, it was aimed at attracting young Chinese Singaporeans to Chinatown and reconnecting them with Chinese culture. However, the disco became a fiasco when concerned Singa poreans, in the name of valuing traditional Chinese culture, criticized it on the grounds that it was boosting Western culture instead. In response, district leaders stressed that traditional Chinese New Year songs would be played, and the venue would be decorated to ‘give a total oriental atmosphere’ (The Straits

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Times 1989a, 22). This act suggests, again, that the state or its agents would not hesitate to self-orientalize when the occasion arises. The concerns of Chinese Singaporeans regarding the loss of their culture and heritage were not entirely unfounded. By 1989, a decade after launching the Speak Mandarin Campaign, ministers were urging clan associations to offer language classes to help raise the standard of Mandarin in Singapore. While Mandarin had replaced other Chinese languages as the lingua franca among Chinese Singaporeans, it was being slowly supplanted by English in business, government, and everyday life. Ministers thus hoped that clan associations could organize cultural performances and public forums to help ‘preserve Chinese culture among Chinese Singaporeans’ (The Straits Times 1989b, 12). During this time, the late 1980s and early 1990s, the government was worried that Singapore was becoming a Westernized society, whereby Singaporeans would become ‘Asians looking like Asians and living in Asia but thinking and behaving like Americans or Britons’ (Business Times 1989, 10). For ‘traditionalist’ Chinese Singaporeans, the annual Chinese New Year celebrations in ­Chinatown were a reassurance that the state was staying committed to preserving ethnic traditions and the ‘Singaporean way of life’ (Business Times 1989, 10). Therefore, tampering with the celebrations by introducing a disco, for example, was, to them, inappropriate: ‘Where […] in particular is the ­Chineseness which should mark Lunar New Year when even skateboard and bicycle acrobatics can find a place in the [celebrations]?’ (The Straits Times 1989c, 14). Ministers actually welcomed the public debates. One of them suggested that the heated discussion on having a makeshift disco in Chinatown showed that Chinese Singaporeans remained concerned about Chinese New Year. But it was also during this period they highlighted that ‘the Lunar New Year was not a religious festival and the Chinese could celebrate it with their non-Chinese friends too’ (The Straits Times 1989d, 11). At the same time as the state was fashioning Chinatown into a centre of Chinese culture, it was inviting other races to join the celebrations (The Straits Times 1989d, 11). The inclusion of new elements, even if they were unrelated to anything ­Chinese, was perhaps necessary because the new Chinatown was a hollow centre of Chinese culture, one that required the state to inject life and vibrancy annually so that it could remain, at least in some other aspects, a symbol of Chineseness in Singapore. The ban on firecrackers, clearance of street ­hawkers, and relocation of inhabitants, amongst other things, had deprived Chinatown of its organic elements and transformed it into a non-residential tourist attraction serving both locals and foreign visitors. State efforts in the name of national development, public health, and public safety actually ‘soft ened the public’s recollection of exactly what happened when crackers were

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allowed,’ and a cabinet minister recalled ‘the good old days’ when there was no ban (The Straits Times 1985c, 12). Some Chinese Singaporeans, whether or not they had experienced the celebrations in Chinatown of colonial and early independence years, evoked ‘happy memories’ of festivities ‘quite unlike the celebrations of today [that were] sterile and commercialized’ (The Straits Times 1987b, 6). Beginning in the early 2000s, in response to such sentiments, officials authorized the lighting of firecrackers by professional event organizers, under controlled conditions, in the annual celebrations (TODAY 2002, 1). The scale and sophistication of Chinese New Year celebrations in ­Chinatown is possible because of the support of sponsors that take the opportunity to publicize their products and display their service to the community and nation. Cultural activities that appear intuitively ‘Chinese,’ such as calligraphy competitions, lantern riddles, and dragon and lion dances, held (only) during the festive season, often draw large crowds from other parts of Singapore. Food remains the key focus of the celebrations. The main streets of Chinatown are closed to motor traffic, and a legion of temporary vendors appear to receive the yearly wave of customers eager to buy New Year goodies and other tasty treats in preparation for the festival. In the cultural activities held in Chinatown, which display essentialist ideas of Chineseness, the m ­ ultiplicity of meanings attached to the notion of Chinese identity is elided. Whether it is dance, opera, or acrobatics, it is called ‘Chinese,’ with little regard for its origins in, say, a county, province, or so-called dialect or subethnic group. That said, this is perhaps not the reason why Chinese Singaporeans appeared to be ­shunning Chinatown; they did not resist being lumped together as Chinese by their community and national leaders. The ‘Mandarinization’ of Chinese Singaporeans has been successful, and most Chinese Singaporeans, somewhat uncritically, assume a primordial relationship between Mandarin (as the Chinese language) and Chinese ethnicity (Wong and Tan 2017, 18–50). They value ­Mandarin for mainly instrumental reasons and can barely speak other Chinese languages or so-called dialects—their identity as Chinese Singaporeans, let alone as affiliates of some Chinese dialect or subethnic group, thus has little effect on their feelings toward Chinatown. Coupled with the participation of mainland Chinese performers in the cultural activities, the Chinese New Year celebrations are vehicles through which traditional Chinese culture is dissem inated from supposedly more ‘authentic custodians,’ while constant references to ancient Chinese myths accentuate the authority of the generic Chineseness represented by these activities (Anderson et al. 2019, 149). Such references to an abstracted and dehistoricized Chineseness further obscure the diversity of the community categorized as ‘Chinese’ in Singapore.

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With the influx of new Chinese immigrants from mainland China during the 2000s, the ethnic Chinese population of Singapore became more differentiated, and Chinatown has since been dominated by mainland Chinese businesses, restaurants, and retail operators. So many are the new immigrants that they have branched out to form an unofficial, even newer Chinatown in the Geylang district east of the city centre (Ang 2018). The differences between the so-called old and new Chinese diasporas have disrupted the meaning of Chineseness in Singapore. The Chineseness of the revamped Chinatown has not only been orientalized to attract tourists, but it has also come to represent mainland Chinese culture and traditions—assumed to be more authentic because they are practiced by so-called natives of the perceived homeland of all Chinese—rather than the ‘stuff’ that had characterized the lives of ­Chinese sojourners and settlers under colonial rule. No longer the community of ‘original’ Chinese immigrants and their descendants, Chinatown has turned into a highly commercialized and visible ‘China’s Town’ that renders talk of a ­uniform Chinese population in Singapore meaningless. Singaporeans, both Chinese and non-Chinese, can no longer easily distinguish between what may be called ‘native’ Singaporean Chinese (Chinese overseas), Chinese nationals (overseas Chinese), and ethnic Chinese from other parts of the world. ­Lumping them all together as ‘Chinese’ is thus misleading, but isolating alien residents from China for public discussion risks stoking fears or prejudices that border on racism. When conceived in its diasporic and transnational context, then, Singapore’s Chinatown is a ‘complex sedimentation of multiple—and sometimes contradictory—traces, in a global city that is itself coming to terms with the emerging age of China’ (Anderson et al. 2019, 83). The key question becomes whether mainland Chinese influence could really dominate and subsume other Chinese cultures and identities in Chinatown and, more broadly, in Singapore because the existing Chinese Singaporeans do not consider the new immigrants from China their own. But Singapore’s exchanges with China have remained predominantly economic, if not utilitarian; the Chinese New Year celebrations are a rare instance of the relationship moving beyond the purely material and an excellent ­opportunity for China to improve its image among Chinese Singaporeans. In everyday interactions of recent years, unhappiness among Chinese Singapor eans toward Chinese citizens residing in their neighbourhood has grown. For them, Chinese citizens have not quite blended well in Singaporean society and have brought instead a host of social problems, from causing property prices to skyrocket to being intolerant of local culinary preferences. Although official Sino-Singapore diplomatic relations remain reasonably strong, the resentment

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of Chinese Singaporeans at the behaviour and perceived cultural arrogance of Chinese citizens may nonetheless sustain or reinforce the negative stereotypes of Chinese citizens living in Singapore; it is also possible that Chinese citizens think that Chinese Singaporeans are culturally and ethnically less authentic and hence no longer real ‘Chinese’ like themselves (Ho 2016, 152–3). Thus, within this evolving assemblage lies a Chinatown that is experiencing and anticipating a broader ‘Sinicization’ of Singapore as a global city. Given China’s increasing global clout that could have great cultural, economic, and social implications for Singapore, Chinatown is no longer seen—at least from the state perspective—as an exotic, problematic, or threatening other, but as a part of the ‘mundane cosmopolitan interactions’ of the city centre (Anderson et al. 2019, 89). One such interaction occurs every year in Chinatown’s Chinese New Year celebrations (Kong and Yeoh 1997). One of the most important dimensions of the festival is its role in cultivating diplomatic ties with China, which sends performers, supplies, and visitors to participate in the festivities. Statements of friendship and mutual appreciation are exchanged to cement relations, and Chineseness is leveraged and performed at the national and even global levels. But as the festival becomes more professionalized and commercially promoted, its links with the local Chinese community have become less prominent. Community members apparently have little say in its planning and execution. Officials, very often even cabinet ministers, sit on the organizing committees as well as approve and officiate Chinese New Year activities. By actively participating in the events, the government is both courting and disciplining the key organizers and sponsors of the celebrations, most notably the clan associations and the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in the hope of aligning them with major state objectives such as social integration (Visscher 2007, 128–176). Moreover, the convergence of national interests between China and Singapore in forging a singular Chinese community—from scratch—has diluted the role and sway of dialect groups and local associations in the celebrations. But efforts to ‘Sinicize’ the ethnic Chinese in Singapore have been complicated by the multiracial ethos of the postcolonial nation. The Chingay Parade, which celebrates the birthdays of well-known Chinese deities and concludes the celebrations every year, high lights the complications and tensions. A Multiracial Chinese Parade The Chingay Parade is a major highlight of Singapore’s Chinese New Year celebrations. Held on the last night of the celebrations, Chingay features

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a procession of lavishly decorated floats, sponsored by big companies and ­government organizations, that travels through the streets of Chinatown and the main roads of the city centre. It ends with a fireworks display that lights up the night skyline of Singapore. Aware of the tourist dollars Chingay attracts, state organizers have turned it into an international spectacle celebrating ­Singapore as a ‘cosmopolitan global city of hybridizing multiculturalism’; it is no longer a strictly Chinese affair (Goh 2011). Theatrical and carnival-like displays of different cultural motifs, carefully selected by the organizers to give equal emphasis to the officially recognized races, signify a focus away from the exclusive exhibition of ‘Chinese’ culture expected of the celebrations. The postcolonial state organizes parades such as Chingay to ‘materialize and legitimize official versions of multiculturalism’ (Goh 2011, 112), which has developed into a tradition of its own. Chingay started in 1973, when the Singaporean government decided to adopt for the Chinese New Year celebrations a creolized version of street processions enacted by Hokkiens during religious festivals and special events (Goh 2011, 120). State organizers, with the consent and assistance of local community leaders in Chinatown and surrounding districts, cleansed Chingay of its r­ eligious character to express a secular Chinese identity. They removed the spiritualist element that usually headed the old processions, whether a wooden boat, religious artefact, or spirit-medium in trance leading the floats. Rather than being attired to pray for peace, Chingay was dressed up for a masquerade. The secular Chingay, with its gaiety and noise, was intended to compensate for the ban on firecrackers (Goh 2011, 120). Ministers and officials also believed that Chingay could modernize Chinese New Year celebrations. By ‘reviving’ Chingay in secular form, the state could claim to patronize ‘authentic’ Chinese traditions (Goh 2011, 121). At its inception, calls for making it a multiracial event emerged. In convenient response to such calls, state organizers began to transform Chin gay into a vehicle of national multiracialism. The annual iterations of Chingay ‘signified the perennial nation, if not existing in the imagination from time immemorial, then extending into the immortal future as the transcendental community’ (Goh 2011, 122–3). The nationalistic aspects of Chingay were thus obvious. Over time, however, the state would dilute these aspects by globalizing Chingay. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Singaporean government worked to transform the economy into a postindustrial mode. Chingay became part of its strategy to transform Singapore into a global city of commerce, finance, fine arts, and upscale living, one that could attract talented cosmopolitans to work or settle in Singapore. In recent years, Chingay has also moved to public housing estates, albeit on a smaller and less spectacular scale. Symbolic authority has

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cascaded down the bureaucratic hierarchy to a so-called network model that connects autonomous organizations outside direct state supervision to achieve the carnival effect. Chingay floats are no longer assigned to government-linked grassroots organizations but are selected from proposals by non-governmental civic, commercial, educational, and religious institutions (Goh 2011, 128). Local grassroots institutions, which enjoy a fair degree of autonomy in everyday governance despite being part of the state, organize sidewalk carnivals, or mini-Chingays, in the public housing estates. Far cheaper to put together than Chingay, these events are often accompanied by flea markets and stage performances of dance and song, which are more interactive than the barricaded Chingay for tourists and purportedly more sophisticated Singaporeans. For their strong vernacular feel and less restrained gaiety, the sidewalk carnivals actually resemble the old Hokkien religious and street processions more strongly than Chingay. But given the international publicity and state recognition of Chingay, most Singaporeans still accord it a higher status than its ‘poor imitations’ in the residential neighbourhoods (Goh 2011, 129). In Chinatown’s Chingay parade, non-Chinese floats have included Malay cultural organizations’ portrayal of Sang Nila Utama’s founding of premodern Singapore, Indian dancers from Indian fine arts societies, and both Indian and Malay folk performances. While individual Chinese groups have not disputed being incorporated into the parade as ‘Chinese’ rather than as their subethnic identities (which, again, points to the success of the Mandarinization and Sinicization of Chinese Singaporeans), some Indian Singaporeans are allegedly upset at the double standard: Chingay, despite its celebration of Singapore’s ethnic diversity, is still considered ‘Chinese’ in nature, while their own ­Thaipusam festival has remained classified a religious ritual, even though it has shed many of its religious elements and developed into a ­cultural d­ isplay of Indian identity. The distinction between culture and religion is ­crucial—the authorities have argued that the playing of musical instruments, a key c­ omponent of festivities, should apply to only cultural pro cessions such as Chingay but not to religious ones such as Thaipusam (Sykes 2015, 398). The existence of lingering voices of discontent suggests the need for the state to continue its ideological work, through the census, ethnographical writings, and urban planning, in order to define diverse ethnicities into the racial categories of ‘Chinese,’ ‘Malay,’ ‘Indian,’ and ‘Others’ that has provided the framework for government (Goh 2011, 114). Creative work has gone into Chingay to put this framework on display. Ascriptive multiracialism is the key principle in organizing Chingay, and the preservation of ethnic heritage functions to emotively bind middle-class Singaporeans to their nation (Goh 2013, 230).

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Chingay, and Singapore’s Chinatown and Chinese New Year celebrations that it represents, is similar to what literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt has called a ‘contact zone,’ where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other (Pratt 1991, 34). The use of the concept here requires some modification or qualification. In its original usage, contact zone is applied to the imperial context, whereby power and sovereignty are negotiated when previously ­separate societies come into contact. In postcolonial Singapore, the state actually replicates colonial practice and refashions Chingay into a ‘re-contact zone’ where ethnic groups, already living together, gather again for a spectacle within which, ­ironically, official claims may be contested. Chingay is no longer solely or exclusively ‘Chinese’ and serves the national interests of courting foreign t­ alent and keeping a multiracial nation together. It expresses trans-Asian connections across national borders and remains an Oriental carnival and spectacle. But given that it has been the state’s intention to turn Chinatown and Chingay into transnational tapestries of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism does not, as some scholars suggest (Beck and Sznaider 2010, 400), negate or presuppose nationalism. Chingay is also a ‘border of memory’ where ­competition over social memory emerges (Boyle 2019, 300). Chinatown and the Chinese New Year celebrations that characterize the site are spaces of mnemonic encounter and practice, where different kinds and levels of collective memories jostle for official endorsement or mere preservation in social practices.2 Memories are alive only when they remain within bounds, which are, at least in the context of postcolonial Singapore, defined by the state. To that effect, Chinatown is a consecrated site that embodies fading memories (Nora 1996), which are emptied of any real significance and homogenized for justifications of the nation’s origins and its linear, somewhat natural trajectory to its present state (see ­Figure 3.2). For Chinese Singaporeans, then, what is Chingay about? Is it Chinese, cosmopolitan, Hokkien, multiracial, or Singaporean? As a border of ­memory, Chingay exists among memory communities invested in the heritage of Chinatown and the symbolic meanings of Chinese New Year celebrations. Although the official narrative that Chingay is both cosmopolitan and multiracial remains dominant, it does not prevent Chinese Singaporeans from forming their own impressions of the parade. To begin with, many non-Chinese, even Chinese themselves, have not fully understood the reasons for celebrating Chingay or the Chinese New Year (The Straits Times 1985e, 20). Some spectators ‘hardly cheered, laughed or waved when the participants performed 2 The chapters by Ivings and Shimizu in this volume also present cases of bordered cosmopolitan memory focusing on Hokkaido and Taiwan. The chapter by Solomon addresses mne monic encounter and practice in the context of regional vernacular culture in northern Japan.

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A float at Chingay, an increasingly cosmopolitan event in Singapore Courtesy of Wikimedia

before them’ (The Straits Times 1986a, 14). And as if to confirm the success of their own M ­ andarinization and Sinicization, other spectators propose renaming the parade ‘Zhuang Yi’ to align it with the Speak Mandarin policy (The Straits Times 1987c, 20). Paradoxically, then, Chingay has become a victim of its own success. Many Chinese Singaporeans have become ethnically ­apathetic and are barely conscious of their identity as Chinese, let alone as Cantonese, H ­ okkien, Teochew, or others. Although they still possess a vague idea of what being Chinese entails, they identify Chingay as a ‘priceless part of our [national] heritage’ (TODAY 2007, 18) and struggle for a deep appreciation of Chingay’s cultural motifs, most of which originating in supposedly Hokkien or Fujianese traditions. Apathy and ignorance have thus characterized many C ­ hinese ­Singaporeans’ impressions of Chingay. The competition, or lack thereof, over interpretations renders C ­ hingay a border of memory among both Chinese and non-Chinese Singaporeans. 6 Conclusion Singapore’s Chinatown has had an interesting history. Originally an urban enclave of sojourners and settlers from China during colonial times,

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Chinatown was purged of its inhabitants and their culture, traditions, and heritage in the wake of Singapore’s independence. At almost the same time, however, the Singaporean government took steps to re-create Chinatown as a heritage site and argued that it remained the bastion of Chineseness. The official narrative rang hollow in the face of public scepticism supported by fading memories and oral histories and was shot in the foot by a gradual shift in the government’s stance toward multiracialism. Yet the state’s embrace of multiracialism also meant that Chinatown received a facelift and official recognition ­guaranteeing its continued existence as a tool for nation-building. With tourism added to the mix, Chinatown and the annual Chinese New Year celebrations held in the district assumed a cosmopolitan, specifically trans-Asian, look incorporating the essentialized motifs of Singapore’s legally prescribed races while downplaying the predominance of Chinese elements. Addressing both domestic sensibilities and global appeal, the celebrations culminating in the Chingay parade every year have never been excessive displays of Chineseness. Rather, the c­ elebrations have been increasingly shaped by economic interests, political calibrations, and racial sensitivities, creating a spectacle that represents the state’s cultural discourse and the public’s general acceptance of that discourse. Some cynicism and indifference nonetheless have existed to challenge the essentialized idea of static and unchanging cultural identities—indifference could well be a form of cynicism in itself. More and more Chinese Singaporeans go on overseas vacations during the Chinese New Year season, believing that the family bonding so prided in Chinese culture can take place abroad—­Chinatown, Chingay, and other more ‘national’ or physical ­manifestations matter less and less to them (The Straits Times 2016). That said, the commercialization, ­politicization, and racialization of the celebrations have transformed Chinatown into a multiracial heritage site and the Chinese New Year celebrations there into multiracial festivities that, notwithstanding the persisting contradictions and tensions, have confirmed the state as a dominant arbiter of all racial ­discourses, identities, and expressions in Singapore. References Anderson, Kay. 1991. Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Anderson, Kay, Ien Ang, Andrea Del Bono, Donald McNeill, and Alexander Wong. 2019. Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Ang, Sylvia. 2018. ‘The “New Chinatown”: The Racialization of Newly Arrived Chinese Migrants in Singapore.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (7): 1177–1194.

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Barr, Michael D. 2014. The Ruling Elite of Singapore: Networks of Power and Influence. London: I.B. Tauris. Beck, Ulrich, and Natan Sznaider. 2010. ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda.’ British Journal of Sociology, 61 (1): 381–403. Blackburn, Kevin, and Alvin P. H. Tan. 2015. ‘The Emergence of Heritage Conservation in Singapore and the Preservation of Monuments Board (1958–76).’ Southeast Asian Studies, 4 (2): 341–364. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Business Times. 1978. ‘Singapore Gives the Tourists Food for Thought.’ Business Times August 8, 1978. Business Times. 1984a. ‘Tourist Task Force Proposes ‘Dual Personality’ for S’pore.’ , November 24, 1984. Business Times. 1984b. ‘All-Out Bid to Woo Tourists.’ , November 24, 1984. Business Times. 1985a. ‘Legends Alive on the Streets.’ Business Times, February 16, 1985. Business Times. 1985b. ‘No Longer an Attraction?’ , November 1, 1985. Business Times. 1989. ‘Preserving Our Way of Life.’ , February 2, 1989. Goh, Daniel P. S. 2011. ‘State Carnivals and the Subvention of Multiculturalism in Singapore.’ British Journal of Sociology, 62 (1): 111–133. Goh, Daniel P. S. 2013. ‘Multicultural Carnivals and the Politics of the Spectacle in Global Singapore.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14 (2): 228–251. Ho, Benjamin. 2016. ‘Learning from Lee: Lessons in Governance for the Middle Kingdom from the Little Red Dot.’ East Asia: An International Quarterly, 33 (2): 133–156. Kong, Lily, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 1997. ‘The Construction of National Identity through the Production of Ritual and Spectacle: An Analysis of National Day Parades in Singapore.’ Political Geography, 16 (3): 213–239. Kuo, Eddie C. Y. 2019. ‘The Speak Mandarin Campaign.’ In A General History of the Chinese in Singapore, edited by Chong-Guan Kwa and Bak-Lim Kua, 735–754. Singapore: World Scientific. Leong, Weng Kam. 2016. ‘The Evolution of the Chinese Language.’ In 50 Years of the Chinese Community in Singapore, edited by Cheng-Lian Pang, 131–148. Singapore: World Scientific. Lim, Guan Hock. 2019. ‘Chinatown: Cradle of Chinese Community Development.’ A General History of the Chinese in Singapore, edited by Chong-Guan Kwa and Bak-Lim Kua, 77–111. Singapore: World Scientific. Lim, How Seng. 2019. ‘Social Structure and Interactions.’ In A General History of the Chinese in Singapore, edited by Chong-Guan Kwa and Bak-Lim Kua, 115–134. Singapore: World Scientific. New Nation. 1971. ‘No Big Bang for New Year.’ January 23, 1971.

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Nora, Pierre. 1996. Realms of Memories: Rethinking the French Past, Volume 1: Conflicts of Divisions, edited by Pierre Nora and translated by Lewis A. Coser. New York: ­Columbia University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. ‘Arts of the Contact Zone.’ Profession, 33–40. Rahim, Lily Zubaidah. 2009. Singapore in the Malay World: Building and Breaching Regional Bridges. London: Routledge. Reddy, Geetha. 2016. ‘Race Rules in Singapore.’ In Singapore: Negotiating State and ­Society, 1965–2015, edited by Jason Lim and Terence Lim, 54–75. London: ­Routledge. Singapore Monitor. 1983. ‘ASEAN Curators to Study Singapore’s Cultural Landmarks.’ Singapore Monitor, October 31, 1983. Singapore Monitor. 1984a. ‘A Cold, Hard Look at Tourism.’ Singapore Monitor, ­September 13, 1984. Singapore Monitor. 1984b. ‘Festive Spirit in Chinatown Soon.’ Singapore Monitor, December 30, 1984. Singapore Monitor. 1985a. ‘Lights Up, Chinatown.’ Singapore Monitor, January 8, 1985. Singapore Monitor. 1985b. ‘A Five-Star Chinatown Hotel.’ Singapore Monitor, January 16, 1985. Singapore Monitor. 1985c. ‘New Year Stampede of Shoppers.’ Singapore Monitor, ­February 10, 1985. Singapore Monitor. 1985d. ‘Chinatown’s New Year Celebrations.’ Singapore Monitor, February 16, 1985. Singapore Monitor. 1985e. ‘Chinatown is Very Much Alive.’ Singapore Monitor, February 18, 1985. Singapore Tourism Board. n.d. ‘Chinatown.’ Accessed: July 4, 2020. https://www .visitsingapore.com/see-do-singapore/places-to-see/chinatown/. Sykes, Jim. 2015. ‘Sound Studies, Religion, and Urban Space: Tamil Music and the ­Ethical Life in Singapore.’ Ethnomusicology Forum, 24 (3): 380–413. The Straits Times. 1972. ‘They’re Part of Our Living Culture.’ The Straits Times, March 8, 1972. The Straits Times. 1979. ‘Everything Tourists and Others May Want to Know About Us.’ The Straits Times, August 10, 1979. The Straits Times. 1980. ‘STPB Chief’s Call to Preserve Buildings and Life-Styles of Old Singapore.’ The Straits Times, June 19, 1980. The Straits Times. 1982. ‘Impressions, Images, Nostalgia.’ The Straits Times 21, 1982. The Straits Times. 1984a. ‘Rats! Where is All the Festive Air?’ The Straits Times, January 28, 1984. The Straits Times. 1984b. ‘Still a Tourist Draw.’ The Straits Times, October 1984, 1984.

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The Straits Times. 1985a. ‘Business is Slow in Chinatown.’ The Straits Times, February 11, 1985. The Straits Times. 1985b. ‘Form Makes the Occasion.’ The Straits Times, February 20, 1985. The Straits Times. 1985c. ‘Chinatown’s Test Will Come after the New Year.’ The Straits Times, February 20, 1985. The Straits Times. 1985d. ‘13-Year Nan Has Made Many Forget.’ The Straits Times, ­February 27, 1985. The Straits Times. 1985e. ‘Many Still Ignorant of Their Fellow Citizens.’ The Straits Times, June 22, 1985. The Straits Times. 1986a. ‘Give Chingay parade a hand.’ The Straits Times, February 22, 1986. The Straits Times. 1986b. ‘Chinatown of Old for Lunar New Year.’ The Straits Times, November 28, 1986. The Straits Times. 1987a. ‘Is the Lunar New Year in Danger of Fading Away.’ The Straits Times, January 4, 1987. The Straits Times. 1987b. ‘Old Ways of Celebrating the New Year.’ The Straits Times, ­January 24, 1987. The Straits Times. 1987c. ‘Zhuang Yi.’ The Straits Times, February 13, 1987. The Straits Times. 1988. ‘Old World Charm at the Doorstep.’ The Straits Times, ­November 28, 1988. The Straits Times. 1989a. ‘Event not Meant to Boost Western Culture.’ The Straits Times, January 24, 1989. The Straits Times. 1989b. ‘Hold Classes to Raise Standard of Chinese, Clans Urged.’ The Straits Times, January 28, 1989. The Straits Times. 1989c. ‘Adapt Too Much and It Isn’t Lunar New Year Anymore.’ The Straits Times, February 5, 1989. The Straits Times. 1989d. ‘MP Welcomes Public Discussion on Lunar New Year ­Festivities.’ The Straits Times, February 12, 1989. The Straits Times. 2016. ‘More Singaporeans Spending CNY Abroad.’ The Straits Times February 12, 2016. TODAY. 2002. ‘Chinese New Year at Chinatown.’ TODAY, January 22, 2002. TODAY. 2003. ‘Just Like Old Times.’ TODAY, January 3, 2003. TODAY. 2007. ‘Chingay Is For Everyone.’ TODAY, March 1, 2007. Urban Redevelopment Authority. 1995. Chinatown: Historic District. Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority. Visscher, Sikko. 2007. The Business of Politics and Ethnicity: A History of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Singapore: Press. Wang, Gungwu. 2003. Don’t Leave Home: Migration and the Chinese. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press.

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Wang, Gungwu. 2009. ‘Chinese History Paradigms.’ Asian Ethnicity, 10 (3): 201–216. Wong, Kevin Zi-Hao and Ying-Ying Tan. 2017. ‘Mandarinization and the Construction of Chinese Ethnicity in Singapore.’ Chinese Language and Discourse Yeo, Su-Jan. 2020. ‘Right to the City (at night): Spectacle and Surveillance in Public Space.’ In Companion to Public Space, edited by Vikas Mehta and Danilo Palazzo, 182–190. London: Routledge. Yeoh, Brenda S. A., and Lily Kong. 2012. ‘Singapore’s Chinatown: Nation Building and Heritage Tourism in a Multiracial City.’ Localities, 2: 117–159.

CHAPTER 4

Negotiating War Memories at the Edge of the Former Japanese Empire: Two Japanese Veterans’ Projects in Palau, Micronesia Shingo Iitaka Abstract This chapter focuses on the memorial projects of two Japanese war veterans at Pacific War battle sites in Palau, Micronesia, in order to examine entanglement of national and local memories of the war and how the borders between these narratives find material expression on the ground. The first veteran project was developed by Funasaka Hiroshi, who organised one of the earliest nongovernmental memorial tours to Palau in 1968 to build war monuments. Funasaka profoundly influenced the memorial activities subsequently undertaken by other Japanese, including by veterans, bereaved families, and former immigrants to Palau. The second project is the Angaur State Nature Park Project by Kurata Yōji, which was launched in 2001 when the practice of Japanese memorial tours to Palau was in decline. Kurata, appealing to the value of Pacific War sites as heritage, designed an ecotourism package that incorporated visits to sites related to the war, in order to attract the post-war generation. Both projects were assisted by Palauans of Japanese ancestry, those born to Japanese fathers and Palauan mothers during the Japanese administrative era and their descendants. These Palauans founded a voluntary association called the Palau Sakura Kai in the 1960s. Although both projects were partially accepted by local society in order to foster the growth of tourism in Palau, they failed to involve indigenous society in general, as they disregarded Palauan ways of remembering the war. This memorial dissonance demon strates that ‘borders of memory’ continue to cut through memorials to the Pacific War in Palau.

Keywords Palau – Pacific War – war memory – tourism – monument – heritage – Palauans – Japanese

© Shingo Iitaka, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_005

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Wars in the 20th century were a worldwide phenomenon, fought between global powers and involving diverse peoples from nation-states and their overseas colonies. While such wars were inherently international, the memory of them is shaped by particular times, places, and national cultures (White 1995, 531; Dolski et al. 2014, 2). Earlier studies have shown how the commemoration of global wars, such as through publicly honouring or mourning the war dead, building national monuments, and celebrating anniversaries associated with the end of these wars, has contributed to the widespread emergence of national ‘memory booms’ in the post-war era (e.g. Winter 2006, 26). The ‘industry of memory’ which produced these booms is shaped by the politics of remembrance within each country. For victorious nations, it is largely the heroic stories of brave soldiers which attract viewers to the screen and visitors to the former battlefield, monopolizing the way the war is remembered and excluding alternative narratives. However, this industry also operates globally, reproducing cultural dominance by shaping how wars are remembered more broadly, as in the ways the Vietnam War is often represented in the US media from the US perspective (Nguyen 2016, 14). In memories of the Pacific War, it is the US narrative, in which the Pacific Islands were liberated by the United States from invasion by the Empire of Japan, which has permeated over the Pacific (Camacho 2011). Nevertheless, this perspective has not been hegemonic in Japan, which in the post-war period has tended to view Japan’s fallen soldiers as miserable victims rather than imperial invaders (Seraphim 2006). In this conflict over how the war is remembered between the US and Japan, the perspectives of the Pacific Islanders themselves tend to be overlooked. The former combatants have constructed numerous war monuments on the islands since the end of the Second World War, but these have seldom granted attention to the voices of the islanders, who were not parties to the war but were dragged into it nevertheless. Material memorials are an important means of war commemoration in the Pacific, but the area’s inhabitants have paid little attention to monuments adhering to US and Japanese narratives. Peoples from Micronesia often say, for instance, that ‘It was not our war’ (Falgout et al. 2008, 221). The inhabitants of these islands instead give expression to their own war memories via songs, dances, artworks and story-telling. In more recent times, however, relics of the Pacific War have become resources for tourism, able to attract former veterans, bereaved fami lies, and foreign visitors curious about war history (Murray 2016; Iitaka 2018). In these circumstances, material markers of the war, originally foreign to the local population, have slowly come to be seen as heritage for the residents of these islands, as well as for visitors from the combatants.

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In this context, recent years have seen complex patterns of confrontation, negotiation, and appropriation playing out amongst those invested in shaping remembrance of the war and its material expression on the ground. The war memories of the various stakeholders are not isolated, but influenced by each other. Although it is clear that some of these mnemonic agents have more power to represent their memories than others, there is a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between them, and these various agents frequently share memories, and the material invoking those memories, while attaching different meanings to them (Strange 2004). The recent heritagisation of war relics and memorials in the Pacific demonstrates just such a relationship: agents from the US, the Allies, and Japan are eager to preserve them in order to commemorate or mourn their war dead, while Pacific Islanders view them as tourist resources to attract foreign visitors (White 2015). This chapter focuses on two Japanese veterans’ memory projects located at Pacific War sites in Palau, Micronesia, to investigate the way Japanese war memory is constructed through interaction with local society. One project is associated with Funasaka Hiroshi (1920–2006), and the other with Kurata Yōji (1927–2019), both of whom survived the Battle of Angaur, a raised coralline island situated at the southern end of the Palau Islands. In 1968, Funasaka organised one of the earliest non-governmental tours to Palau to hold memorial services (ireisai) and build war monuments (ireihi).1 Subsequently, veterans, bereaved families, and former Japanese migrants organised similar tours. By the late 1990s, however, those who had taken part in earlier tours had aged and stopped visiting. Some monuments began to deteriorate and were abandoned. Kurata, witnessing the fading memory of the Pacific War among Japanese citizens, decided to dedicate himself to maintaining war monuments by taking on the role of ‘gravekeeper’ for his fellow soldiers (Yomiuri Shinbun 2010). In 2001, he launched the Angaur State Nature Park Project, an ecotourism package that incorporated site tours designed to appeal to Japanese visi tors who had no direct connection with the battle. Funasaka’s memory project in the 1960s and Kurata’s in the 2000s emerged in different historical contexts. Nevertheless, both of these private endeavours contributed to the post-war fostering of national war memory at the edge of the former Japanese Empire. While these two projects were privately, rather than publicly, initiated, they were coordinated with a particular local population: Palauans of Japanese ancestry, who were born to Japanese fathers and Palauan mothers during the In the pre-Pacific War era, war monuments were called chūreihi or chūreitō, which implied loyalty to the Emperor. In the post-war period, the more neutral term ireihi has come to be widely used to commemorate the war dead.

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Japanese administrative era, and their descendants. This group established the Palau Sakura Kai (Palau Cherry Blossom Association) to welcome memorial tour groups from Japan in the 1960s. However, while these Palauans of Japanese ancestry assisted both projects, over the longer term both projects struggled for local acceptance as they failed to involve indigenous society more broadly. Although there was a symbiotic relationship between these Japanese projects and the Palau Sakura Kai’s support, that relationship did not contribute to or result in a memorial community crossing the borders of nation states. The author examines the written records related to these two projects as well as the oral accounts of Kurata in order to investigate Japanese memories of the Pacific War. The author also refers to Palauans’ oral histories collected over the course of a number of field visits, in order to investigate and understand how the local population reacted to these projects. This approach may run the risk of reducing Palauan agency in remembering the Pacific War through its narrow focus on the Japanese veterans’ memory projects, as its focus is on those particular Palauans who assisted them. It is important to note that it is not the collective war memories of Palauans in general which is being examined here (cf. White 2015, 210), but the memories of those involved in the projects. However, in highlighting the failure of these projects, the chapter sheds light on the entanglement and estrangement of war memories in particular historical contexts. As Boyle points out, the investigation of how various agents draw, maintain, and police their own ‘borders of memory’ through their interaction with others is crucial here (Boyle 2019; and see also the Introduction). The chapter reviews the historical background to the Pacific War and the growth of post-war battlefield tourism in Palau, looking at how Funasaka’s and Kurata’s projects developed in close connection with broader currents of national memory in post-war Japan. It also examines how Palauans reacted to these efforts, paying attention to the contested memory space in the post-­ Pacific War era,2 where Japan’s national memory has been projected beyond the nation’s borders and out onto Palau, which became an independent coun try in 1994 after the long administration in the post-war era. Historical, anthropological and religious studies have investigated the interplay between national and personal memory, including the incorporation of the latter by the former and the dissonance between the two (Kitamura 2009; O’Dwyer 2010; Nishimura 2011; Iitaka 2015). There has been comparatively little attention, though, paid to the memorial entanglement of the Pacific War that is present between mnemonic actors from the and Japan, which were responsible For a discussion of how such contested memories played out at a local level domestically, see the chapter by Aukema in this volume.

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for the war, and the Pacific Islanders themselves, who were drawn into the conflict. While Keith Camacho has looked into this for the Mariana Islands, and Stephen Murray has examined the case of Peleliu (Camacho 2011; Murray 2016), more work remains to be done. This chapter will pay particular attention to a specific local population, Palauans of Japanese ancestry, in order to demonstrate the entanglement of distinct national and local memories regarding the war and how the borders between such memorial communities come to find material reflection on the ground. 1

The Japanese Administration in Micronesia and the Pacific War

The Japanese administration of Micronesia began in 1914 at the start of World War I, when the Japanese Navy came to occupy the German-held territories there, the Mariana Islands (except Guam under the US administration), the Caroline Islands, and the Marshal Islands. These islands were known as Nan’yō Guntō (South Sea Islands) in Japan. After receiving the mandate from the League of Nations, the Empire of Japan established the South Seas ­Government (Nan’yō-chō) in Koror, Palau, situated at the western end of the Caroline Islands, in 1922 (see Map 4.1). Despite withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1935, the Japanese administration in Micronesia persisted; its features included the promotion of immigration, economic expansion, and militarisation. The Nan’yō-chō and its related organs encouraged immigration from Japan and its territories, especially after the 1930s when Japan reinforced its imperial policies. In 1935, the total number of Japanese immigrants to Micronesia reached 51,861, and outnumbered the Micronesian population. At the time, more than 6,500 Japanese immigrants lived in Palau, while there were approx imately 6,200 Micronesians including Palauans ( 1932; 1937). The Empire of Japan exploited Micronesia’s natural and human resources (Purcell 1976). Many Japanese immigrants were employed in the sugar cane industry in the Mariana Islands. Some cultivated new fields on larger volcanic islands for agricultural use. Others engaged in the fishing industry for bonito, tuna, and pearls. Micronesians were exploited as cheap labourers and assigned to harsh work such as mining. In the 1930s, phosphate mining on Angaur, Palau became the second largest industry in the Nan’yō Guntō after the sugar cane industry in the Mariana Islands (Peattie 1988, 132–4). Militarism strengthened after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and was at its height during the Pacific War. A naval officer became the director of the Nan’yō-chō in 1943, when the Pacific War intensified. The Government suspended its civil administrative functions in April of 1944; all staff members

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Map of Palau’s islands design by the author

became paramilitary personnel. Former civil servants from the Nan’yō-chō were evacuated to the jungle on Babeldaob Island, where units under the 14th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army were stationed. When the Second World War ended, the surviving military personnel, military labourers, and Japanese civilians on Babeldaob surrendered in a state of extreme hunger (Murray 2013,

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52–4). Prior to this, though, American forces invaded Peleliu and Angaur, the southern part of the Palau Islands, in order to gain control of their airfields. Like the battles of Marianas, the battles of Peleliu and Angaur caused a large number of casualties among Japanese and US military personnel.3 On Peleliu, 10,022 Japanese servicemen primarily from the 2nd and 15th Regiments under the 14th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army were killed in action, and 446 — most of them military porters from Korea—were captured.4 Only 34 soldiers survived the battle, with 14 wounded soldiers captured. Out of 28,484 from the 1st Marine Division and the 81st Infantry Division, 1,684 US servicemen were killed in action. On Angaur, 1,150 Japanese servicemen (out of around 1,200 from the First Battalion of the 59th Regiment of the 14th Division) fought to the death, with the rest captured, and 260 US servicemen were killed in action (BBS 1968, 233). In the post-Pacific War era, Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare (reorganised into the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in 2001) began in 1952 to organise travel to overseas battlefields to recover remains. The ministry has worked with private and non-profit organisations, including the Japan War-­ Bereaved Families Association, the Japan Youth Memorial Association, and ­veterans’ associations formed by those engaged in severe combat in Asia and the Pacific. Approximately 1,280,000 remains from about 2,400,000 fallen soldiers have been returned to Japan.5 In the case of Palau, about 8,830 (out of about 16,200) remains have been recovered and returned. Unidentified remains are buried at Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Tokyo. The Ministry has also launched efforts to remember the war dead by building national monuments. In the Asia and the Pacific region, 15 national cenotaphs have been erected since the first memorial was built on the island of Iwo Jima in 1971. They include the Monument of the War Dead in the Western Pacific on Peleliu, where Japan’s Emperor and Empress held a memorial service in April 2015. In the northern and central Pacific regions, national mon uments have also been built on the island of Attu (in the state of Alaska), Saipan (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands), and Majuro (an atoll in the Marshall Islands). Other monuments have been constructed in the The number of Japanese military personnel who died in ‘the central Pacific area’ covering Guam, the Bonin Islands, and other Micronesian islands was estimated at 197,600 ( 1967, Table 1). Murray pointed out the difficulty of rendering the final count of the number of deaths on Peleliu because of the chaos of war, as well as the differences among Japanese and sources (Murray 2016, 95). See the website of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf /seisakunitsuite/bunya/hokabunya/senbotsusha/seido01/ (accessed on 31 August 2022).

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Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Mongolia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and Myanmar. The ministry has organised pilgrimage tours for bereaved families, who receive partial funding for travel expenses from the national treasury. 2

Initial Memorial Projects on Palau

Japanese memorial tours to overseas war sites date back to the beginning of the twentieth century when the Empire of Japan was expanding into neighbouring territories. Such tours were carried out to pay tribute to the war dead and to ­celebrate the Empire’s victories. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), tours to battlefields such as Lūshun and Dalian attracted many J­ apanese citizens (Ko 2001). War monuments to commemorate fallen heroes were built at these sites. In 1940, which marked the 2,600th year of Japan’s imperial reign, tours to overseas war sites flourished (Ruoff 2010). By contrast, the post-­Pacific War visits were not to sites of martial glory, but to battlefields at which ­Japanese military units had been defeated (Nishimura 2011). Surviving veterans and bereaved families desired to visit war sites scattered with the remains of their comrades, fathers, husbands, and sons, while the Japan War-Bereaved Families Association has demanded that the Diet and the concerned ministries provide better treatment for the fallen soldiers, and voluntary associations have worked both alongside and in competi tion with the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to recover the remains (Seraphim 2006, 60–85). This process only began after 1952 because of the Japan’s abandonment of the sovereignty after the Second World War and the disappearance of the Japanese population from its former imperial possession. After the Pacific War, the former Nan’yō Guntō was under navy control and became the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands under the civil administration, which covered most part of Micronesia. Between October 1945 and May 1946, over 60,000 Japanese were evacuated from the former Nan’yō Guntō (Micronesia): 20,041 returned to Japan’s main islands, 33,075 to Okinawa, 7,726 to Korea, and 550 to Taiwan (Imaizumi 2005, 13). Former military personnel wished to revisit battlefields to mourn their lost comrades, carrying a sense of guilt that they had survived. Likewise, former Japanese immigrants (especially those from Okinawa) were eager to revisit Micronesia, especially the Marianas and Palau where many immigrants had lived, to mourn those who had lost their lives either through starvation or from fighting (Iitaka 2015). However, Japanese citizens were not allowed to travel abroad immediately after the war, except for business, educational reasons, or government inspections. When Japanese

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citizens were finally allowed to visit foreign countries as tourists in the mid1960s, there were initially certain restrictions, such as carrying a maximum $500 of foreign currency. The cost of travel was also higher at the time. Despite these obstacles, those concerned were determined to visit overseas battlefields to console the war dead. Funasaka Hiroshi was among those who wished to visit the former b­ attlefields in Micronesia (Trefalt 2015). Funasaka was born into a farming family in Tochigi Prefecture in 1920. After joining the army in 1941 in the city of U ­ tsunomiya (Tochigi Prefecture), he was sent to the city of Qiqihar in Manchuria to guard the border with the Soviet Union. Afterwards, he joined the First Battalion of the 59th Regiment and moved to Angaur as a squad leader. He was severely injured in the Battle of Angaur, but survived and became a prisoner of war (Funasaka 1966; 165). Although his family had received an official notice that he had died with honour, Funasaka eventually returned to Japan in 1946 and opened a very successful bookstore called Taiseidō near Shibuya Station in central Tokyo, offering a broad assortment of military history books and war accounts. In 1965, for the first time since repatriation, Funasaka returned to Palau’s battlefields as a member of an official inspection team. He was shocked to see a great number of human remains in caves surrounded by scattered firearms, helmets, gas masks, canteens, and other war artefacts. For Funasaka, the human remains seemed to have been ‘preserved in the same postures at the time of their deaths’ 21 years prior to his visit. The sight made him feel disappointed with the efforts of the previous national inspection conducted in 1953 by the crew of a research vessel, Nippon Maru (Funasaka 1966, 196). After returning to Japan, Funasaka held a memorial service in Utsunomiya, where the First B ­ attalion of the 59th Regiment was originally stationed. He brought stones from Angaur as symbolic figures representing the war dead and presented them to bereaved family members.6 At the service, he also showed photographs of the remains and relics left on the battlefields. Later he recalled, ‘I could not bring myself to listen to the voices of grieving families,’ who wondered how their husbands or sons had died (Funasaka 1966, 199). Consequently, Funasaka felt a strong urge to honour the war dead in his own way. He planned to erect war monuments in Palau and to organise non-governmental memorial services, using his own money for this pur pose. After returning from his 1965 trip to Palau, he wrote two books about When the death toll of Japanese soldiers drastically increased toward the end of the Pacific War, the system of repatriating the remains of fallen soldiers collapsed. The bereaved only received urns containing ‘nothing but a small stone or a chunk of wood’ (Nishimura 2011, 303).

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the battles there: Screams of Fallen Heroes: An Account of Honourable Deaths at the Battle of Angaur (Funasaka 1966)7 and Sakura Sakura: An Account of the Battle at the Peleliu Caves (Funasaka 1967). The famous, controversial novelist, Mishima Yukio, who was Funasaka’s kendo (a Japanese martial art) mate, wrote the foreword to the former book. Funasaka used the royalties from his books to build memorials. He said, ‘I do not intend to make money for myself from publishing my books. If I earn any profits—even slightly—I will use them to erect war memorials on Angaur, where a large number of souls of departed heroes, whose blood was shed, bodies are torn, and bones are broken, are resting’ (Funasaka 1966, 200). Prior to launching the memorial tours, Funasaka consulted with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs concerning how best to carry his project forward. The Ministry provided information about local conditions and advised him on where the monuments should be built in Palau, but the actual implementation was left up to him. Initially, local Palauan society was uncooperative. Palauans in general had little interest in a foreigner’s project to construct war monuments on their land, because the Pacific War as they saw it was ‘not our war’ and the resultant monuments never evoke Palauan memories of the conflict (Murray 2016, 211–2).8 Nevertheless, the fledgling Palau Sakura Kai helped Funasaka to acquire permission to build the memorials (NSK 1968, 8–9). Finally, in 1968, a memorial tour was arranged for 47 people (includ Funasaka and the tour company’s president who was deeply moved by Funasaka’s endeavour), consisting largely of surviving veterans and bereaved family members. They were divided into two groups and set off at different times. The first group (22 people) visited Palau via Guam in January, while the second group (29 people) travelled from the end of April to the beginning of May. Funasaka and the president joined both groups, each of which spent around 10 days in Guam and Palau. Assistance from the Palau Sakura Kai Funasaka would not have been able to achieve his dream without help from Palau Sakura Kai. Most Palauans of Japanese ancestry were raised by their An English version of this book, published in 1986, is titled Falling Blossoms (Funasaka 1986). Whether Palauans explicitly resisted Funasaka’s project to construct war monuments is not investigated here. Previous research has suggested that while Palauans understand the reason the and Japan build war monuments, they have little interest in them (Falgout al. 2008; Murray 2016).

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Palauan mothers and maternal relatives during the Japanese administrative era; several were recorded in the family registers of their Japanese fathers. To deal with their predicament after their fathers’ evacuation to Japan, Palauans of Japanese ancestry formed the Palau Sakura Kai in the 1960s (Iitaka 2021). They called for mutual assistance, as their social capital in Palau was limited due to their lack of paternal networks. They were also motivated to obtain ­information on their fathers and paternal relatives in Japan.9 A member of the association recalled, ‘we expected to meet again our Japanese repatriated fathers.’ The arrival of Funasaka’s group offered them the opportunity to develop contacts in Japan and rebuild ties with their fathers and paternal relatives, which the Pacific War had severed. They had their own purposes which were related to but different from those of Japanese visitors. The Palau Sakura Kai had helped Funasaka negotiate with the local organisations concerned in order to receive permission to erect memorials. It also helped to arrange the 1968 memorial tour. The first group left Japan on 18 ­January 1968, but had to spend five days in Guam since the US administration did not allow them to enter Palau. In Guam, a Palauan of Japanese ancestry who had a seat in the legislature in the Palau district of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, gave them hope.10 He happened to be in Saipan, and, upon learning of their troubles, helped them to obtain visas. He also offered accommodation at his hotel in Koror, Palau (NSK 1968, 14–5). The first group arrived in Palau on 25 January and had only two days for memorial services on Peleliu, Angaur, Koror, and Babeldaob. The second group left Japan on 23 April 1968. This time, they waited for only one day in Guam for an entry permit to Palau. They reached Palau on 25 April and spent six days attending memorial services and investigating former battlefields. One of the main locations where the 1968 tour groups held memorial services is the Japanese Cemetery (Nihonjinbochi) in Koror, also known as the Navy Cemetery (Kaigunbochi) because the Japanese Navy was stationed there 9 10

The information about the establishment and organisation of the Palau Sakura Kai is based on the interview to its members, which the author has conducted since 2008. Iitaka (2021) investigated the membership of the association. In this chapter, the names of the members of the Palau Sakura Kai are not given because exposing their names can still be a sensitive issue in Palau. Although Palauans of Japanese ancestry include famous figures such as former President Kuniwo Nakamura (1943–2020) and former Ambassador to Japan Minoru Ueki (1931–2021), other Palauans discrimi nate against those with Japanese ancestry in certain social situations. Some Palauans of Japanese ancestry were not allowed to be buried either at the traditional burial sites of their kin groups or in the public cemetery. They were buried at the Japanese Cemetery in Koror (Iitaka 2016a).

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after the occupation of Palau in 1914. At this locale, some memorials and tombs for Japanese were erected in the pre-war era. Funasaka’s group also visited many sites located in Peleliu and Angaur. On Peleliu, memorial services were held in a corner of the local public cemetery in the village of Ngerchol, on the northwest coast of the island, a long way from the site where Japan’s national memorial would eventually be built in 1985. The place for memorial services on Angaur was on the western coast, close to where the last Japanese had fallen on the island. The visitors also toured military sites on Babeldaob, such as the old headquarters of the Japanese Army in Ngatmang, as well as former ­settlements established by Japanese immigrants, although Babeldaob’s thick jungle prevented extensive exploration (NSK 1968, 15). Funasaka erected monuments at these locations. At the Japanese Cemetery, he built a Buddhist memorial that would watch over the spirits of those who had died around Koror and Babeldaob during the war. The Palau Sakura Kai prepared a parcel of land in the cemetery. A cement house was built to store a statue of Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, with which the first group performed a consecrating ceremony on Guam prior to entering Palau. The participants were amazed at and grateful for the well-maintained state of the cemetery, which was under the Palau Sakura Kai’s supervision. The association’s members promised to preserve the cemetery after the tour groups returned home. Their attitude convinced the visitors that they were Japanophiles. Funasaka believed that they were also ‘genuine Japanese’ and had ‘never lost their Japanese pride’, even under the US administration (NSK 1968, 29). However, members of the group really had quite ambivalent identities, because of divergence between their Japanese ancestry and Palauan daily lives (Iitaka 2016a; 2016b). Funasaka also built two war monuments on Peleliu and Angaur. The design of both monuments is similar: a square metal plaque was embedded in a frame fixed on a cement platform (see Figure 4.1). The title inscription of Funasaka’s memorial reads ireihi, which literally means ‘memorial monument’. That title is followed by a message of condolence to those who died in combat, and an explanation of how the memorial was built. The explanation inscribed on the Angaur memorial declares that the royalties of Funasaka’s book on the Battle of Angaur were used to build it. Likewise, the one on the Peleliu memorial affirms that the royalties of Funasaka’s book on the Battle of Peleliu were also used. The inscriptions on both monuments mention that newspaper compa nies, Funasaka’s bookstore, and the Palau Sakura Kai supported his project. When the first group of the 1968 memorial tour visited Peleliu and Angaur, the monuments there were still under construction by the Japanese craftsman who was moved by Funasaka’s endeavour and went to Palau prior to the tour group,

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Angaur ireihi built by Funasaka in 1968 (2009) All photographs by the author

but the second group was able to hold memorial services in front of the newly built ireihi. Memorial services were conducted according to Buddhist tradition, led by a Buddhist priest from Japan. The second group of the 1968 memorial

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tour collected and cremated human remains found on Peleliu and Angaur, and interred them into a case attached to the bottom of the ireihi.11 Here, the names of the fallen soldiers and their posthumous Buddhist names were preserved, along with a statue of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In all, Funasaka collected about 10,000 posthumous Buddhist names of those who died in the Battle of Palau, since most of the grieving families could not attend the memorial tour. The participants also made offerings of water, rice wine, sweets, pickles, tea, cigarettes, garlands, and other items to the war dead, which had been brought from Japan after being purified at a Shinto shrine (NSK 1968, 21). These activities were made possible through the protection provided by the Palau Sakura Kai and prominent Palauans of Japanese descent assisted Funasaka with memorial projects on Peleliu and Angaur. A Palauan woman of Japanese ancestry from a chiefly lineage on Peleliu Island, together with her husband, who also had Japanese heritage, were influential within local society and actively welcomed memorial tour groups to Peleliu. The woman had attended schools for Japanese children during the Japanese administrative era, and remained in Palau after the war. Her son inherited the high chief title through this matrilineal line, and still helps Japanese visitors to Peleliu today. Another Palauan man of Japanese ancestry, whose Japanese father had been engaged in phosphate mining on Angaur, inherited a high chief title from his mother in the post-Pacific War era. He also actively welcomed memorial tour groups to Angaur. His son in turn continued to welcome Japanese visitors following his father’s death (including Kurata, see below). Funasaka’s 1968 memorial tour was the earliest non-governmental memorial trip to Palau. His ability to organise trips and his fame as a war writer helped his undertaking become a model for future efforts. After the 1968 tour, different groups of veterans and bereaved families constructed war monuments and personal tombstones at the Japanese Cemetery in Koror, as well as around the monuments Funasaka had built on Peleliu and Angaur (Murray 2016). Consultation with the Palau Sakura Kai became the standard procedure for Japanese visitors who came to Palau to hold memorial services. Without their generous assistance, it would not have been possible to erect various war monuments and personal tombstones. As the report of Funasaka’s group in 1968 showed 1968, 29), Japanese visitors were supported by their genuine hospitality. However, Japanese memorial tours to Micronesia began to decline in the late 1990s as their regular participants aged and passed away. Veterans and bereaved families began to think about abandoning memorial tours. Unlike The gathering of remains without scientific scrutiny is strictly prohibited these days. Palauan ancestors were also buried on the islands (Ishimura 2010, 1–3).

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former immigrant groups (such as the association of Okinawans formerly resident in the Nan’yō Guntō, which continued visiting these islands in order to pass on their memories), most veterans’ groups decided to discontinue the trips (Iitaka 2015, 134). Funasaka and his followers were no exception. Although the descendants of veterans have taken part in major memorial services—such as the 70th anniversary ceremony of the Battle of Peleliu in 2014 (Yomiuri ­Shinbun 2014)—they no longer regularly visit the battlefields. The Palau Sakura Kai has also shrunk due to its own members ageing and passing away. The initial post-war tide of mourning fallen Japanese soldiers had receded by the late 1990s. 4

The Nature Park Project on Angaur

While the veterans’ earlier accounts of the Pacific War were tragic and mournful, lighter narratives appeared that attracted post-war generations, and tamed the memory of the Pacific War. The battlefield was no longer a wasteland but became a site of heritage, providing post-war generations with a sense of ‘imperial nostalgia’ (Lorcin 2013). It was in these circumstances that Kurata Yōji sought to reinvigorate tours to Japan’s battlefields in the Pacific by turning the tide and advertising war sites on Angaur as a heritage that could be experienced by younger generations too. Kurata had moved to Palau in 1941 and worked at the Experimental Fishery Station of the Nan’yō-chō. He was locally drafted into the military for the Battle of Palau and survived, although his family in Japan also initially received an official notice that he had died on Angaur. After being repatriated to Japan, he worked at the Experimental Fishery Station in Tokyo Prefecture and conducted research in the Bonin Islands, investigating the ecology of sea turtles and establishing his career as an oceanographer (Kurata 2003). Kurata hesitated to revisit Palau, even after restrictions on the overseas travel of Japanese citizens were lifted, because he felt guilty for having survived combat when most of his comrades had been killed in action. However, when he visited Angaur in 1975, for the first time since the war, he felt as if ‘his fellow soldiers’ souls were waiting for him’ (Yomiuri Shinbun 2010). Visiting Palau on several subsequent occasions, he became convinced of the necessity for him to mourn the war dead in his own way. At the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Angaur in 1994, he returned to see the caves which he and his fellow soldiers had occu pied in their fight against the military; there, he held a memorial service all by himself. He edited a book on Palau, including his account of the Battle of Palau, for the 10th anniversary of Palau’s independence (Kurata 2003). He had

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a strong emotional attachment to Angaur, and said that ‘the island had saved him and Japan.’12 The German administration, which had ruled Palau from 1899–1914, had initiated phosphate mining on Angaur. The Japanese Navy then seized all facilities and started operations. During the Nan’yō-chō era, it became the second largest industry in Micronesia after the sugar cane industry in the Mariana Islands. The mining facilities were destroyed during the Pacific War, but the US took over the business afterward. A Japanese enterprise called the Phosphate Mining Company (Rinkō Kaihatsu Kaisha) was founded with capital investment from the US. Japanese contract labourers came to reside in Angaur with permission from the US administration, although mining was discontinued in 1955 at the request of the local population (Hanlon 1998, 70). Kurata said, ‘The Japanese were saved by Angaur twice’: phosphate mining in the pre-war era had spurred the Empire’s industrial growth, while phosphate mining in the early post-war period, when people had difficulty obtaining food, provided rich nutrients for Japan’s soil. Kurata’s own life had also been saved on the island during the battle. Kurata moved to Palau in 1996. Although he returned to Japan in the 2010s for health reasons, he frequently visited Palau. He called himself the ‘grave keeper’ (Yomiuri Shinbun 2010) as he was committed to preserving ­Japanese war memorials. Nevertheless, he realised that eternal maintenance of ­monuments was impossible, particularly as they could be a burden or obstacle for the local population. To cope with the diminishing numbers of visitors and the ­precarious fate of the monuments, he sought to develop a tour package that combined nature and battlefield tours on Angaur. He was also involved in founding the Oceanic Wildlife Society (OWS) in 1998, a non-profit organisation based in Japan. The OWS focuses on building environmental awareness and ecotourism in the Asia and Pacific region under the supervision of naturalists.13 The scope of its business, influenced by Kurata, includes visits to former war sites. In 1999, the OWS launched the Midway Project, which planned to guide Japanese visitors on eco-tours to the Midway Atoll, a US National Wildlife Refuge known as the world’s largest albatross habitat. The neighbouring sea is famous as an area where the Japanese Navy was soundly defeated in June of 1942, a major turning point in the Pacific War. The Midway Project, an 12 13

The author recorded this statement during an interview with Kurata in Koror in August 2009. Henceforth, if no other reference is provided, his statements are from that ­interview. About the policy of the OWS, see the following website: https://www.ows-npo.org/index (accessed on 10 October 2020). Hereinafter, information about the OWS is from that website.

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ecotourism package combined with a war site tour, preceded the Angaur project, although it ended in 2002, as flights to the Midway Atoll were discontinued. The Angaur State Nature Park Project was inaugurated in 2001, aiming to make use of nature and war relics as tourism resources (see Map 4.2). The state government of Angaur, one of the sixteen states that constitute the Republic of Palau, was its local counterpart. A Palauan of Japanese ancestry living on Angaur, whose father was a core member of the Palau Sakura Kai (mentioned above), sympathised with Kurata’s project and mediated between Kurata and the local government. He says, ‘As my father helped original ireidan from Japan, I would like to keep assisting Japanese visitors. This will contribute to the development of tourism in Angaur.’ In 2004, a visitor centre for the Angaur State Nature Park was opened and began operating in a former elementary school building, provided for free by Angaur State. The visitor centre holds exhibits on the island’s fauna and flora, and presents historical photos from

Map of Angaur Island design by the author

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the Japanese administrative era and the Pacific War period. Kurata and volunteers were in charge of recording the island’s nature, although they were not permanently stationed on Angaur. The planned tour gave visitors a chance to appreciate the island’s rare fauna and flora; it also introduced them to the legacy of the phosphate mining industry and the Pacific War. The former includes the ruined facilities of phosphate mines (e.g. mining sites, railroads, drying machines, dressing ores, belt conveyors, loading ports, etc.). The latter encompasses the relics of a wrecked US aeroplane, an abandoned pillbox of the Japanese army, a lighthouse destroyed by the US naval bombardment, the ruins of Angaur Shrine, and memorials erected by Japanese, Americans, and Angaurese (see Figure 4.2). Kurata installed numbered boards at some tourist spots as guideposts for visitors. Some relics are not in their original positions, as they were relocated and preserved as tourism resources. For example, the ruins of a wrecked US aeroplane were collected in one place, which is now called ‘the aeroplane’s graveyard’. Despite these efforts, the Nature Park Project on Angaur ultimately did not succeed. The visitor centre still exists, but the OWS no longer offers tours to Angaur. The exhibition room at the visitor centre is not well preserved, and the numbered boards installed at war relics and mining sites have deteriorated. The number of visitors to Angaur remains small due to the restrictions on accessing the island, which is situated outside the protection of Palau’s barrier reef and is therefore difficult to access by boat (Iitaka 2018, 152–153).

 An abandoned pillbox on Angaur’s seashore (2009)

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Through his project, Kurata had sought to develop a means to manage the burden of maintaining monuments on Palau more than half a century after the Second World War. Now, the post-war Palauan generation is taking over from an older generation, many of which had developed close relations with Japanese visitors. Kurata said in 2009 that ‘Maintaining ireihi is a big burden for Palauans now. Monuments could become big rubbish (ōgomi) for them.’ When an Angaurese landlord from the post-war generation disagreed with a generous lease for a piece of land that his father had offered to Japanese ­visitors to build war memorials, Kurata took the initiative in relocating monuments from the west coast of the island to the east coast. The new place was public land owned by Angaur State. He contacted most of the organisations in Japan that had erected monuments on Angaur and asked for assistance. The OWS also called for donations on their website. These contributions made relocation possible in 2010. The Palauan of Japanese ancestry who assisted with the Angaur State Nature Park Project also helped Kurata to negotiate with the state of Angaur to use a parcel of public land for the relocated memorials. The place where Japanese war monuments were relocated became the Angaur Memorial Park (Angaur Senbotsusha Irei Kōen), marked by a signboard embedded in a cement pillar (see Figure 4.3). While there is no national monument like on Peleliu, the space was secured by assembling together a diverse series of war memorials on Angaur. Unlike the Peleliu Peace Memorial Park, it is not always maintained;

 Angaur Memorial Park and relocated memorials (2013)

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the grass is generally overgrown as it rarely has visitors, although the Palauan assisting Kurata said in 2008, ‘The park should be cleaned up more regularly’. Kurata said this new location on the eastern coast of Angaur was the best place to remember his fellow soldiers, since the deceased could now look towards their homeland, lying far beyond the island of Peleliu on the horizon. When the Japanese Emperor and Empress bowed towards Angaur from Peleliu in 2015, some bereaved families felt that the spirits of their loved ones on Angaur could finally rest (Yomiuri Shinbun 2015). 5

War Sites as Heritage

Kurata’s project corresponded with the growth of more conventional tourism in Palau, which had begun in the 1980s (Iitaka 2018, 147–148). When Palau became an independent nation in 1994, tourism was seen as a local industry vital to the country’s future development. Owing to tourism policies introduced after Palau’s independence, the number of visitors rose swiftly in the late 1990s and 2000s. While the current population of Palau is around 18,000 (including around 5,000 foreigners), more than 120,000 visitors come each year (or they did, before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020).14 The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon, registered as a World Heritage Site in 2012, and its neighbouring waters (including the coast of Peleliu) have long attracted tourists and divers from all over the world. In addition to Palau’s rich natural features, tourism agencies began to consider the relics of the Pacific War as a tourism resource in the late 1990s (Price et al. 2015, 227; Murray 2016, 162). Battlefield tourism opened up a new market, as it drew Japanese and US visitors from the post-Pacific War generation, as well as from the pre-war generation who had directly experienced the war and attended memorial tours since the 1960s. Peleliu offers rich resources for such battlefield tours, which divers and other travellers can easily join in their spare time (Iitaka 2018, 150). War sites on Babeldaob also became more accessible in the 2000s when a highway was built with funds secured through the Compact of Free Association with the US Battlefield tourism has expanded through close ties with Japanese and veterans who have revisited war sites, as with Kurata’s project on Angaur. Japanese veterans and grieving families, while staying in Palau, relied on local tourism agencies funded with Japanese capital. During their stay, veterans See the statistics on the Palau Government website: https://www.palaugov.pw/executive -branch/ministries/finance/budgetandplanning/ (accessed on 31 August 2022).

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informed Japanese tour guides about their harrowing experiences on the battlefield, and shared their rich knowledge regarding the deployment of soldiers on Peleliu and Angaur as well. The Japanese tour guides later recounted the vivid narratives of combat, making tour participants from the post-war generation feel as if they were on a real battlefield.15 This interaction between veterans and tour guides resulted in a battlefield tourism that largely followed the narrative from the perspective of the Japanese military. Indeed, the narratives of tour guides born in the post-war era sometimes sound like fresh recollections of the war. Simple memorial services, with incense sticks offered with prayers, are also part of these tours to key memorial sites on Peleliu, which makes the participants emotional. These are modelled on the memorial trips carried out by veterans which were initiated by Funasaka. Although Peleliu contains numerous war relics, heritagisation was initiated by the US. The entire island has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated as a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1985. Microne sians rarely valued (or simply ignored) war relics immediately after the war, despite the general deployment of their material objects such as stones in order to represent their legendary and historical events. This is because they regard the Pacific War as one begun and fought by foreigners (Falgout et al. 2008, 221). For Palauan and other Micronesians, indeed, the Pacific War was like a typhoon destroying everything on the islands at once; they could not avoid it (Poyer et al. 2001). War relics were not heritage for them. However, Palauans have also appropriated war sites for themselves. In recent years there has been a trend towards perceiving the colonial legacy and war remnants as part of Palauans’ own heritage (Ishimura 2010). Palau’s Historic Preservation Office has registered some locales related to the Pacific War as historic sites, along with indigenous sites that trace their origins back to prehistoric times. The airfield for the former Japanese Navy’s seaplane in Koror is listed as a historic site. Among the visiting points on Angaur (established by Kurata in the course of his project), the ruins of the phosphate factory built during the German administration has been registered as a historic site. A further ruin on Angaur has been registered, this one from the battle itself. In the course of the battle for control of the islands between the Japanese and invading Americans, most of the people of Angaur were evacuated before the fighting began, but around 200 Palauans were trapped on the island. They stayed in a cave on the north coast of the island until the them alive. The site is now recognized as a historic site. Angaur State built The author interviewed Japanese tour guides during fieldwork in Palau in 2013 and 2017 and collected the information on how they acquired knowledge about the battles.

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 The cenotaph to the ‘Liberation of the People of Angaur’ (2009)

a cenotaph here in 1993; with ‘Liberation of the People of Angaur’ inscribed on it (see Figure 4.4). The monument has become a landmark representing local war memory. This is uncommon, given the fact that there are few war ­monuments dedicated to Micronesians by themselves. As in Guam, where ­Liberation by the US is widely accepted, the Angaurese way of remembering the Pacific War evolved under the influence of US war memory; 8 October is now a state ­holiday called Angaur State Liberation Day.16 6

‘Borders of Memory’ as a Contact Zone

These two projects in post-war Palau, originating with two prominent ­Japanese veterans, Funasaka Hiroshi and Kurata Yōji, illustrate the changes that took place in how the Pacific War was remembered between the late 1960s and the 2000s. Funasaka’s initiation and promotion of memorial tours for fallen Japanese 16

On the other hand, the official languages of Angaur State include Japanese, along with Palauan and English. Angaurese speak ‘Angaur Japanese’ as a pidgin language because of the long history of phosphate mining, which lasted until the 1950s (Imamura and Long 2019, 81). However, Japanese was probably added as one of the official languages because many elders were still fluent in Japanese and literate in simple characters such as katakana when the Constitution of Angaur State was drafted in the early 1980s.

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soldiers began when Japanese citizens actively recalled the Pacific War from the victim’s perspective (cf. Trefalt 2015). In contrast, Kurata’s commitment to preserving war monuments and planning battlefield tours took place when living memory of the war was in sharp decline (Iitaka 2018). Despite their differences, these two projects helped to maintain Japan’s national memory of the Pacific War in post-war Japan. Their activities took place far beyond post-war Japan’s domestic frontiers, and reached the edge of the former Japanese Empire, but they nevertheless reflected national borders of memory on the ground. Funasaka coordinated the 1968 memorial tour to Palau right after Japanese citizens gained permission to travel abroad because previous national efforts left him dissatisfied. At the same time, the Japanese Government was partially responding to Funasaka’s and other veterans’ demands when the national monument at the Peleliu Peace Memorial Park was erected in 1985. Japanese tourists generally visit both the Peleliu public cemetery, where Funasaka’s monument was built, and the national monument in the park. Funasaka’s project and national initiatives were complementary to the construction of sites of Japanese war memory on Palau. Although there was no national monument built on Angaur, the Nature Park Project on Angaur became an undertaking of the state of Angaur. The site where war monuments on Angaur were relocated in 2010 was inside the Angaur Memorial Park, offered by the local government. These memory projects were also supported by Palauans of Japanese ancestry who formed the Palau Sakura Kai in the 1960s. However, Japanese encounters with these Palauans did not result in the development of a war memory community incorporating both Palauans and Japanese. In spite of the cooperation, Japanese visitors and Palauans of Japanese ancestry attached different meanings to the projects: the former mourned the war dead, the latter longed for reconstructing their relationship with Japan. Combining Japanese and particular Palauans with a nostalgia for the Empire of Japan, the projects continued to disregard Palauan ways of remembering the war, catering to the return of Japanese in the post-war era. They only engaged a small section of local society through the Palaua Sakura Kai. As a result, they contributed to the construction of national ‘borders of memory’ through the material remains left and erected on Palau itself. Funasaka mourned the fallen soldiers as victims, and even believed that Palauans of Japanese ancestry were Japanophiles. Kurata memorized war sites on Angaur by heritagisation, but he also acknowl edged himself as the ‘grave keeper’ of fallen soldiers. Their efforts are in danger of being absorbed into a presumption by the political right that Palauans, kind to Japanese visitors, are grateful for Japan’s ‘benevolent’ colonial rule and fully support remembering Japan’s war dead (Murray 2016, 165–9). Actual Palauan memoires of the war have little place here.

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The challenges faced by Funasaka and Kurata at different times indicates that indigenous society as a whole did not universally endorse their efforts. As Palau was freed from the Empire of Japan, first under US control and then as an independent political entity, arguments naturally erupted over the ­construction of Japan’s national memory in Palau. As Murray points out, the monuments built either by the US or Japan are not familiar to Palauans (Murray 2016, 211–2). Japanese monuments inscribed with kanji and kana that ordinary Palauans from post-war generations are unable to read are unrelatable objects for locals. Through a singular point of access, the Palau Sakura Kai, and with the growth of tourism in post-war Palau, Funasaka and Kurata’s endeavours achieved partial acceptance, but both enterprises failed to involve indigenous society in general. Although Palauans have come to accept Japanese visitors in the post-war context in which Japan became a neighbouring country providing generous financial assistance in place of post-war reparations, they have different ways of remembering the Japanese administration and the Pacific War (Poyer et al. 2001; Falgout et al. 2008). Such dissonance proves that the ‘borders of memory’ with which Palauans and Japanese are struggling remain disputed zones (Boyle 2019). Although modern war is an international phenomenon, its narration remains largely the preserve of state agencies and national perspectives. The limits of the Japanese veterans’ projects exemplify this point. Yet, there are other events which cross the borders of national memory. Regardless of ­soldiers’ nationality, the survivors of combat have shared their experiences, as demonstrated by the recent anniversary ceremonies of the Battle of Peleliu, attended by ­Japanese, Americans, and Palauans with an eye towards reconAlthough Funasaka and Kurata’s endeavours were not successful in internationalising their war memory, their efforts included building connections to more generalized purposes with universal values, such as world peace, the conservation of nature, the preservation of heritage, and peace-making. Their negotiation over war memory at the edge of the former Japanese Empire remains open for further construction of internationalised war memory, since these borders of memory are not fixed but fluid in various historical and social contexts.

For example, at the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Peleliu, a U.S. Marine veteran shook hands with a Japanese Navy veteran. Prominent Palauans also attended the ceremony. See the website of the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service: https://www .dvidshub.net/image/1593810/marines-remember-battle-peleliu-during-70th-anniversary (Accessed on 31 August 2022).

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the late Kurata Yōji and the members of the Palau Sakura Kai, who kindly and patiently took the time to be interviewed. My fieldwork in Palau since 2008 has been funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2008–2010: Grant Numbers 08J02475; 2012–2013: Grant Numbers 24720393; 2015–2017: Grant Numbers 15K03049, 2018–2020: Grant Numbers 18K01195). References BBS (Bōeichō Bōeikenshūjo Senshishitsu). 1967. War History Series: Japanese Army Operations in the Central Pacific Area, Vol. 1: Fight to the Death in the Marianas. ­Asagumo Shinbun Sha. BBS (Bōeichō Bōeikenshūjo Senshishitsu). 1968. War History Series: Japanese Army Operations in the Central Pacific Area, Vol. 2: Peleliu, Angaur and Iwo Jima. Asagumo Shinbun Sha. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Camacho, Keith. 2011. Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Dolski, Michael, Sam Edwards, and John Buckley. 2014. ‘Introduction.’ In D-Day in History and Memory: The Normandy Landings in International Remembrance and Commemoration, edited by Michael Dolski, Sam Edwards, and John Buckley, 1–41. Denton: University of North Texas Press. Falgout, Suzanne, Lin Poyer and Laurence Carucci. 2008. Memories of War: ­Micronesians in the Pacific War. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Funasaka, Hiroshi. 1966. Screams of Fallen Heroes: An Account of Honourable Deaths at the Battle of Angaur. Bungei Shunjū. Funasaka, Hiroshi. 1967. Sakurasakura: An Account of the Battle at the Peleliu Caves. Mainichi Shinbunsha. Funasaka, Hiroshi. 1986. Falling Blossoms. Translated by Hiroshi Funasaka and Jeffery D. Rubin. Singapore: Times Book International. Hanlon, David. 1998. Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory, 1944 1982. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Iitaka, Shingo. 2015. ‘Remembering Nan’yō from Okinawa: Deconstructing the Former Empire of Japan through Memorial Practices.’ History & Memory, 27 (2): 126–151. Iitaka, Shingo. 2016a. ‘Inclusion and Exclusion of ‘Nikkei’: On the Case of the Controversial Burial of a Palauan of Japanese Ancestry.’ Japanese Journal of Cultural Anthropology, 81 (2): 228–246.

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Iitaka, Shingo. 2016b. ‘Traces of ‘Mixed Blood’ in Micronesia in the Post-­Japanese Imperial Era: Border Crossings of Palauans of Japanese Ancestry.’ Cultural ­ ­Anthropology, 17: 8–25. Iitaka, Shingo. 2018. ‘Tourism of Darkness and Light: Japanese Commemorative Tourism to Paradise.’ In Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying, edited by Adam Kaul and Jonathan Skinner, 141–159. Louisville: University Press of Colorado. Iitaka, Shingo. 2021. ‘Palau Sakura Kai: An association of Palauans of Japanese ­ancestry.’ In Memories of the Japanese Empire: Comparison of the Colonial and Decolonisation Experiences in Taiwan and Nan’yō Guntō, edited by Yuko Mio, 117–134. London: ­Routledge. Imaizumi, Yumiko. 2005. ‘Problems among the Post-war Repatriates from Japanese Mandate Micronesia: Their Mainland and Okinawan Associations.’ Bulletin of the Historiographical Institute, 30: 1–44. Imamura, Keisuke and Daniel Long. 2019. Japanese Language in Palau: Colonial Vestiges and Loanwords. Hitsuzi Shobo. Ishimura, Tomo. 2010. ‘War Memory and Ruins in Palau: Collecting Human Remains of War Dead and the Role of Archaeology.’ Archaeological Journal of Kanazawa ­University, 66: 1–3. Kitamura, Tsuyoshi. 2009. A Postwar Ethnography of the War Dead: Memories of People Visiting War Sites in Okinawa. Ochanomizu Shobō. Ko, En. 2001. ‘Tourism Born out of Victory: The First Japanese School Excursion to Manchuria in 1906.’ Journal of Global Studies, 7: 11–30. Kurata, Yōji. 2003. ‘A Soldier Who Survived a Battle of Honourable Death.’ In The Republic of Palau: Past, Present and the 21st Century, compiled by Ken’ichi Sudo, edited by Hiroshi Inamoto and Yōji Kurata, 363–366. Nagasaki: Orijin Shobou. Lorcin, Patricia M. E. 2013. ‘Imperial Nostalgia; Colonial Nostalgia: Differences of ­Theory, Similarities of Practice?’ Historical Reflections, 39(3): 97–111. Murray, Stephen C. 2013. ‘The Palauan Kirikomi-tai Suicide Bombers of World War II and the Siege of Babeldaob: A Reconsideration.’ Pacific Asia Inquiry, 4(1): 52–54. Murray, Stephen C. 2016. The Battle Over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American ­Memories of War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Nguyen, Viet T. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nishimura, Akira. 2011. ‘Battlefield Pilgrimage and Performative Memory: Contained Souls of Soldiers in Sites, Ashes, and Buddha Statues.’ Memory Connection 303–11. (Nihon Saura Kai). 1968. Connected by Cherry Blossoms: A Record of Memorial Tour to the Palau Islands. Tokyo: Nihon Sakura Kai. O’Dwyer, Shaun R. 2010. ‘The Yasukuni Shrine and the Competing Patriotic Pasts of East Asia.’ History & Memory, 22 (2): 147–77.

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Peattie, Mark. 1988. Nan’yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Poyer, Lin, Suzanne Falgout, and Laurence Carucci. 2001. The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Price, Neil, Rick Knecht, and Gavin Lindsay. 2015. ‘The Sacred and the Profane: ­Souvenir and Collecting Behaviours on the WWII Battlefields of Peleliu Island, Palau, ­Micronesia.’ In Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands, edited By Gilly Carr and Keir Reeves, 219–233. New York and London: Routledge. Purcell, David. 1976. ‘The Economics of Exploitation: The Japanese in the Mariana, ­Caroline, and Marshall Islands 1915–1940.’ The Journal of Pacific History, 11 (3): 189–211. Ruoff, Kenneth. 2010. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan: 1945–2005. ­Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center. SSG (South Seas Government). 1932. Ten Years History of South Seas Government. Koror: Nan’yō-chō. SSG (South Seas Government). 1937. The 5th Yearbook of Statistics by the South Seas Government. Koror: Nan’yō-chō. Strange, Carolyn. 2004. ‘Symbiotic Commemoration: The Stories of Kalaupapa.’ History & Memory, 16 (1): 86–117. Trefalt, Beatrice. 2015. ‘The Endless Search for Dead Men: Funasaka Hiroshi and Fallen Soldiers in Post-war Japan.’ In The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and ­Culture, edited by Christina Twomey and Ernest Koh, 270–281. London and New York: Routledge. White, Geoffrey. 1995. ‘Remembering Guadalcanal: National Identity and Transnational Memory-making.’ Public Culture, 7 (3): 529–555. White, Geoffrey. 2015. ‘The Coastwatcher Mythos: The Politics and Poetics of Solomon Islands War Memory.’ In Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands, edited by Gilly Carr and Keir Reeves, 194–216. New York and London: Routledge. Winter, Jay. 2006. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Yomiuri Shinbun. 2010. ‘Immigrated to Palau to Keep the Graveyard of Fellow Soldiers.’ Yomiuri Shinbun, August 14, 2010. Yomiuri Shinbun. 2014. ‘Never Forget the Tragic War.’ Yomiuri Shinbun, September 16, 2014. Yomiuri Shinbun. 2015. ‘Longing for the Day.’ Yomiuri Shinbun

CHAPTER 5

Hidden Christians Made Visible: An Ethnography of Tourism in a World Heritage Property of Japan Raluca Mateoc Abstract This chapter explores the transformation of Japan’s 22nd World Heritage property ‘­Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ into a touristic destination and the borders of memory that have emerged from the decade-long nomination process. The cultural property consists of one archeological site, ten villages and a cathedral, spread across Nagasaki and Kumamoto Prefectures and bears testimony to the cultural tradition nurtured by the Hidden Christians. The latter are understood as those who practiced and passed down their faith in secret, without priestly leadership, for about 250 years, during a nationwide ban on Christianity. After discussing the nomina tion process and related criticisms, the chapter outlines the ways in which the Hidden Christian culture (graveyards, churches, sites of houses, and others) is made tangible in the World Heritage nomination file. The core of the analysis reveals the borders of memory that emerge at the level of the Prefectural Government, Catholic church, tourism agencies and local guides, and the consequent collisions and fusions in their aims and perspectives. The two logics applied in the Japanese cultural management outlined by Ogino (2016)—the logic of actualization, and the preservation of the present—are addressed in relation to the transformation of the cultural property into a touristic destination.

Keywords borders – memory – heritage – tradition – Christianity – Nagasaki

On June 30, 2018, the 42nd Session of the World Heritage Committee held in Manama (Bahrain) decided that the ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ (Nagasaki to Amakusa no Senpuku Kirishitan kanren isan) should be registered as a site of World Cultural Heritage. The committee concluded that the twelve sites spread across the coasts and remote islands of Nagasaki © Raluca Mateoc, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_006

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and Kumamoto Prefectures should be listed as they bear unique testimony to a cultural tradition nurtured by the Hidden Christians in the Nagasaki region that lasted about 250 years, for most of the Edo period. Christianity was introduced to Japan in 1549 by Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, whose mission was successful in teaching catechism and baptizing both feudal lords and lay people. Consequently, a first edict expelling Jesuit missionaries was issued in 1587, expanded by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1614 to prohibit Christianity throughout Japan. In the absence of missionaries, Christianity went underground, and Christians practiced and passed down their faith in secret without priestly leadership. The ‘Hidden Christians’ followed a certain type of Christian rites, such as b­ aptism, prayers, or the liturgical calendar, but on the outside, they were parishioners of Buddhist temples, and thus, they could not be distinguished from other Japanese. After the lifting of the ban in 1873, following the forced opening of the country and the Meiji restoration, some Hidden Christians accepted the authority of the Catholic church, while others rejected it. The Nagasaki region of north-western Kyushu was the most evangelised, and had the highest number of people who maintained the Christian faith during the ban. The historical narrative of the World Heritage cultural property addresses the emergence, development, and end of this Hidden Christian tradition. The twelve components of the World Heritage property (one archaeological site, ten villages and a cathedral) are organised in chronological order and are sited along the seacoast or on remote islands to which Hidden Christians migrated during the ban on Christianity. The archaeological site is the site of the rebellion of Japanese Catholics against the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1614, which triggered Japan’s nationwide seclusion policy and gave rise to the cultural tradition of the Hidden Christians. The ten villages are the places where the latter maintained their faith during the period of the ban by developing a religious tradition (e.g. venerating natural sites as sacred places, substituting everyday items for Christian devotional objects) and by migrating to remote islands at the end of the eighteenth century. The last component, Oura ­Cathedral, marks the revealing of the secret faith by the Hidden Christians to missionaries of the Paris Foreign Mission Society, who had come to Japan in 1854 with the re-­opening of the country. After the lifting of the ban, the ­Hidden Christians split into those who accepted the guidance of the incoming missionaries and rejoined the Catholic Church, and those who refused to submit to the authority of the missionaries and instead maintained their own practices nurtured during the period of the ban on Christianity. This group is known as the kakure kirishitan. The ten villages include tangible elements connected to the Hidden Chris tians as well as churches built in the early Meiji era under the guidance of

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Map of the components of ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ site, from the nomination file ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region: World Heritage Nomination 2017’, 45 Courtesy of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan

Catholic missionaries (see Map 5.1). While the churches have been present in nomination-related tourist narratives since the 2000s, Hidden Christian culture is currently finding its way into them. Based on ethnographic fieldwork

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conducted in Tokyo, Nagasaki, and several locations in Nagasaki Prefecture,1 this chapter addresses the transformation of the cultural property into a tourist destination, and the borders of memory that this transformation generates. After discussing the rather bumpy World Heritage nomination process, the chapter outlines Hidden Christian tangible culture as presented in the nomination file and shows its present-day significance. It then addresses its inclusion in the touristic narratives of the Prefectural Government, Catholic Church, tourism agencies and local guides, revealing both collision and fusion in these narratives. The various narrations produce material and symbolic spaces that stand at the intersection between various memory collectives, and thus outline the contours of the borders of memory running between them. 1

Investigating Heritage

This investigation of heritage follows previous interrogations into the impact of fundamental changes in the understanding and management of ‘cultural heritage’ as a category of legal, political, and governmental significance (Smith 2006; Coombe 2012). These changes are generated by a rejection of ‘­monumental heritage’ as a privileged expression of the modern nation-state that prevailed in the nineteenth century, and by the emergence of new configurations of power in the latest two and a half decades, putting into play new objectifications, subjectivities, technologies, expertise, struggles, and vitalities (Coombe 2012, 375). Moreover, I look at heritage as something created at a local level, and thus follow an approach that views heritage as a ‘little tradition’ (Cox and Brumann 2010). This shows how rural heritage is appropriated by local inhabitants, tourists or conservationists (e.g. Kelly 1986; Ehrentraut 1993), thus addressing a conception of heritage as ‘made’ rather than found or given. The idea of heritage from below’, claiming that heritage is about people, collectivity, and individuals, and about their sense of inheritance from the past also supports this investigation (Robertson, 2012). When looking at ways in which the state, the church, tourism agencies and local guides approach the Hidden Christian narrative, the chapter will consider This chapter draws on research that has received funding from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Cultural Anthropology) and the German Academic Exchange Service (Max Institute for Social Anthropology, Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’). As my next research grant (awarded by the Prunier Foundation, to be hosted by the University of Tokyo) has been delayed because of Covid 19, interviewing has continued remotely.

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two logics applied in the Japanese cultural management outlined by Ogino (2016, 15–16): the logic of actualization, which involves a non-­materialistic view of tradition, focused on preserving the intangible, and the preservation of the present, based on a doubling of the world, when a heritage site is both a touristic destination and a living place. Any analysis of Hidden Christian sites turning into touristic destinations considers the boundary between the religious and the secular, which arises when sites, objects, and practices of a religious nature, defined by law as private, are designated as public cultural properties or heritage (Teeuwen and Rots 2020, 14). Chapters in Rots and Teeuwen (2020) show how this boundary is set when various actors—ranging from diplomats at UNESCO and bureaucrats at the national Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō) to local stakeholders such as performers, priests, and entrepreneurs—give shape to and negotiate notions of heritage on the ground (Teeuwen and Rots 2020, 1). Examples related to sacred sites include Mt. Ōmine and Okinoshima (DeWitt 2020), the Sēfa Utaki sacred groves (Rots 2020) and the aenokoto harvest rite (Kikuchi 2020). The World Heritage cultural property ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the ­Nagasaki Region’ has attracted anthropological investigation for the ways in which ­Hidden Christian culture from two regions—Sotome and Hirado—is re-­presented as national heritage in the nomination (Saitsu 2017; Kawashima 2017). It has also been examined to study the initiators of World Heritage registration (Matsui 2010) and shifts in nomination content (Mateoc 2019). The multi-level ethnography of tourism and the borders of memory that this chap ter reveals offer new insights to the study of cultural properties and Japanese cultural heritage in general. The World Heritage Nomination ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ is Japan’s 22nd World Heritage Property and the 8th World Heritage property of Japan connected to Christianity. In 1590, the number of Catholics in Japan did not surpass 1.3% of the total population of 18 million individuals. These numbers differ little from the present-day: approximatively 1% of the Japanese population is Christian, all denominations included (Nogueira Ramos 2019, 3–4). The association of

According to the Yearbook of Religion, 1.5% of the Japanese population is Christian (Agency for Cultural Affairs 2018). The other religious affiliations are: Shintoism (70.4%), Buddhism (69.8%), and Other, including Islam, the Baha’i faith, Hinduism and Judaism (6.9%).

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such a low number of Japanese Christians with a World Heritage property is interesting for examining how the ‘universal’ value of such sites is crafted. The June 2018 registration was preceded by a more than decade long ­nomination process. In the early 2000s, the Association for Declaring the Nagasaki Church Group World Heritage3 proposed 26 churches and ­Christian sites (‘Nagasaki Church Group’) as being of universal value, claiming that many of the church builders and believers were formerly Hidden Christians and that to preserve the churches also helps to preserve their earlier history of persecution (de Luca and Miura 2019). After being placed on Japan’s ­Tentative List4 in 2007, in January 2015, the nomination file ‘Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki’ was submitted to the World Heritage Centre. The nomination encompassed three historical phases—the introduction of Christianity to Japan, the ban on Christianity and hiding, and the period following the lifting of the ban ­represented by castle sites, villages, and churches. Its Outstanding Universal Value (OUV)5 was the acceptance process of Christianity in Japan beginning in the sixteenth century, exchange with the West after that century and physical evidence demonstrating the cultural tradition generated by such exchange. The application was withdrawn in 2016, following the ICOMOS6 Interim Report which advised that the application focus on the perseverance of Christian communities during two centuries of prohibition and persecution. As a result, in February 2017, Japan submitted a substantially re-scoped nomination and downsized the number of components by eliminating sites unconnected to its new OUV: the unique tradition nurtured during the ban by the Hidden Christians of the Nagasaki region. Practically, the focus shifted from church architecture to the villages.7 The comparison with other World Heritage Christian sites in and outside Japan reveals the nature of the ‘hiding’ conducted by the Hidden Christians. While in other nominations (e.g. ‘Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia’ in Turkey), Christians also kept their faith while in hiding 3 The Association includes people from churches, local companies, mass media and local ­government and has approximatively 80 members. 4 A Tentative List is an inventory of properties that each State Party (state which ratified the World Heritage Convention) intends to consider for World Heritage nomination. 5 Outstanding Universal Value means cultural and / or natural significance which is so excep tional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity (Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention 2019, 20). (the International Council on Monuments and Sites) is the advisory body for cultural sites to the World Heritage Centre. See Boyle’s chapter for the wider context of this move.

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from religious suppression, the case of Nagasaki is different in that Christians there did not physically hide from the outside world, but were in social hiding, meaning that they maintained their Christian faith while outwardly behaving as Buddhist and Shinto practitioners. In terms of other Asian countries and their histories of acceptance of Christianity, the World Heritage narrative shows that only in Japan was the Christian faith passed down secretly through many generations in the complete absence of missionaries and despite the two-century ban. Other Hidden Christian communities across Japan disintegrated in the eighteenth century because of the ban, remaining intact only in the Nagasaki region. This comparative analysis nuances the meaning of ‘­hiding’ and accentuates the distinction of the religious tradition nurtured by the Hidden Christians of Japan while reinforcing wider, universal dimensions such as endurance, resilience, strength, and creativity in keeping the faith. The selection of the ten villages considers the civil authorities’ ways of ­targeting the Christians and consequent development of the tradition in secrecy. 214 villages were shortlisted for inclusion based on three common characteristics: (a) the entire population was registered with Buddhist temples (terauke seido); (b) burial practices such as changing the direction in which the body was facing when interred, differing from the Buddhist ones; (c) under the direction of religious leaders known as Mizukata (a person in charge of baptizing people) or Chokata (a head of all followers who decides every year’s calendar) they formed small faith communities through which they practiced and passed on their belief to others. The unique focus of the file on Christians as being the sole target of the authorities is challenged by recent historical scholarship (Nogueira Ramos 2019). The latter nuances the persecution narrative and shows that, in addition to Hidden Christians, the authorities targeted the illegal Nichiren branch called Kakure Daimoku or Fujufuse, and various heterodox movements issued from the Pure Land School (kakure nenbutsu). Thus, by focusing uniquely on the ban on Christianity, the file provides a simplified historical narrative. The new nomination file received a series of criticisms, the disconnection of the sites from the Hidden Christian narrative; the disconnection of the churches, built by foreigners in the early Meiji era, with the Hidden Christians from the Edo period; and the short time span in which the new nomination file was prepared (Saitsu 2017). Another criticism shows that the file obscures the differences between the underground Christians (Senpuku Kirishitan) from the Edo period and contemporary Hidden Christians (Kakure Kirishitan) through the use of the term ‘Hidden Christian’ in its English title, while the Japanese name of the property explicitly refers to the Senpuku Kirishitan experts as well as members of the Nagasaki World

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Heritage Scholarly Conference8 were also criticised, as they did not visit museums related to the past and present of Hidden Christians during their stays in Hirado City, and thus failed to understand the disruptions experienced by the Hidden Christian communities (Otsuki 2018, 39).9 However, the universal value of a nomination file is always a subject of ­contestation in terms of excluded narratives. For the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, the exclusion of Korean forced labourers working at the sites had been criticised by South Korea and China for failure to display universal values (Underwood 2015), revealing an example of how East Asian governments clash and rub against each other (Boyle 2019, 293). Recent work (Brumann 2021, 131) reveals the diplomatic tussle around the attribution of World Heritage designations to these sites, and the reactions of the Japanese and South Korean delegations to the ICOMOS inscription recommendations and calls to convey the ‘full history’. In terms of the national-level attitudes towards the nomination of C ­ hristian heritage, while the inscription of the Christian sites was managed by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the inscription of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution was led by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretariat (naikaku kanbō). Another issue related to the timing of the World Heritage nomination. While 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the ‘discovery’ of ­Hidden Christians at Oura Cathedral, their nomination was given up due to ‘political reasons’. The recommendation for that year was handed over to the Meiji Industrial Sites, while the one for the Christian Sites came up the following year.10 National priorities clearly impact the feasibility of heritage sites being recognized as universal value (again, see Boyle’s chapter here). 8

9

The working group created by the Prefectural Government of Nagasaki in 2007 for d­iscussing the preservation campaign of Catholic heritage sites and writing the ­nomination file. It consists of members from the public and private sectors e.g. Catholic leaders, scholars, business owners or civil servants. Kakure kirishitan 隠れキリシ or senpuku kirishitan 潜伏キリシタン (hidden, crypto, or clandestine Christians) are the labels used by Japanese scholars for referring to the practi tioners of Christian faith in the Edo period. Miyazaki Kentarō (2003) refers to the kakure kirishitan as the descendants of Hidden Christians who did not rejoin the Catholic church after the lifting of the ban and to senpuku kirishitan as those who preserved the Christian faith during the ban. Scholars look at regionally based rituals of kakure kirishitan (Filus 2003; Turnbull 1996; Whelan 1992; Toyama 2014; Harrington 1980) and spatial structures (Imazato 2017), secrecy (Nosco 1993) and a sacred book (Whelan 1996) of the historical Hidden Christians. Dai Hasegawa, Seikaiisan nyūsu 14/ 07/ 12: `Nagasaki no kyōkai-gun to kirisutokyō kanren isan’, seikaiisan e suisen kettei [World Heritage 14/07/12: ‘Nagasaki Churches and Christian Sites’ to be recommended as a World Heritage Site], hasegawadai.com.

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This section shows the transition from two realms of memory that the two nomination files demonstrate. For each file, the selected components define the borders of what is being commemorated as ‘universal’. While the first file presents the sites as a place of exchange and communication of traditional cultures between Japan and the West, the second one accentuates the courage and faith of Japanese Christians, who, for around seven generations, developed a distinctive religious tradition. This transition from one historical narrative to another offers interesting possibilities for examining the ways in which ­tourism narratives are adjusted to the new nomination, and the emerging borders of memory among tourism-makers. At the same time, this section reveals the political stakes of the nomination’s timing which suggests a border of memory, or contested prioritization of heritage within Nagasaki, between the industrial and the Christian sites. The following section outlines the tangible elements of the Hidden Christian culture incorporated by the nomination and their present-day significance. 3

The (In)tangible Heritage of Hidden Christians

The ten villages of the cultural property offer rich material for the mapping of the tangible culture associated with the Hidden Christian. In some villages, the boundary of the nominated property is precisely delineated, such as for Sakitsu Village in Amakusa, where it surrounds the area of the Kogumi unit11 used in Hidden Christian communities. In others, it is more fluid, such as in the villages on Kashiragashima Island, where it incorporates the steep terrain of the island to which the Hidden Christians resolved to migrate, and all of the remains associated with the faith and which bear testimony to the background and process of their migration. In some components, the ‘Hidden Christian’ villages are separated from the ‘Buddhist’ ones and a ‘Shinto’ one, and this separation reveals an artificial division between villages based on religious tradition. The maps of each village pinpoint graveyards, places related to civil and religious authorities, temporary or current churches, and other memorial places. These elements will be discussed succinctly below, in terms of their historical and contemporary significance. The graveyards date from the early period of the initial introduction of ­Christianity, the period of clandestine faith and the transitional phase from the 11

One of the three-scaled groups of Hidden Christians delineated by missionary Jerónimo Rodrigues in the early seventeenth century: regional (sōgumi 惣組), large (ōgumi 大組), kogumi ) groups (Imazato 2017, 270).

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latter half of the nineteenth century. Some remains of Catholic tombs belonging to the first category stand in Kasuga Village and are illustrated in photos with piles of stone rubble. Graveyards from the second category stand in the mainland and offshore villages and look like ordinary Buddhist sites. The World Heritage nomination file further reveals that ‘while Buddhists laid the bodies of the deceased in the coffin in a sitting position (Zakan), Hidden Christians bent the knees of the deceased and laid their bodies on the side, with their heads toward the south. They also buried a piece of camellia wood with the deceased, as this was regarded as sacred by the Hidden Christian communities’ (Japan, Nomination File 2017, 88). Third, the graveyards established in the transitional phase are mixed graveyards of Catholics and Hidden ­Christians and bear the names of specific communities. In order to prevent destruction from wildlife, fences have been installed. Local communities maintain the graveyards that are still in use, and records are kept for those no longer in use (see Figure 5.1). The places related to civil authorities are sites of houses, such as in Sakitsu, where one can find the site of the house of village headmen from the Yoshida family, in which the Efumi12 ceremony took place, and where the present

Graveyard, Sotome area All photographs by the author 12

The Efumi ceremony is a local variation of the anti-Christian policy conducted yearly and forcing people to step on sacred images, medallions, or other Christian devotional items.

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Sakitsu church was constructed in 1934. Similarly, Shitsu Village includes the magistrate’s office that controlled the village during the ban on Christianity. Some sites of houses are marked with a monument. The places of faith include natural sites, sites of houses of Hidden Christian leaders, shrines, and temples. The natural monuments include a mountain that Hidden Christians secretly venerated, and Nakaenoshima Island, where a group of Japanese Catholics were executed and consequently, the Hidden Christians venerated the island as a martyrdom site. The sites of houses are places where houses of religious leaders (Mizukata) stood, and where Hidden Christians’ devotional tools (icons, catechisms, or abalone shells as substitute objects) have been kept up to the present day. Such houses used by local residents will not be opened to the public, and thus stand as invisible memory spaces. In some villages, the Hidden Christians who converted to Catholicism initially used the houses of former leaders as temporary churches for their rituals and later built the current churches in those places. The shrines are places where the Hidden Christians secretly offered the Oratio prayer,13 or where they outwardly belonged in order to hide their inner faith and where they secretly enshrined objects for worship.14 The temple is a place where the Hidden Christians were affiliated while outwardly behaving as Buddhists, and on which the names of Hidden Christian donors are engraved, indicating a close relationship between their communities and the Buddhist temple. Additionally, the maps of the component villages mark down places such as the beach on which Catholic missionaries landed after the ‘Discovery of ­Hidden Christians’,15 rice paddies that were once cultivated by migrant ­Hidden ­Christians, a site that bears witness to the cooperative relationship of Hidden Christians with Buddhist fishing communities (turntable where they hauled in their fishing nets together), places where new waves of persecution occurred in the early Meiji era, and a spot where, after the arrival of mission aries, a conflict of opinion occurred over whether or not to submit to their authority. At the same time, the continuity of land use patterns in each village, the retaining of their original structure and layout, such as the main streets and residential areas dating back to the period of the ban on Christianity are recurring tropes in the World Heritage narrative. A prayer mixing words in Japanese, Portuguese, and Latin, passed down along the period of the ban on Christianity. See the chapter by Shimizu in this volume for examples of how shrines interacted with indigenous religion and practice in Hokkaido and Taiwan. An event to which scholars and the nomination file refer to, when describing a group of Hidden Christians from Urakami who came to Oura Cathedral in 1865 and revealed their secret faith to the missionaries.

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 Egami church

In addition to the tangible heritage of Hidden Christians, all villages except for one include churches built in the early Meiji era symbolizing the end of the religious tradition. The latter are built on memorial places, such as the Sakitsu church, constructed in 1934 at the site of the house of former village headmen from the Yoshida family, or the Former Nokubi church, built in 1908, beside the house of a former Hidden Christian leader (Chokata). The churches are praised for the building techniques, such as the Egami church whose floor level is set high off the ground, considering its position near a spring (see Figure 5.2). In Sakitsu church, tatami mats were used for the flooring from the very beginning, and its altar was set up on the very place where the Efumi ceremony was carried out. Shitsu church has a characteristically low roof that was designed to cope with strong sea winds, as well as two steeples in both the front and the back as a result of extensions. The Former Gorin church holds great significance for the villagers who dismantled, relocated and re-built it on the place of a former prison detaining Christians during one of the last persecution waves. Some of the churches have active parishes (e.g. Shitsu, Sakitsu), while others can be visited from the outside and are open once a year for the commemoration mass of their construction (Ono, see Figure 5.3). While for Oura Cathedral, the archdiocese is responsible for maintenance and conservation, the other churches are maintained by the clergy and the laity.

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 Stonewall along Ono church

This section shows how the tangible heritage of the Hidden Christian embodies layers of time—the emergence of the religious tradition, its unfolding during the clandestine period, and its end. The twelve components make up a so-called ‘serial property’. Such World Heritage properties are composed of two or more elements—even hundreds—separated in space, and their importance stands in the whole assembly rather than in the individual parts. They are considered as a single property, and thus have to be managed as such through a coordinated management system, which is a pre-condition to the inscription (Brumann 2013, 36). Serial properties also reveal that the physical ground and the heritage ground do not always coincide and that there is a growing presence of immaterial aspects within the World Heritage from the 1990s onwards (Brumann and Berliner 2016, 3). The spectrum of components in the studied serial property accounts for an interesting dichotomy between the immaterial aspects and the tangible ones. The intangible is paired with the ‘absence’ of material culture, such as for the sites of houses, but also with the remoteness and belonging of Hidden Christian objects to the private realm, away from a public gaze. The tangible elements are churches and their connection to the Hidden Christian narrative is only tangential. At the same time, the tangible and intangible elements melt away in the village space, and their interrelatedness makes it difficult to grasp them individually. The following

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section shows how elements of the cultural property are depicted in tourism narratives along the nomination, and the borders of memory emerging within and between these institutions. 4

Tourism in the World Heritage Property

The making of Hidden Christian tangible sites as touristic destinations unfolds in a context in which the joint preservation and use of culture is actively encouraged by the Japanese government. In 2018, a revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties (bunkazai hogohō), the national law protecting Japan’s cultural heritage, gives more freedom to local authorities to make use of heritage as tourism resources under slogans such as ‘from preservation to practical use’ (hozon kara katsuyō e) and ‘culture that makes money’ (kasegu bunka) (Teeuwen and Rots 2020, 11). At the same time, a ‘Strategy for revitalizing regional areas’ (Chihō saisei senryaku), beginning in 2007 and prioritised under the second Abe administration (2012–2020), sought to counter the effects of a rapidly aging population and of the flow of people into urban areas. The regional revitalization plans and the cultural property law target the increase of both visitor and inhabitant numbers and the use of regional resources, such as abandoned agricultural fields. In the World Heritage narrative, together with environmental pressures, the gradual abandonment of villages by their inhabitants due to economic ­migration towards urban centres, and the consequent loss of memories due to rituals and memories no longer passing from generation to generation, tourism is highlighted as one of the factors affecting the property. However, in spite of this narrative and the tourism promotion efforts, the number of visi tors remains low. While Oura Cathedral is the most visited component with 49,020 persons per month, Kasuga Village is the least visited one, with only 100 persons per month (Comprehensive Preservation and Management Plan 2017, 113). The low visitor numbers suggest that there is no threat of over-visitation, as anticipated in the World Heritage narrative. In 2017, the posters of the old nomination ‘Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki’ still covered the walls of taxi stops in Narujima and Hisakajima, while people headed from the port to 30 minutes-long visits of the churches and back. In some components, the tourism infrastructure is experimental, with electric vehicles to be tested, park and ride systems, rental bicycles with motor-assist functions, a trial cruise, and digital content in English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Residential and religious organizations engaged in tourism promotion are depicted in the World Heritage narrative. The former are involved with

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experiencing nature, industry and general daily-life atmosphere and offer programs for making Manjū cakes, potato planting, hand-rolling green tea, making wooden tableware, extracting camellia oil, or hauling in fishing nets. For the latter, one example is the Former Shitsu Aid Centre, established by the parish priest of Sotome in the late nineteenth century and including facilities such as a teaching centre, a macaroni factory, or a flour mill. The Centre offers tea roasting and Sōmen (noodle) making, tea-tree planting, tealeaf picking and potato digging as experience programs (Interview 2020). Other religious associations, NPO s, conferences or sister cities hold Western music concerts, including Gregorian hymns that the early Jesuits taught at their educational institution, or a festival at the Remains of Hara Castle. These small-scale engagements of residential and religious organizations reveal how heritage stands as a ‘little tradition’ (Cox and Brumann 2009) created by those actively involved with its making. On a larger scale, the tourism narratives of the property are produced by the Prefectural Government, the Catholic church, tourism agencies and local guides who make their own tours. The following sub-sections discuss these narratives and the borders of memory that they create. 4.1 The Prefectural Government The Nagasaki Prefectural Government started in 2005 the ‘Project of Discovery and Transmission of History in Nagasaki’, involving the creation of ‘stories’ associated with historic cultural heritage in the prefecture. Christian culture was at the frontline of many historical themes, viewing its peculiarity in rela tion to Nagasaki Prefecture and thus power as a touristic resource. The project resulted in the issuing of the ‘Traveling and Studying Nagasaki’ publication addressing the Christian culture with themes such as the arrival of Francis Xavier at Hirado, the Martyrdom of the 26 saints, the Shimabara Rebellion, and the Hidden Christians in the Edo period. One concrete product of the project was the ‘Nagasaki Kirishitan Kiko (Nagasaki Christian Travel)’ based on the discovery of history and culture in lesser-known places and addressing small travelling groups (Matsui 2009, 153). In 2007, when the nomination file ‘Churches and Christian Sites of Nagasaki’ was put on Japan’s Tentative List, the Nagasaki Prefectural Tourism Federation designed a ‘Nagasaki Pilgrimage’ in consultation with the Catholic Archdiocese of Nagasaki. The pilgrimage sites—churches, martyrdom sites, graves and museums divided into six parts according to the regions in the prefecture—have been promoted as ‘travels of the heart’ (kokoro no tabi). Along with this movement, in 2014, the World Heritage Promotion Division of the Prefectural Government stated that ‘it is our sincerest hope that you will come away with the feeling that this is ‘a living

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heritage’ nurtured through the unyielding persistence of the local community’. However, following the collaboration between the administration and the Catholic Church in the nomination, a change from ‘pilgrimage’ to ‘culture’ occurred, involving a shift from tours of churches to those encompassing a greater variety of places of memory and history (Kawashima 2017, 72). After the submission of the new nomination file, and the shift from churches to villages as the dominant component, members of the Prefectural Government mentioned that this represented the passage from a historical to a substantial aspect, which requires new promotional tools (Interview 2017). The everyday management of tourism in the cultural property is undertaken by the information centre ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’. Founded by the Prefectural Government in 2014, the Centre manages access to seven churches in the inscribed villages and an additional eighth one. It receives individual visits if the total number of visitors is five or less, or group tours for tour organisers if the total number of visitors is six or more. A system of prior notification ensures that visitors are received in appropriate numbers and welcomed by a church keeper, who, in time slots of 30 minutes per visit, explains church etiquette and history. The Centre receives foreign visitors (e.g. from South Korea, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan) who come as pilgrims to visit the churches in the area regardless of the nomination, and Japanese visitors who come for sightseeing.16 One interviewee described the activity of the Centre as such: ‘Our mission is to protect how the church is visited by the tourists, as the churches are not tourist attractions but places of prayer. Because of the changing title the content is hard to understand by the tourists. Under oppression, there was the Fumie, and all Japanese people know this—so some of them are interested in the sites in relation to this knowledge. Otherwise, they come more for sightseeing, unlike foreigners, who come in pilgrimage groups for visiting churches. The tourists who participate at the mass are counted, not the regular ones’ (Interview 2017). The kakure kirishitan are not part of the touristic narrative of the Prefectural Government, and thus a border of memory stands between their past culture and everyday lifestyle. In parallel with the World Heritage promotion, new heritage policies target their folklore and engage in the collection of oral history, thus revealing a transformation of folklore in the age of World ­Heritage Iwamoto 2013). The latest interview data indicates dwindling numbers of kakure kirishitan: 300–400 on Ikituski Island, 50 on Hirado Island, 100 in In 2013, there were 9,038 foreign pilgrims coming with group tours, and the figures following years are 7, 012 (2014), 14, 581 (2015), 12, 296 (2016), 10, 182 (2017), internal document of the Info Center.

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Sotome in Nagasaki and 20–30 in the Goto Islands (Interview 2020, Agency for Cultural Affairs). Other interview data shows that in the 1960, Narujima Island (part of the Goto Islands) had a population of 9,200 out of which about 6,000 were kakure kirishitan.17 The church keepers appointed by the information centre reveal their thoughts on the nomination. One speaks of it as of a double-edged sword: ‘Unlike the oppression, the World Heritage nomination is good news. But there is also a concern about the economic aspect. Local people are confused about all the people coming in’ (Interview 2017). Another one sees the nomination as empowering for local Catholicism: ‘the nomination might promote the spirit of Christianity, and people of the world will see the contribution of Father de Rotz to the area. There is a decrease of population – with the nomination, more people will come as tourists and new residents, and this will make the village more active.’ (Interview 2017) The ethnography of Fukushima (2015) reveals how the aged church congregation members of the Egami church aimed to dismantle it while the church was proposed for inscription, thus pointing at a clash between the wishes of local people and those of the authorities. At the same time, the example is revealing for the meanings of intangibility for local people, as the intangible practice of dismantling the church is more important than preserving the church building itself.18 Furthermore, the process of designating churches with little or no congregations as national or World Heritage properties has been referred to as ‘preserving shells’, though some may also serve as concert venues, pastoral centres, or other social welfare purposes (Fukushima et al 2008). 4.2 The Catholic Church In 2012, there were 62,603 Catholics in the Nagasaki archdiocese, the s­ econd largest number after Tokyo, with 96,258. Nagasaki tops other dioceses in Japan with a percentage of Catholics, with 4.4% compared to 0.5% in Tokyo. Among the 133 churches in Nagasaki Prefecture, 71 are parishes.19 These ­numbers show that Nagasaki stands as an important hub for Japanese Catholicism. Therefore, the engagement of the Catholic Church with the touristic p ­ romotion of the nomination offers interesting ground for analysis.

17 18 19

The everyday culture of the kakure kirishitan will be addressed in further fieldwork. See the chapter by Solomon in this volume for another example of local ideas on ­intangible practice, albeit focused on Japan’s northeast. Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Japan. Source: https://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/wp content /uploads/2016/08/statistics2012.pdf

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The World Heritage promotion movement of the Catholic Church started with the publication of the ‘Guides to Pilgrimage Sites and Churches in ­Nagasaki’ (Nagasaki Bunkensha, 2005), issued under the supervision of the Catholic Archdiocese of Nagasaki. Its five pilgrimage tracks address three dominant themes related to the overall history of Christianity in Japan. The first one is related to martyrdom and the pilgrimage stops are the Nishizaka Martyrs’ Site (26 Martyrs Monument, 26 Martyrs Museum, St. Philip of Jesus Church), martyrdom sites such as the landing and boarding places of the 26 martyrs to the execution place or burial grounds connected to the beheading of 131 martyrs in the ‘Kori Kuduro’ persecution of 1658. Additionally, one pilgrimage includes the Nakamachi church, dedicated to the 16 martyrs of Nagasaki, and the ­aforementioned St. Philip of Jesus Church dedicated to the 26 martyrs of Japan. The second theme is related to overlapping historical layers. One ­pilgrimage stop is the old residence of a Chokata of Hidden Christians, whose ­granddaughter married Dr. Takashi Nagai, author of ‘Leaving these children behind’ and ‘The bells of Nagasaki’, while suffering radiation-related diseases caused by the atomic bombing. A church in the Sasebo area which survived the devastation caused by a succession of major air raids and the Urakami church, built on the site of the village head’s residence and destroyed by the atomic bomb, and the largest Catholic church in East Asia by the time of completion in 1915 are other places which superpose historical narratives. Other related pilgrimage stops are sites of churches destroyed at the beginning of the persecution and where a temple, a prison and a magistrate’s office were constructed. The third pilgrimage theme is related to churches praised for their stunning architecture, such as the Saint Philip of Jesus Church, whose spire-like soaring flame in the sky remind of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. As the Peace Park is included in the pilgrimage tracks, Catholicism and the memory of the atomic bombing are interrelated. Furthermore, the Church portrays the Hidden Christians as ancestors of Catholics who today keep the faith alive by still making monthly visits to a church on a deserted island, or reviving the church exterior in spite of the decreasing number of its parishioners. As for the kakure kirishitan, a display at the 26 Martyrs Museum points to the fact that nowadays, both the Catholic Church and the kakure kirishitan leaders have friendly relations, and there are some common liturgical celebrations. As a next stage of involvement in the nomination, the Nagasaki Catholic Archdiocese founded the Nagasaki Pilgrimage Centre in 2007. In the following year, the latter officially separated from the church, becoming an NPO eligi ble for support from the government and engaging in regional revitalization and tourism promotion. The Centre continues its activity up to present-day by

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supplying pilgrimage maps and related merchandise (e.g. stamp notebooks, badges) and serving as a specialised organization working with pilgrimage guides. 390 pilgrimage-related sites in Nagasaki Prefecture are divided into 6 parts and introduced as a model pilgrimage course. ‘The work of the Centre is to solve the misunderstanding of tourism and praying. Tourists take it for fun, but the church is not for fun. We are not supporting the nomination itself but try to make tourists understand what Christianity in Nagasaki is, as the understanding of this culture is low level.’ (Interview 2017) Then, the interviewee pointed at the need for further training of qualified guides in order to explain the profound meanings of Christianity in Nagasaki with the new nomination, and not just of the churches. Together with the Nagasaki Prefecture Convention and Tourism Association and ‘Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki Information Centre’, the Nagasaki Pilgrimage Centre is one of the creators of the Pilgrimage Guide (2017) – a specialised guide with pilgrimage tracks in the Nagasaki Prefecture. This partnership between the state, an association and an NPO reflects a devolution of authority from the state to a multi-level heritage protection, as highlighted by Coombe (2012). In the narrative of the Catholic church, the World Heritage site highlights the universal dimension of Catholicism, which surpasses national borders via the theme of martyrdom, and in its descriptions of churches with European influence. Moreover, the site is an expression of overcoming a history of confrontation between religion and the state, therefore speaking to a universal value. The worldwide dimension also stands in the words of an interviewee, a member of the Former Shitsu Aid Centre who, when asked about the most emotional moment since the opening of the centre, answered that ‘it was when a South American priest visited the centre and played a hymn on the old organ which Father de Rotz had ordered from France. And the Japanese visitors who happened to be there sang along with the organ’ (Interview 2020). While for the Prefectural Government the label ‘pilgrimage’ refers to cultural and historical sites of Nagasaki Prefecture, for the Catholic church, it is impregnated with a universal religious significance in which Nagasaki was and is a locus of Catholicism. Tourism Agencies Since 2007, Japanese tourism agencies have designed tours with a thematic focus on specific Christianity-related historical areas of Nagasaki Prefecture. A Kyushu-based tourist agency designed three Christian pilgrimage tours (a one-, three- and six-day tour) in the Nagasaki region after the World Heritage registration. Its one-day tour includes Sotome pilgrimage sites (Shitsu church, Former Shitsu Aid Center, Endō Shūsaku Literary Museum, Kurosaki

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Church20) and Nagasaki-based ones (Ground Zero, the 26 Martyrs Museum, Oura Cathedral). The three day-tour adds Nagasaki City (Peace Park, Atomic Bomb Museum, Peace Fountain, Peace Statue) and Unzen-based nature sites (Nita Pass and Unzen Jigoku) for its second day. The third day is based in Shimabara and includes the Harajō castle ruins and Shimabara Castle. The sixday tour adds sites in Kumamoto Prefecture (e.g. Oe Cathedral, Sakitsu Village, ­Kumamoto Castle) in its fourth day and in Hirado (Tabira Church, Matsura Historical Museum, Dutch Trading Post, St. Francis Xavier Memorial Church, Hirado C ­ astle, Nakaenoshima Island, Kasuga Village) in its fifth and sixth days. In these tours, Christianity-related historical sites (churches, museums, castles), places related to the overseas exchanges of Nagasaki (trading post), and sites related to the atomic bombing are combined. The agency targets Christians all over the world who are interested in Christian history and practice in Nagasaki, and so far, visitors have come from Hong Kong, Singapore, ­Philippines, and the UK (Interview 2020). The kakure kirishitan are connected to Kasuga Village and Nakaenoshima Island, the focus being on historical Christianity (see Figure 5.4). A Philippines-based agency did a five day-long Nagasaki Pilgrimage educational tour in April 2020 with a parish priest as a spiritual chaplain and twenty Filipino priests and five lay persons. Its stops were places related to Christian history in Nagasaki City and Prefecture (St. Francis Xavier Memorial Church, Tabira Church, Oura Cathedral and Christian Museum, Urakami Cathedral, Nakamachi church, 26 Martyrs Museum, Nishizaka Hill, Minami Shimabara Arima Christian Heritage Museum), as well as sites related to the atomic bombing (Atomic Bomb Museum, Peace Park), international Nagasaki (Glover G ­ ardens) and a nature site which embeds a story of Christian martyrdom (Unzen Jigoku). The kakure kirishitan are present in the Shima no Yakata Museum stop which includes artefacts related to their recent history. The theme of most interest to the visitors ‘is connected to Philippines’ first saint, Lorenzo Ruiz, who earned his sainthood by refusing to surrender his faith as demanded by the Tokugawa shogunate’ (Interview 2020). San Lorenzo Ruiz, the first F­ ilipino saint stands among sixteen martyrs of N ­ agasaki who died between 1633 and 1637 to whom the Nakamachi church is dedicated. Just like the Kyushu-based agency, the Philippines-based one prioritises places related to historical Christianity and adds sites on the atomic bombing and i­nternational history of Nagasaki City. It is important to note that the

20

The church located in the Kurosaki district is the setting for Endō Shūsaku’ s (1923–1996) novel Silence

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 Stone shrine, Kasuga village

term ‘pilgrimage’ is used in a loose sense by both agencies for itineraries with ­religious as well as non-religious sites. A Tokyo-based agency focusing on Japan’s rural regions proposes the discovery of the Goto Islands as Japan’s religious and secluded islands, through cycling tours, trekking uninhabited islands, and island-hopping tours. As its

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experience tour was designed after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, currently it mainly conducts cycling tours for Japanese residents. Its target customers are ‘educated travellers, a group of people who value cross-cultural exchange and mutual understanding’ (Interview 2020). As an agency member explained: The World Heritage part was not the only reason for developing the tour, as we would like the traveller to experience the way of life in Goto because it is so attractive. These tours make people aware of something new, what is important to local life and it immerses them in it. These reasons include Hidden Christians’ life, history, and their thoughts. The tours should be sustainable and respectful of local life. (Interview 2020) The island-hopping tour includes accommodation in a Japanese style designer’s house and trekking through a village with remains of houses, stone walls of farmlands, a cemetery, and the remains of a wooden church. The village is reachable through forests via the Satomichi old trail that settlers used to get to mass as well as to school in the Nokubi settlement. The agency works with French, Italian, and Portuguese guides based in their countries who are Hidden Christian experts and could be added to the tours. Thus, the ­Tokyo-based agency stands in contrast with the Kyushu and Philippines-based ones, in terms of its focus on experiencing island life and thus embedding the Christian culture into a larger picture. The travelling is also more non-conventional and the experience is immersive; it is difficult to label as either sightseeing or religious exploration (Takehisa 2018). 4.4 Local Guides The local guides who make their own tours began their activities in the 2010s and mainly target cruise ship passengers who visit Nagasaki City for the day— Nagasaki generally welcomes more than 40 cruise ships per year. Other targets are private tours, school trips with educational tours, international exchange programs, and visiting VIP s. The tours last between 4 and 8 hours and are tar geted at groups of 3 to 8 people. The first type of tour is aimed at discovering Nagasaki City for the first time and includes the atomic bomb sites, Mount Inasa, sites related to Nagasaki as the port opened to foreign trade (Dejima, Glover Garden, Sōfuku-ji Temple, Suwa Shinto Shrine), the urban structure under the Edo shogunate (Spectacle Bridge), and two Christianity-related sites See the chapter by Ivings in this volume for a discussion of heritage related to foreign trade in Japan in the nineteenth century.

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(Oura Cathedral, the Site of the 26 Martyrs). Other tours are briefer and limited to atomic bomb related sites, Chinatown and Glover garden, with the history of Christianity in Nagasaki a side story: After visiting Glover Garden, Oura Cathedral is located on the way back to the cruise port. So, I stop in front of the church and summarise the history of Christianity in Nagasaki. If my clients have more time to spend in Nagasaki City or if they are Catholic, I include the 26 Martyrs Site, Oura church and Urakami Cathedral. The guests did not ask me to include any of the World Heritage components, except one family from the P ­ hilippines. (Interview 2020) The second type of tour addresses Christian sites in Nagasaki City, and includes churches (the Oura Church, Nakamachi Church, Urakami Cathedral), ­martyrdom sites (Site of the 26 Martyrs and Museum and St. Philippo Church, 26 Martyrs Hill, and St. Kolbe’s Lourdes on the hill occasionally), the Dr. Nagai Memorial Museum and the Hidden Christian leader’s house (­Nyokodo). These tours add the Peace Park and Glover garden as sites not related to Christianity. The third type includes the churches and Christian sites in the Sotome area, and targets churches for visits from outside (Kurosaki church, Ono church, Shitsu church), museums related to historical Museum of Hidden Christian cultural tradition, Endō Shūsaku’ Literary Museum) and contemporary (Sotome Museum of History and Folklore) Hidden Christian culture, an in-coming Catholic missionary in the late 1800s (the Former Shitsu Aid ­Centre), monuments and memorials (Monument of Chinmoku or Silence, De Rotz Memorial Hall). Two places reachable through forest trekking are Bastian’s hut (a hiding place for a baptised Japanese priest in the 1640s) and the Karematsu Shrine, dedicated to this priest. In addition to the Nagasaki region, the Amakusa region is targeted by a local guide who includes a half-day pilgrimage tour of two Catholic churches, a rosary museum with a recording of a secret prayer, and a park with magnificent sea views in her tours. The Amakusa region is presented like a lost ­paradise, with seafood tasting and dolphin watching, and the churches are praised as such in the guide’s description: ‘by international standards, these churches are small and simple. But there are no Christians in the world who overcame a 250-year persecution like the ones in Nagasaki and neighbouring Amakusa did.’ The guide acknowledges the changes brought by the World Her itage nomination: ‘the places have more visitors after they were designated as World Heritage. In Amakusa the local government has built a small but new

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museum for visitors and big parking areas. And Oura church in Nagasaki has turned an old Latin seminary building into a museum too’ (Interview 2020). Apart from the regions of Nagasaki and Amakusa, other World Heritage components are less approached in standard tours, except for a tour on ­Kuroshima Island, which includes a shrine, a temple, a Catholic Church, a viewpoint as well as a nut tree from which Hidden Christians made nut oil, and Ficus Superba plants used as windshields. One itinerary in Nishisonogi area creatively combines the Christian heritage (Shitsu community, Ono church), with industrial heritage (Hario Communication Tour) and nature (Saikai Bashi Park, N ­ anatsugama cave, Nagasaki bio park). Nagasaki as a leader of Japan’s modernization is addressed in some tours with the ‘Battleship Island’ (­Gunkanjima) mine as an optional site, either visited or observed from the mainland. In addition to standard tours, local guides do customised tours in Shimabara, Hirado or the Goto Islands or serve as guides for travel agents who most often organise tours in the Goto Islands. In addition to the four churches registered as World Heritage Sites (Kyu-Nokubi, Kashiragashima, Egami and Kyugorin) and a Christian cave, the Goto Islands are also paired with bathing, canoeing, coral reef diving, fishing, wild vegetation, black lava shores, white sands and blue water, seafood and/or real-life inspired art. However, an interviewee suggested there had been no major increase in visitor numbers in the villages of the cultural property: In my view, the number of visitors has not changed so much as a whole. One of the reasons is the location. Most components are in rural areas or small islands off the coast of the mainland of Kyushu. Arrangements for transportation need to be well prepared in advance. For some foreign tourists, these places may look attractive, but it is really hard to coordinate many things on their own. (Interview 2020) In addition to the tours themselves, local guides provide clients with opportunities to experience Japanese culture e.g. tea ceremony, calligraphy, eating whale meat if they so wish, and they introduce Nagasaki’s unique food culture through meals at local restaurants. As the places mapped in the villages of the cultural property (shrines, ­graveyards, or sites of houses) are not part of the itineraries of touristic ­agencies and local guides, a boundary stands between the World Heritage nar rative and these touristic narratives. Unlike the tours of tourism agencies, the tours made by local guides are more intimate, immersive, sensuous, involving chatting with local inhabitants, tasting Nagasaki’s cuisine, or hiking to hidden gems hard to find on one’s own. Ropeways, streetcars and/or rental bicycles are

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used as means of transportation. The narratives on the numbers of tourists are polarised between increasing numbers (Amakusa) and unchanged ones (Goto Islands). The kakure kirishitan culture is addressed with the inclusion of local museums. However, for these guides, the overall discovery of Nagasaki City as an exotic and multicultural place is the primary endeavour, while Christian Nagasaki comes second. 5 Conclusion This chapter has shown how the World Heritage cultural property ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region’ generates borders of memory at the level of specific institutions—the Prefectural Government, the church, the touristic agencies, and the local guides—through the lens of tourism. My ­analysis revealed that the World Heritage produces an idealised version of the history and religious tradition nurtured by the Hidden Christians during the ban. First, this history collides with the narratives of Japanese scholars who address criticisms related to the disconnection of its Outstanding ­Universal Value with a lack of tangible evidence from the Hidden Christian period. ­Second, it competes with the narrative of a historian who, in his study on ­Japanese pre-­modern rural society, reveals that the Hidden Christians were not the only religious group targeted by the ban policy. The criticisms also reveal that, in spite of being the natural carriers of heritage, the kakure kirishitan are absent from the World Heritage narrative. The outlook on Hidden Christian tangible culture shows that some heritage elements have a present-day significance (e.g. functional churches) while others are just spaces marked with monuments (e.g. sites of houses). As some houses which host devotional objects are not open for visitation, the everyday, private memory and the public memory put forward in the nomination file stand apart. The chapter has revealed how the Prefectural Government initially focused on Christian culture of Nagasaki and later on the nomination passed to the promotion of pilgrimage, while still focusing on the historical significance of Christian culture. On the other hand, the Catholic church focuses on the religious significance of Christian sites and is committed to revealing the universal dimension of the Catholic faith in Nagasaki, by including narratives on architectural fusions of churches between east and west, and a narrative of martyrdom as central. Viewing the historical focus of the state and religious focus of the church, a border of memory is set between the two institutions. At the same time, there is a fusion between the two institutions, with the partic ipation of the Catholic Church in the promotion of tourism by the Prefectural Government.

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Tourism agencies focus on a mixed narrative of Nagasaki as the only port opened to the West, as a place of international exchange, as an atomic bomb site and as a Christianity hub. With the nomination, Christian culture in ­Nagasaki has been re-designed and re-addressed in terms of its World Heritage label. The Hidden Christian narrative occupies a small part of most itineraries. For one Tokyo-based agency, the Christianity narrative is embedded in the overall discovery of the Goto Islands as Japan’s Christian islands. The boundaries between sacred and secular are blurred, through the inclusion of sites related to all aspects of Nagasaki City and related use of the term ‘pilgrimage’ for the itineraries. Local guides who make their own tours propose separate itineraries for discovering international and atomic-bomb related Nagasaki sites, and Christian ones. With stops at local museums, they include the kakure kirishitan in their tours. The touristic narratives of agencies and local guides do not include sites of houses, sites related to authorities, or other places marked in the inscribed villages. The memory of these places therefore remains private, and a border is thus once again set between the nomination narrative and the tourist narrative. While looking back at the two preservation logics outlined by Ogino (2016), the chapter reveals that the logic of actualization is meaningful for church congregation members and local residents who engage with preservation of functional or closed churches, or aimed to dismantle the Egami church when the nomination started. The preservation of the present is meaningful for the church and the state in their own ways of engaging with tourism promotion. Acknowledgements For bringing this chapter to light, I am deeply grateful to Prof. Takahiro ­Miyachi for his continuous support of my research ideas and hosting of my projects, to Prof. Christoph Brumann for his helpful comments on the draft version and to the editors of the volume, for the enriching workshop discussions and ­feedback. Naturally, all inaccuracies remain my own. References Agency for Cultural Affairs, 2018. Yearbook of religion (shūkyō nenkan), accessed on 10.9.2020. https://www.bunka.go.jp/tokei_hakusho_shuppan/hakusho_nenjihokok usho/shukyo_nenkan/ Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of memory: affirmation and contestation over Japan’s heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312.

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Brumann, Christoph. 2013. ‘Comment le patrimoine mondial de l’Unesco devient immatériel.’ Gradhiva 18: 22–49. Brumann, Christoph. 2021. The Best We Share: Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena. New York: Berghahn Publishers. Brumann, Christoph, and David Berliner. 2016. ‘Introduction. UNESCO World Heritage – Grounded?’ In World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann and David Berliner, 1–34. New York: Berghan Publishers. Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Japan (CBCJ). Accessed on 12.12.2020. https://www .cbcj.catholic.jp/english/japan/comt/. Comprehensive Preservation and Management Plan. 2017. ‘Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region.’ Accessed on 1.2.2021. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1495 /documents/. Coombe, Rosemary J. 2012. ‘Managing Cultural Heritage as Neoliberal Governmentality.’ In Heritage Regimes and the State, edited by Regina Bendix, Aditya Eggert and Arnika Peselmann, 375–387. Gottingen: Universitätsverlag Gottingen. Cox, Rupert, and Christoph Brumann. 2009. ‘Introduction.’ In Making Japanese ­Heritage, edited by Christoph Brumann and Rupert Cox, 1–19. London: Routledge. De Luca, Renzo and Miura. 2012. Association for Declaring the Nagasaki Church Group a World Heritage. Accessed on 1.5.2019. http://www.heritage-nagasaki.jp/en/e _index.html. DeWitt, Lindsey E. 2020. ‘World Cultural Heritage and Women’s Exclusion from Sacred Sites in Japan.’ In Sacred Heritage in Japan, edited by Aike P. Rots and Mark ­Teeuwen, 65–86. Abingdon: Routledge. Ehrentraut, Adolf W. 1993. ‘Heritage authenticity and domestic tourism in Japan.’ Annals of Tourism Research, 20 (2): 262–278. Filus, Dorothea. 2003. ‘Secrecy and Kakure Kirishitan.’ Bulletin of Portuguese – Japanese Studies, 7: 93–113. Fukushima, Ayako. 2015. ‘Demolitions of Tangible Properties as an Intangible Practice.’ In World Heritage, Tourism, and Identity. Inscription and co-production, edited by Maria-Gravari Barbas and Mike Robinson, London: Routledge, 199–217. Fukushima, Ayako, Junne Kikata, Tadashi Takao and Hisashi Shibata. 2008. ’Preserving the ‘shell’ and Regenerating the spirit - Case Study of Christian churches in islands in the southern Japan.’ At the 16th ICOMOS General Assembly and International Symposium: ‘Finding the spirit of place – between the tangible and the intangible’, 29 Sept.–4 Oct. 2008, Quebec, Canada. Harrington, Ann. 1980. ‘The kakure kirishitan and their place in Japan’s religious ­tradition.’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 7 (4): 318–336. Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region. World Heritage Nomination 2017. Japan. Accessed on 1.2.2021. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1495/documents/. ICOMOS, 2017. Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region ( Japan) – Interim report and additional information request. Charenton-le-Pont: ICOMOS

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Imazato, Satoshi. 2017. ‘Spatial Structures of Japanese Hidden Christian Organizations on Hirado Island.’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 44 (2): 255–279. Iwamoto, Michiya. 2013. Sekai isan jidai no minzoku-gaku. Tokyo: Fukyousha. Kawashima, D. Tinka. 2017. ‘Pilgrimage, cultural landscape and tourism in the heritization of churches and Christian sites in Nagasaki.’ In Conflicts, Religion and Culture in Tourism, edited by Razaq Raj and Kevin Griffin, 69–81. Abingdon: CABI. Kelly, William W. 1986. ‘Rationalization and Nostalgia: Cultural Dynamics of New ­Middle-Class Japan.’ American Ethnologist, 13 (4): 603–18. Kikuchi, Akira. 2020. ‘What does it mean to become UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage? The case of aenokoto.’ In Sacred Heritage in Japan, edited by Aike P. Rots and Mark Teeuwen, 113–133. Abingdon: Routledge. Mateoc, Raluca. 2019. ‘World and Local Heritage along the Nomination Process of ‘­Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region.’ The Annals of The Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of ‘Dimitrie Cantemir’ Christian University, 18 (1): 125–146. Matsui, Keisuke. 2009. ‘Commodification of a Rural Space in a World Heritage Registration Movement: Case Study of Nagasaki Church Group.’ Geographical Review of Japan Series B, 82 (2): 149–166. Miyazaki, Kentarō. 2003. ‘The Kakure Kirishitan Tradition.’ In Handbook of Christianity in Japan, edited by Mark M. Mullins, 19–35. Leiden: Brill. Nagasaki Bunkensha. 2005. ‘Guide to Pilgrimage Sites and Churches in Nagasaki,’ supervised by The Archdiocese of Nagasaki. Nagasaki Prefecture Convention and Tourism Association, Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki Information Center, Nagasaki Pilgrimage Center. 2017. ‘Nagasaki Pilgrimage: A Guide to the Churches and Christian Sites of Nagasaki. Nagasaki ­Prefecture.’ Nogueira Ramos, Martin. 2019. La foi des ancêtres. Chrétiens cachés et catholiques dans la société villageoise japonaise (XVIIe-XIXe siècle). Paris: CNRS Editions. Nosco, Peter. 1993. ‘Secrecy and the Transmission of Tradition: Issues in the Study of the ‘Underground’ Christians.’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 20 (1): 3–29. Ogino, Masahiro. 2016. ‘Considering undercurrents in Japanese cultural heritage ­management: the logic of actualization and the preservation of the present.’ In Reconsidering Cultural Heritage in East Asia, edited by Akira Matsuda and Luisa Elena Mengoni, 15–29. London: Ubiquity Press. Omata Rappo, Hitomi. 2017. ‘Memories of a “Christian Past” in Japan: The Museum of the Twenty-Six Martyrs in Nagasaki.’ Anais de História de Além-Mar, 249–282. Otsuki, Tomoe. 2018. ‘A Critical Review of Catholic Heritage Sites in Nagasaki, Japan’. The Newsletter, International Institure for Asian Studies, 80: 38–39.

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Rots, Aike P. 2020. ‘Whose sacred heritage? Contesting World Heritage at Sēfa Utaki.’ In Sacred Heritage in Japan, edited by Aike P. Rots and Mark Teeuwen, 87–111. ­Abingdon: Routledge. Rots, Aike P., and Mark Teeuwen, eds. 2020. Sacred Heritage in Japan. Abingdon: ­Routledge. Saitsu, Yumiko. 2017. ‘“Nagasaki no Kyōkai-gun” sekai isan suisen torisage kara miete kuru mono’. In Nagasaki: kioku no fūkei to sono hyōshō, edited by Hayanagi ­Kazunori. Kyoto: Kōyō-shobō. Smith Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Takehisa, Kadota. 2018. ‘Spirituelle Touristen und Profane Pilger. Zusammentreffen von Religion und Tourismus en einem japanishen Kulturerbe.’ In Themen und ­Tendenzen der deutschen und japanischen Volkskunde im Austausch, edited by Johannes Moser, 139–161. New York: Waxmann. Teeuwen, Mark, and Aike P. Rots. 2020. ‘Heritage-making and the transformation of religion in modern Japan.’ In Sacred Heritage in Japan, edited by Aike P. Rots and Mark Teeuwen, 1–16. Abingdon: Routledge. Toyama, Itsuko. 2014. ‘Dual Funeral Services: Compatibility and Consistency in the Dual Religions of Japans Kakure Kirishitan.’ Accessed on 10.10.2020. https://www. andrew.ac.jp/soken/assets/wr/sokenk215_1.pdf. Turnbull, Stephen. 1996. ‘Acculturation among the Kakure Kirishitan: Some Conclusions from the Tenchi Hajimari no Koto.’ In Japan and Christianity, edited by John Breen and Mark Williams, London: Palgrave MacMillan. Underwood, William. 2015. ‘History in a Box: UNESCO and the Framing of Japan’s Meiji Era.’ The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 13 (26): 1–14. UNESCO. 2019. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World ­Heritage Convention 2019. Intergovernmental Committee for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, World Heritage Centre. Accesses on 2.12.2020. https://whc.unesco.org/en/guidelines/ Whelan, Christal. 1992. ‘Religion Concealed. The Kakure Kirishitan on Narushima.’ Monumenta Nipponica, 47 (3): 369–387. Whelan, Christal. 1996. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth: The Sacred Book of Japan’s Kakure Kirishitan, translated and annotated by Christal Whelan, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

PART 2 Material Matters

CHAPTER 6

Art in Former Military Sites: Spectres of Geopolitics in the South China Sea Gabriel N. Gee Abstract In the late twentieth century, former industrial warehouses throughout the globe have found a new lease of life as ideal spaces for the exhibition of contemporary arts. ­Following the diversification of artistic practices at the turn of the 1960s, abandoned factories offered ideal opportunities for the development of new artistic forms such as installation and performative works. In parallel, former military and surveillance sites have on occasion encountered a similar fate. In Southeast Asia, the ­transformation of former military barracks and compounds into exhibition spaces runs parallel to the regeneration of industrial buildings. In the cultural repurposing of military infrastructures, however, a question arises as to the remaining visibility and agency of their ­former function. To what extent, in what manner, does the weight of history transpire within the walls of the gallery? This chapter aims to reflect on the repurposed functionalities of different types of former military sites in Southeast and East Asia, and the manner through which military history and heritage survives in these places, visibly and invisibly. Repurposed military and surveillance sites offer an opportunity to consider the changing textures of geopolitics, and the ongoing interrogations they ask of our contemporary societies.

Keywords contemporary art – military heritage – maritime history – colonial history – ­microhistory – Southeast Asia – East Asia – South China Sea

In the late twentieth century, former industrial warehouses throughout the globe have found a new lease of life as ideal spaces for the exhibition of contemporary arts. Following the diversification of artistic practices at the turn of the 1960s, abandoned factories offered ideal opportunities for the develop ment of new artistic forms such as installation and performative works. They © Gabriel N. Gee, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_007

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also embodied significantly the shift from Fordist and modernist societies to more flexible consumerist models. In parallel, one might notice that former military and surveillance sites have on a number of occasions encountered a similar fate. In Southeast Asia, the transformation of former military barracks and compounds into exhibition spaces, such as the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Singapore, runs parallel to the regeneration of industrial buildings, for example that of the Centre for Heritage, Art and Textiles (CHAT) in the former factory of the Nan Fung Cotton Mills in Hong Kong. In the cultural repurposing of military infrastructures, however, a question arises as to the remaining visibility and agency of their former function. To what extent, in what manner, does the weight of history transpire within the walls of the gallery? Additionally, in some instances, sites with military connotations inherited from 20th century conflicts have been appropriated by artists, whose work aimed to take advantage of their symbolic presence. This was the case of the project Floating Island in 2013, which revisited bunkers and battery sites on the Kinmen Islands under Taiwanese jurisdiction off the Chinese coast. How can artistic practices revitalize these sites? In fact, given the complex and in many occasions dark heritage associated with the history of such sites in the South China Seas, to what extent can revitalization give way to a thanatic reflection, whose capacity to summon the spectres of history can serve as a cautionary reminder of the region’s contested past and territories? This chapter aims to reflect on the repurposed functionalities of different types of former military sites in Southeast and East Asia, and the­ manner through which military history and heritage survives in these places, ­visibly and invisibly. Given the conflicted roots of former military structures, often located at the crossroads between competing geopolitical ambitions, the reflection considers their capacity to invoke memories of cir culation and confrontation as inscribed in space. With respect to this volume’s contribution to an ongoing reflection on ‘borders of memory’, it explores the particular juxtaposition of competing narratives on sites marked by the imposition of significant state apparatus. It considers the manner through which national memories can be revisited, rethought and layered by artistic interventions that reveal the plural voices at play in the constitution of past and present collective identities. Moreover, the reinvention of military sites does not attest to the disappearance of military infrastructure and pressure in the region, simply relocated to more appropriate facilities. Repurposed military and surveillance sites offer an opportunity to consider the changing textures of geopolitics, and the ongoing interrogations they ask of our contemporary societies.

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Military Buildings and the White Cube

The image of the ‘white cube’ has captured the emergence in the 20th century of an autonomous gallery space, suited first to the development of modernism, then adapted more broadly to the exhibition of international contemporary arts. The artist Brian O’Doherty, in a series of essays published in 1976 in the American Art journal Artforum, offered a revealing analysis of the white cube as gallery space, in its formal qualities, as in its underlying reason of being: A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval Church. The outside world must not come in. The windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pound soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying goes, to ‘take on his own life’. (O’Doherty 1986, 15) The development of such a neutralized space for artistic experience mirrored the formal investigations of the modern avant-garde. It came as a radical break with preceding modes of displays, in which paintings were piled one upon the other on richly coloured walls. The model of the white cube retreated to an invisible shell in which the appreciation of the internal logics of artworks could be best nurtured: Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial – the space is devoted to the technology of aesthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display. (O’Doherty 1986, 15) The Museum of Modern Art which opened in 1929 in New York is the founding landmark in the history of white cube design and its subsequent global expansion (Lowry 2009). With the diversifications of practices that occurred in the second half of the 20th century, new genres, mediums and formats for artistic practices investigated new spaces; succeeding generations of white cubes ­nevertheless continued to thrive, seducing generations of curators with their laidback, seemingly neutral, opened stance. A product of Western museology, it has accompanied the internationalization of the art scene in the second half of the century throughout the world (Filipovic 2014). In Southeast Asia for exam ple, the main halls of Taipei Museum of Fine Art and the pristine galleries of

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Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, the design of the Singapore National G ­ allery or the temporary settings of art fairs such as Art Basel in Hong Kong or Taipei Art Fair, all attest to the influence and pervasiveness of the white cube model. O’Doherty’s interest was not solely to pin down the spatial and formal characteristics of the white cube, but to reflect on the context(s) that led to its development, and the roles it plays in our society; given the widespread influence of the model, such a contextual reflection also points to the shifts in the mapping of international industrial production, and the expanding importance of a diversified cultural production and consumption in our globalized society. In that respect, the increasing availability in former industrialized nations of large, vacant warehouses and factory halls, and their metamorphosis into art and cultural centres, attests to a global economic transformation, with its myriad of regional reconfigurations. The Tate Modern in London, for instance, opened in 2000, occupies the former Bankside Power Station, an iconic building designed (1947–63) by the architect Giles Gilbert Scott. It is a powerful symbol of Great Britain’s economic transformation in the second half of the twentieth century, with the abandonment of its industrial past and the adoption of new economic models based on finance and knowledge production. Within the larger historical frame of global entanglements, different regional contexts lead to different histories. In Taiwan for example, conversions of buildings such as Huashan 1914 Creative Park, once a wine and camphor ­factory in the heart of Taipei, evoke industrialization on the island during Japanese rule (Wang 2016).1 The Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile in Hong Kong, mentioned earlier, embodies local entrepreneurship under British rule in the post war era, before Chinese textile production in the 1980s overwhelmed the market. In such bricked warehouses adorned with disused chimneys, the former industrial shell is smoothly incorporated into a new cultural economy;2 the toils of old give way to the chirping sounds of electronic communication and the rediscovered touch of artisan making. How do the walls of military structures respond to such reappropriations? Do they lean neatly into a new future? Or do their previous identities emerge 1 The Huashan buildings were abandoned in 1987; it reopened as a creative park in 2003. 2 In Taiwan as in the West, modernization processes have their partisan and detractors. ­Creative industries take inspiration from Richard Florida Cities and the Creative Class (­ when social historians point to the depolitization of what they see as violent transformation (High, 2017). In the economic mutations that occurred in the late 20th century and early 21st century in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, not all former industrial infrastructure, however, has necessarily found a second life; this has been the object of a research project led by artist Yao Jui-Chung on disused public property in Taiwan (Yao 2016). The work of Yao on military sites is discussed later in this text.

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from beneath the white paint? The Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore is an archetypal example of the kind. It is located in a series of white buildings, neatly spaced out in a green environment a little off Alexandra Road, near the Pasir Panjang district. The CCA has offices there, artists’ studios for its art residence programme, a gallery space and a project space; it shares the ground with a number of contemporary art galleries, in what was redesigned through a 2012 public-private partnership as a cultural quarter. The CCA itself opened in 2013.3 Beneath the white walls drenched in tropical sun, in a seeming archetype of the white cube neutral settings, memories of Singapore’s late modern history come to the fore. Pasir Panjang was the name of the original Malaysian kampung. Its first recorded inhabitants date back to the early 19th century, when the followers of the Temenggong Abdul Rahman had to leave the banks of the Singapore River and resettle away from the newly arrived British forces (Savage 2019). The ­cluster of white buildings are known as Gillman Barracks. The barracks date back to 1936, and were erected as part of a large military zone complete with schools, hospital facilities and residential housing (see Aukema’s contribution in this volume for a discussion of memory and the uses of a former military barracks in southern Kyoto). They were handed over to the Singaporean State following its declaration of independence in 1965 (Seng, 2011). In the barracks now occupied by commercial dealers, the slickness of international transactions takes on a palpable formal anonymity: an aesthetic abstraction bordering on the decorative. At the CCA itself, however, the programme, under the direction of Ute Meta Bauer, has not shied away from socio-political matters. The publication Place, Labour, Capital (2018), aimed to summarize the spirit of the first five years of activities at the CCA, engaging resolutely with the centre’s environment and position in the dynamic harbour city (Bauer & Rujoiu 2018). In parallel, a number of exhibition projects have focused on the complexities of intertwined histories and spaces in Southeast Asia. The centre’s opening show, Paradise lost (2014), featuring the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Zarina Bhimji and Fiona Tan, explored narratives of travel, migration and disGhost and spectres – shadows of history (2017) looked at the socio-political contexts of Cold War Asia through cinematic works; in 2020, The Gillman Barracks redevelopment was a partnership between Singapore National Arts Council, Singapore Economic Development board, and the Corporation. http://ntu.ccasingapore.org/exhibitions/paradise-lost accessed 01.09.2020. With films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ho Tzu Nyen, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Park Chankyong, curated by Ute Meta Bauer.

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John Low’s studio during his 2019 residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore

the Non-aligned exhibition touched upon post-war experiences of decolonization, particularly in former British colonies.6 While the offices, the large exhibition space itself and the adjacent project room all convey the white screen of a professional gallery container, such investigations can certainly be seen as engaging with the colonial history of the site itself (see Figure 6.1). When I visited the CCA in 2019 to conduct research in its archive and library, I had the opportunity to meet the Singaporean artist John Low, who was an artist in residence at the time. John Low’s practice is posited at the crossroads between contemporary Chinese ink painting, and a historical exploration of this pictorial tradition in Singapore. When I first entered his studio space in Gillman Barracks, with its large white rooms and high ceilings, and bright artificial light, I first marvelled at his meticulous abstract brush paintings on rice paper hanging on the white walls (see Figure 6.2). Then I noticed the pile of books on the table. John explained his artistic research into a heavily codified practice, whose very raison d’être was, however, tributary to the tumultuous Chinese and Southeast Asian history in the twentieth century (see Figure 6.3). 6 Works by John Akomfrah, Naeem Mohaiemen, the Otoloth Group, curated by Ute Meta Bauer.

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For John Low, two main questions stand at the forefront of his research. First, what is Chinese ink painting today? Second, where can we locate this type of painting? Both these questions necessarily induce a reflection on the historical

John Low, Ink painting, Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, detail Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore

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displacement of Chinese populations in the 20th century, as well in the case of Singapore on the legacies of colonial society and cultural hybridities: What is Chinese ink painting? It is defined either through its medium and materials, or through a cultural context, or both. As a matter concerning its identity, communally or individually ... how has it evolved here in post-independence Singapore? There are also debates on whether

History table in John Low’s studio at Photograph by the author

Singapore

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the word ‘ink’ should be deleted from the label. Has it developed from a singularly particular or a diverse, pluralistic tradition and cultural heritage that have been transmitted here, one which is peculiar to Singapore Chinese society? Is it involved with a larger Chinese cultural tradition or one that is involved with a nationalistic, multi-ethnic cultural concern? Is there a central operating concept, like for example, the concept of ‘­cultural China’? Singapore is a pluralistic society. It also experienced a period of ­colonization under British administration, from 1819 to 1963. In the political, social and economic contexts stemming from British administration to post-independence, how have meanings and notions of subjectivities, sense of place, been constructed in relation to these nationalistic/­ communal interests? How is this cultural heritage positioned, with regards to its development, or on the contrary its stagnation? What are those values that the Chinese here identify as part of their heritage, and have these evolved? The [question] where is Chinese ink painting today, seems to point to its absence, or its direction when the practice becomes diverse, in the Singaporean contemporary art scene and thereby having an implication on the question of its identity. Could the medium and its identity (­Chineseness) be separated and how, by what means?7 Progressively, the white cube of the Gillman’s barracks starts to ooze historical ramifications; the walls regained the memories of their initial function: military structures erected by British colonial forces to accompany imperial forays into the China Sea. In the late 1930s when the barracks were built, the second Sino-Japanese war was propelling massive displacements of populations. The Chinese artists who sought refuge in present-day Malaysia and ­Singapore brought with them artistic knowledge and practices that have been kept alive and evolved under the radically different tropical climate. Attempts by the newcomers to make sense of their new environments led to the label ling of a Nanyang School, a southern school of painting, whose representatives such as Cheong Soo Pieng (1917–83), a graduate of Xiamen academy (1935), or Georgette Chen (1906–1993), who studied in New York and Paris, embraced local territories and subjects (Ong 2015, 45). John Low, together with the artist and archivist Koh Nguang How, has been exploring the mutations as well as, in some cases, immobility of Chinese pictorial idioms under the tropics. At the John Low in conversation with the author, March 2019.

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beginning of the twenty-first century, Koh and Low followed in the footsteps of the Ten Men group, which in the 1960s organized six travels across the Malay world, to Java, Bali, Thailand, Cambodia, Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and Sumatra, to immerse themselves in local flavours, and reconstructed the group’s visit to Angkor Wat in Cambodia (Béton Salon, 2016).8 As part of John’s open studio at the CCA, next to his painting which through abstract calligraphic landscapes comes to question the terms of Chinese ink painting and the meaning of a displaced tradition, a display composed of selected catalogues and newspaper articles from Koh’s personal archive pointed to the historical and theoretical research sustaining the work. The artistic dilemma of the first generation of ink painters in Singapore could be said to revolve around pursuing traditional genres, such as bird and flower painting, replicating the inherited motifs of the Chinese landscape; or to engage with a new environment, as well as with the growing influence of Western modernist styles (Clark 1998). John pointed to the study of the coconut tree, an archetypal motif on those southern shores, as an example of innovative pictorial forays, in the work of Cheng Chong Swee (1910–1985). In a catalogue of Swee’s work brought into the conversation, amongst the fleeting impressions of coastal beaches under the tropical flora, two deserted forts suddenly appear, their walls covered with grass, a quiet reminder of the wartime era that precipitated the migrations of Chinese artists overseas (Deserted fort 1948). The scholarly discussion touched upon the formal aspects of ink painting as much as the historical context for its development by overseas Chinese communities. The Gillman barracks were contemporary of the exodus that brought a number of notable Chinese ink painters to Malaysia and Singapore, as geopolitical commercial competition and military confrontation intensified in East Asia. To this displacement, the artist studio in its monastic form adds another cultural layer of hybridity. Chinese literati painters were essentially private practitioners; studio practice as embodied in the facilities provided by the CCA in Singapore, a row of neat pristine cubes, together with a certain idea of the artist as a social actor, was also imported from Western cultural traditions. The work of John Low can be said on the one hand to reground displaced cultural practices in their localities and the journeys that pathed their trans mission. On the other hand, the combined formal and contextual investigation, as framed by the artist’s studio in the particular site of the barracks, operates as a double entry point in the invocation of maritime and global encounters, The project was exhibited in Paris as part of a group show curated by Mélanie Mermod and Vera Mey, which looked at geopolitical entanglements in Cambodia and Asia more generally.

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encroachments and cultural transformation in Southeast Asia: first by peeling the whiteness of the surrounding walls to reveal the local fabric of space at the tip of the Strait of Malacca, long a strategic passage between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. There is a border zone that attracted European’s desires in the early modern age, and British acumen and colonial rule in the early nineteenth century when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles set foot in Singapura, which have to this day informed the city’s multi-layered society. Second, by considering the extent to which the white cube is itself a product of global maritime encounters, not so much a blank canvas as a resonating chamber of the complex circulation of people and goods in the modern age. In a collective reflection on ‘border objects’ initiated by Sabine du Crest and investigating the unique nature of objects imported to Europe in the early modern age from distant shores such as Southeast and East Asia (du Crest 2018), which were then modified and repurposed, Rémi Labrusse extends the discussion to ‘bordered interiors’ (‘intérieur frontière’ Labrusse 2018). These are typically described as private rooms which in the nineteenth century mixed an arrangement of imported, foreign, exotic objects converged to create a hybrid space in which different geographical and historical entities could coexist. This discussion focuses on a European context and the melancholic implications of a retreat from the pressure of objective modernity. The notion of a hybrid interior, however, with its many layered narrative dimensions, is useful in approaching John Low’s research at the CCA in Singapore. The bordered memories conveyed in his work, in that space, provide a reframing of practice and display strategies, which reveal their estranged identities. The seemingly inconspicuous white cube becomes a bordered interior inherited from global entanglements where experimental artistic research unveils patterns of social and imaginary constructions. 2

Bunkers and Borders

In contrast to the latent presence of history within the repurposed fabric of the gallery space, contemporary artists and curators can also choose to ­confront the military past directly. In 2004 on Kinmen Island, just off the Chinese coast, a Contemporary Art and Heritage program brought artists in dialogue with the remnants of a militarized border zone once the site of heavy artil lery confrontation. Kinmen Island is a territorial bastion of the Republic of China, and a vivid reminder of Chinese and East Asian political upheavals in the twentieth century. When the defeated armies of the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan in 1947–49, Kinmen Island became an outpost of the ROC’s military

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apparatus against its estranged sibling, the People’s Republic of China. As the frontline between the communist government and the ROC in the post ­Second World War period, the island was covered with bunkers to offer protection from bombing and artillery fire. After the end of the Cold War era, and with the apparent easing of relations across the straits that marked the early 21st century, the site was identified as a significant spot to both engage with dark memories and heritage, and consider an alternate construction of the future. The curatorial statement of a 2004 event pointed to this dual strategy: As [Kinmen Island] is slowly relieved of its military practical value, the island, through artistic interventions and exchanges, can become a ­meeting ground for artistic energies that foster new concepts, ideas and symbolism. (Cai 2006)9 The symbolical potential of the disused bunker is seen as a platform from which to invent new forms, new connections, new ‘journeys into the future’. It can do so without nurturing an anachronic romantic sentiment, but in full awareness of its economic potential: With its strategic location and a wealth of military facilities, Kinmen can establish a long term strategy of developing a tourist industry that showcases the island’s special cultural characteristics and raises global visibility. Internationally-renowned contemporary art exhibitions sites were converted from former military installations such as the Venice Biennial, which utilizes an old naval base and arsenal to house its exhibitions. Places where different cultures and religions collide have brought forth contemporary art: Istanbul Biennial takes place in a city where Europe and Asia meet, a historic site of conflict between Islam and Christianity. (Cai 2006) In the initial event in 2004, the artists invited came from both sides of the straits. The statement also underlined the great potential for displaying ­artworks of the bunker themselves: Bunkers possess a special aesthetic quality, with a thousand changeable exterior forms and camouflage patterns, each structure attracts the viewer like a work of art. (Cai 2006) 9 The founder of the event was Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who went on to study in Japan, and settled in the US

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Sounding a little less like a home and decoration magazine for the new ­territories of the future, the end of the statement addressed more specifically some of the symbols mentioned in a general fashion in the previous announcements: The purpose of the unique architecture of the bunkers is to conceal and prevent the enemy’s advance with brute force. Artists must do just the opposite here: to display one’s work … to entice others to enter. Through these works, bunkers become a series of metaphorical ­questions. Can war truly solve political problems? Can Art truly resolve war? (Cai 2006) Such metaphorical questions would appear to envision an impossible mission of planetary salvation. Artistic interventions were more specific. Shen Yuan’s Speaker tea replicated the huge megaphones set up in Xiamen to broadcast propaganda messages to Kinmen, and subverted their original vocation by transforming the out of bound structures into a tea house across the straits. Additionally, the sculpture of a large tongue playfully evoked the brainwashing slogans that accompanied military confrontation. Liu Xiaodong presented eighteen full-size portraits of soldiers, nine painted in a Beijing camp, nine on Kinmen Island itself, all wearing camouflage military clothes, in a hopeful revisitation of the eighteen Arhats, who in the Buddhist tradition serve to guide beings to the path of enlightenment. Wang Wen-chih’s sculptural intervention also hoped to reconciliate the military war zone with its natural environment, through a bamboo and rattan extension to the bunker (Dragons Dares Tiger Lair). On a more sardonic note, a video by Ying Bo drew on the transformation of a state-of-the-art military base into an artist adventure park, entitled Fei Ya! Fei Ya!, which showed well known Chinese artists playing the famous drinking game of the same name. Yin Ling, in a similarly provocative stance, performed Lovemaking for world peace by the Nanshan fortification, in which the artist, lightly dressed in lingerie, made an attempt to ‘symbolically negate, subvert, and flout the cruelty of war and politics’ with a king size pink bed, military suits, chains, and a skeleton. If the Kinmen Island project offered an optimist take on the China-Taiwan border, not everyone has looked at the straits with such positive perspectives. In 2013 the Floating Islands returned on Kinmen Islands as part of the 9th Shanghai biennial. The programme of contemporary art on the island was curated by Sandy Lo, and aimed to avoid being ‘a forceful exhibit of con temporary art that creates forceful symbolic value’, eschewing the slightly heavy statements of the foundational event. Exploring the sense of place and

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Figure 6.4 Yao Jui-Chung, Long live Courtesy of the artist

a sense of openness crucial to the curator’s practice,10 it focused its attention on ­revealing the currents of ‘world history’ (Floating Island, 4).11 Amongst the works exhibited, Yao Jui-Chung screened Wansui (A thousand years) Long live, a ­five-and-a-half-minute long video part in black and white narrowing down on the unnerving loop of history (see Figure 6.4): It has been the centenary of Hsinhai Revolution; the Cold War has long ended, neoliberalism conquered the world, the logic of global capitalism has become universal currency. But what is the transcendental rule of history? Could there be an everlasting dynasty of nationalism? The video begins in Kinmen, the frontier of the Cold War. Not a single soul in sight on the chilling battlefield, all we hear is ‘Wansui’, repeatedly through the most powerful loudspeakers of all psychological wayfarers. Beyond the speakers, the generalissimo is also calling for Wansui! In the derelict Chieh-shou Hall next to the Chungshan building in Yangmingshan. At the end the camera takes us to a disused cinema, the propaganda of an eternal empire echoes an eternal repetition of history. (Floating Island, 27) Since the beginning of his artistic career in the 1990s, Yao Jui-Chung engaged with the hyperreal inanity of the geopolitical situation in the region. ­Border zones, and historical markers of borderlines play a particular role in his 10 Sandy Lo in conversation with the author, April 2019. 11 The Floating islands/ Shanghai Biennial was curated by Sandy Lo.

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peregrination and documentation of the region’s troubled imaginaries. His 1994 photographic and installation pieces Territory takeover, explored the historical succession of colonial takeovers of the island (for a discussion of sites related to the Japanese colonial period see the chapter by Shimizu in this volume). Yao visited six points of arrival of military power in Taiwan—i.e. the arrival of Dutch, Spanish, Ming Loyalist, Qing, Japanese and Kuomintang—and proceeded to urinate on site, naked, the action captured in the golden haze of six photographic prints that commemorate each of the historical landings. Sophie MacIntyre underlined the use of parody and humour in these early works, that serve to unfold the absurdities of Taiwan’s history (MacIntyre 2018, 172). His 1997 piece entitled Recover Mainland China: Action (1997), alludes to Chiang Kai-Shek’s obsession with reconquering the mainland, an aim engrained in generations of Taiwanese, particularly through their military service. The artist, born of a mainlander and a Taiwanese, reminisced on this obsession in a series of performative embodiments. Having made his way to China, Yao JuiChung is seen photographed in front of famous sites, such as the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the Ming tombs, on the Great Wall, in the courtyard of the Palace Museum, his arms straight by his sides in the rigid pose of a soldier standing to order, but always his feet above the ground, in effect not quite on the mainland. The piece was finalised the year of the Hong Kong handover to China, a reversed levitating intrusion onto Chinese territory at a time of increased political anxiety in the China Sea. The mirage of Chiang Kai-Shek’s dream of returning to the mainland, and the profound impact it has had on the lives and imaginaries of people living in ­Taiwan, was pictured in Phantom of History, in which the artist is photographed marching in martial fashion in Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park in Taoyuan City (see Figure 6.5). Since the end of the Martial Law period in 1987, the park has become a repository for undesired sculptures of the Kuomintang leader, donated by cities throughout the island. There too the parody of the parade resonates among the myriad benevolent stances of the smiling general, as a ghostly presence unable to shake off its irrelevant illusions. History is seized at the frontier between the materiality of the present and a spectral parasitic past that refuses to abandon its prey. This borderline investigation into time unfolds spatially at the crossroads of the border zone, that watches over the delimitation of the outside and the inside. The series Roaming around the ruins IV: Gods and idols surround the border (1990–2005), catalogued in exhaustive mode and on bleak black and white films, has the broken figures of various Hindu and Buddhist deities looking out on parking lots, urban precincts, and coastal landscapes. The search for an alternative life materializes on the uncertain terrain of Taiwan’s territorial edges. Roaming around the ruins III on the Western front (2003–2005) uses the same depressing imagery, but this

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Yao Jui-Chung, Phantom of history series, 2007 Courtesy of the artist

time focusing on disused military structures throughout the Western coast of Taiwan. In the Long live (2011–12) and Long Long live (2013) series of photographs and films, a barren land and inhospitable sea only recede in the face of barbed wires, fortified watchtowers and maritime coastal defences, whose lifeless shells persist in being under the turbulent winds. Long Long live was filmed on Green Island, on the eastern side of Taiwan. The camera takes us inside the ruins of a military structure: a jail in a form of a panopticon, where political opponents of the regime were sent during the period of Taiwan’s martial law. There on a decrepit podium, a lone military figure raises his arm and repeats ‘Wansui’, as in the ‘long live Chiang Kai-Shek’ slogan of old, which a zoom-out reveals to be projected on a television screen in an abandoned mess, itself a fleeting frequency amongst a potentially infinite number of identical channels. Encompassing both eastern and western shores, but also expanding its outlook to the northern and southern seas, the work of Yao Jui-Chung considers the movement and vitality of a geopolitical line of dispute: Because Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek wanted to take over the government in China, they positioned the military in Green Island and Orchid Island, and [Hoping Island], which also has a jail. Long long live was talking about the eastern part of Taiwan, and Long live about the Western part. It’s about an island chain that goes from Korea to Japan, and from

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Okinawa to Taiwan; the second chain then goes to Singapore. Recently we did a project related to general MacArthur, in Manilla in the Philippines; next we will go to Okinawa to work with some local artists; the project aims to rethink the war, the imperial times. Next year we will go to Guam Island; and then Hawai’i.12 This military frontier has roots in the early modern period and the arrival of European ships in the South China Sea. In the twentieth century, the Cold War precipitated continental turmoil in adjacent maritime contact zones. In effect, the sea itself becomes a militarized space, where economic interests and political beliefs clash blindly in the wheel of history. In an essay Concerning history, Yu Wei pointed to the spectral evocation of Yao Jui-Chung’s borderline investigations, referring to Jacques Derrida’s reflection on ghostly haunting: ‘the ­historical view that Yao Jui-Chung gives us seems like a local Taiwanese version of hauntology, responding to the complex puzzle of nationalism and system of authority spanning the Taiwan Strait that have plagued us for so long.’ (Yu, 2008, 29) In Spectres of Marx, published in 1993, Derrida picks up the opening line of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party: ‘a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ (Derrida, 1993). In the mid-nineteenth century, this spectre was one yet to come. At the end of the twentieth century, it had revealed itself and seemingly disappeared, superseded by a new evangelical teleology: the redeeming advent of liberal democracy of the end of history heralded by Francis Fukuyama (Fukuyama, 1992). Derrida looks for its haunting presence, which he sees as plural and long lasting in the scrutiny of the illusory and fragmented paradise of late capitalism. When transferred to Southeast and East Asia, the discussion in Spectres of Marx takes a new turn, for, evidently, the fall of the Berlin wall has not occurred in China. Gregory Lee queried the implications of this realisation: is China not yet a ghost? Should it be seen as the living dead? (Lee 1996, 5–6) The maritime frontier that runs from Japan, Korea, Okinawa, to Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia, opposes two narratives of redemption at the end of history, fully blind to the spectral forces that on the one hand command and stir them onwards – their symptomatic form – and on the other impede the claim to a homogenous salvation they insist on bestowing. Here Yao’s musing on the eternal repetition of history takes a new light. His exploration of the fortunes of migrant souls was singled out in his photographic series on Chinatowns throughout the world The world is for all, China beyond China, 1997–2000) (see Chan’s contribution Yao Jui-Chung in conversation with the author, April 2019.

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in this volume for a detailed discussion of Singapore’s Chinatown). The artist stands like a tourist under the gates signalling the entrance to displaced Chinas, artificial shells of uncertain identities whose diasporic nature capture ‘the time out of joint’, the inadequateness of the contemporary with itself, a failure through which perhaps an alternate future can be drawn. Additionally, returning to the discussion on ‘bordered interiors’, Labrusse further suggested a realm of ‘border states’ (états frontières), characterised by psychic tension caused by the conflicting presence of endogenous and ­exogenous forces of cultural representation (Labrusse 2018, 143–44). Besides the seemingly operational use of such a psychological perspective to Yao’s work, it is revealing to consider the added semantic layer of ‘state’, which also conveys the superposition and refraction of collective superstructures to the work. If John Low’s investigation in Singapore unveiled the disjointed nature of ink painting practices transferred under the tropics, Yao’s peregrinations reveal the extensions of liminal border zones inherited from the cultural encounters and military confrontations of the modern age in Southeast and East Asia, where inadequateness is both failure, and a story to be invented. 3

Qijin Kitchen: A Polyphony of Voices

In the case of the conversion of the Gillman barracks in Singapore into a series of gallery spaces dedicated to contemporary art, the military past surfaced as a ghostly presence underneath the white paint of the repurposed fabric. In the Floating Islands festival on Kinmen Island, the walls of the bunkers preserved the echo of geopolitical confrontation, as artistic interventions could deviate or on the contrary insist on their dark heritage. On Qijin Island facing the port of Kaohsiung in the South of Taiwan, the artist Wu Mali has developed another form of artistic reappropriation of a former military site, known as Qijin Kitchen (see Figure 6.6). The project is also a site-specific intervention. However, it articulates a different type of strategy in its engagement with the symbolic aura of a former military site. Kaohsiung is the primary harbour in the south of Taiwan, from which the industrial exports branded with ‘Made in Taiwan’ depart across the globe. Qijin Island is a thin band of land that ­separates the inner bay of Kaohsiung, where the port and container terminal is, and the ocean. The history of Kaohsiung harbour itself is inevitably tied to the island’s posi tion at the crossroads of navigation charts at the top of the southern China seas. In the 20th century following industrial development under Japanese rule, the port was further developed under the Kuomintang in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the largest container terminals in the late 20th century.

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Qijin Island, however, has for many centuries been populated by fishermen. In the early twenty-first century, the island seemed to represent the ‘vernacular Taiwan’, offering a glimpse to visitors of an authentic pre-industrialized world. This is a false impression as the population, then as now, is made of fluctuating textures of migrants and workers sailing on the waves of history. On the island, Wu Mali took over a former military barracks, or rather the kitchen part

Qijin Kitchen, Taiwan Photograph by the author, 2019

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of a barrack section, which has been serving as a rallying point to give voice to this plurality of lives, experiences and geographical entanglements: I have had a space in Qijin, a kitchen, in a former military dormitory previously used by single soldiers, and now I try to use this space as a social space, as a social laboratory; we try to understand how this fishermen’s village has become part of the Kaohsiung port. You don’t find many fishermen nowadays, as they all became workers in factories. There are some important industries in the area, and the port also needs labour force. Qijin was isolated, but now there is a tunnel that connects the village to the city, mainly for the exportation of goods from the factories. If you go there, you see all the container landscape, if you come from the city by car, you can see all the tracks leading from the factories to the container port. For me, this is the real landscape of Taiwan, as Taiwan’s economy is based on exports. So nowadays, although there are still some fishermen, the fishing boats go far away. The fishing doesn’t really take place around Taiwan. Boats go to Japan and South America […] Furthermore, most people do not like to work in the fisheries or in the port, which is why in Qijin, there are many foreigners, workers from Southeast Asia […] This led me to become interested in the whole social story. I was like most of the people from Kaoshiung, who would say, ‘oh Qijin is a tourist spot’, because there is the sea and a place where you can go swimming, and eat seafood, and people have that stereotypical impression from the area, and do not really know about the place. They think this is the place where you can find the fishermen, the original Kaohsiung inhabitants, when the most part of the population are migrants, maybe partially from Taiwan, and partially from other countries. This is how I started my project with food. My interest is not in the recipes themselves, or how to cook, but in how an entire social context is reflected in our eating. But now I got to know some other people there from different backgrounds, and we sometimes come together to cook, to share stories with each other. And personal stories also reflect the public history, that is always my interest.13 The project revolves around storytelling, the act of narrating, together with remembrance, in a dual attention to both individual and collective destinies. It also involves the recording of these interlaced stories. When I visited Qijin 13

Wu Mali in conversation with the author, August 2018. To read the full interview: http:// www.tetigroup.org/WuMali.htm

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in 2019, I first met Wu Mali with a group of fine arts students who were taken to eat an ice cream near the ferry pier. The owner of the extravagant ice cream shop was a friend whose business story had duly been recorded by the artist. We then moved out of the touristy part into the adjacent streets where the local people pursue their everyday life, to meet a lady who owned a little street food joint nearby. She was originally from a modest family in Thailand, and came to Qijin to marry a local man. On this occasion, Mali was accompanied by two graduate students who helped film the discussion between the two (see Figure 6.8). It was an emotional process as the memory of childhood and family on the distant continent resurfaced. In the encounter with the different experiences on the island, the recording of stories leads to writing of histories, where the polyphonic concert of individual voices come to densify the image of the collective narrative. On our way to the nearby kitchen in the former military barracks, I admired in a little alley the street paintings that adorn the large walls protecting a navy compound (see Figure 6.7). The paintings tell dramatic stories of migrations that occurred after the capitulation of Japan and the exile of the Kuomintang army. Chinese coastal villages off the straits that found themselves under threat from military action were evacuated to Qijin, and we see on these wall paintings the troubled memories of this forced migration.

Qijin, wall painting Photograph by the author, 2019

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April 2019 interview of Wu Mali at Qijin Photograph by the author, 2019

I first met Wu Mali in 2018 in a similar studio to that of John Low at the Gillman Barracks of the CCA in Singapore. Then she had also recalled personal memories that similarly exemplified her attention to the manner through which the personal is interwoven into the collective. In particular, her father, she told me, of Taiwanese descent, had gone to Japan after elementary school and had become a soldier. He had hoped to be able to pursue education in a Japanese university, which became impossible after the capitulation of Japan. The identity of many Taiwanese of his generation was closer to Japanese than to Chinese, while the arrival of the mainlanders in the late 1940s further complexified the cultural landscape of the island: In Taiwan there are many men who came from China with Chiang Kai-Shek, their identity is Chinese. But some of those people also have complicated stories. There were people in North Thailand, Chinese mainlanders in Chiang Kai-Shek’s military, who were against the communists. They fought till the end on the Thailand border, but at the end of the war, they had no place to go, and got to stay there. They were not able to go to China, and didn’t have the opportunity to come to Taiwan, and were not recognised by Thailand’s government. Much later, some of them had the chance to come to Taiwan. There are also Taiwanese people who were sent as soldiers by Japan to Southeast Asia, and didn’t manage to come back at the end of the war. Some came back to Taiwan much much

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later. Their identity is also Japanese, they don’t have anything to do with China, and our so-called Chinese government. Certainly, all these works have to do with a history of East Asia and Southeast Asia, with colonialism, and the war.14 She refers here to pieces such as Birds slide over the sky (1998), which looked at the stories of men in Taiwan, and Treasure Island (1997), which explored the stories of women who moved to Taipei from the south of the island in the 1960s and 1970s to work in the textile industry. When the factories closed in the 1980s, as the competition from China made them unprofitable, the social burden became rife. The work revisits this working class history and the way private destinies touch upon ‘macro-level forces’. In parallel, Wu Mali has been particularly involved in the investigation of environmental issues in Taiwan. With Plum Tree Creek (2005) she looked into the socio-natural entanglements of a local space near her home in the Taipei metropolis, that unearthed the history of the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Taiwan, and questioned present problems of pollution, urban planning and management. It also addressed the shifting perception of ‘nature’ in our global interconnected world. Such lines of thinking led her to co-curate the 2018 Taipei Biennial with Francesco Manacorda, entitled Post-nature. Museum as an ecosystem.15 The biennial presented a range of artworks in the field of environmental aesthetics, but also numerous reports from Taiwanese environmental activists, as it aimed to open the museum to a wider public and to wider civic concerns. Marie Louise Pratt outlined the multifocal and decentralised arts of the contact zone (Pratt 1991), which James Clifford further saw as a path to encourage museal authorities to open their doors to polyphonic interpretations (Clifford 1997). The 2018 Taipei biennial aimed in this spirit to involve and open its remit to actors technically external to the art world. Qijin Kitchen emu lates this endeavour outside the walls of the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts, in the echo chamber that remains of a military barrack. Just like the realm of the aforementioned ‘border state’ suggests an opening of the imaginary at the crossroads of internal and external representational friction, we can now consider a ‘border narrative’, through which critical, personal and collective memories silenced by the course of history may find voice and agency. This border narrative significantly emerges under the abandoned roofs of a plain brick shed. For Qijin Kitchen is no white cube, the greyish dust of the barracks still lingers over the cooking pots and the conversations; a herb garden adorns Wu Mali in conversation with the author, August 2018. For a review of the 2018 Taipei biennial, see Gee 2019.

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its flanks in a semi-wild fashion. It is certainly no creative quarter, pretty much off the tourist trails by the lighthouse and along the beach on the other side of the strip, it is being developed in concertation and with the help and maintenance of local communities; it is also no bunker, with their stern associations of shielded entombment, or coastal defence apparatus. It is a kitchen, alluding less to the technicalities of military encounters or enforcement, as to the pragmatics of daily lives. As such, it provides a place to convey the stories of the city, of the island, and of the contrasted forces that have shaped its histories; in bringing to the fore these unseen memories, it attempts to counter martial narratives of ‘History’ and to represent and give voice to the stratified textures of the present. 4

Concluding Remarks

Former military sites carry with them the memories of belonging, and ­trespassing, physically inscribed in the ordering of space. Their relation to borders varies along with their nature, from a manifest sign of its presence, such as the Bunkers on Kinmen Island, to an evocation of historical terrestrial displacements in the case of the Gillman military barracks. The aesthetic interventions considered in this chapter focusing on the maritime crossroad that is the South China Sea, all negotiate complex geopolitical entanglements, the result of commercial competition and military encroachments, by unveiling liminal, latent, ghostly presences at the heart of the tangible fabric of the present. The research of John Low into the history of Chinese ink painting in Singapore opened a path to reflect on the migration of people and aesthetics, in dialogue with British colonial history in the region. The model of the white cube imported from Western modernism, appeared layered with colourful ramifications in its Singaporean form. In the Bunkers of Kinmen Island, repurposed as an artistic platform, the legacies of the Cold War mixed with the uncertainties of the early twenty-first century tensions across the Taiwan straits. The performative peregrinations of Yao Jui-Chung along the Chinese borders and collective imaginaries, further questions the surviving ideological agents of national identities in a fragmented history. At Qijin Kitchen on Qijin Island across Kaohsiung harbor, Wu Mali’s dialogues and documentation of dispersed stories all coalescing in a thin borderline strip of land facing the sea, suggest a potential remapping and reinvention of the collective psyche, eschewing the monolithic imperatives of state apparatus and national narra tives, in favour of micro-histories as gateways to grasp the multipolar facets of our interconnected societies.

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References Bauer, Ute Meta, and Anca Rujoiu. 2018. Place, Labour, Capital. Singapore: NTU CCA and Mousse Publishing. Béton Salon. 2016. Anywhere but here, Paris: Béton Salon. Cai, Guo-Ciang, ed. 2006. Bunker. Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinmen island. A ­Permanent Sanctuary for Art in a Demilitarilized Zone. Kinmen Island: Charta/­ Bunker museum. Clark, John. 1998. Modernity in Asian Art. Sydney: University of Sydney. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes, Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. ­Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Spectres de Marx. L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la n­ ouvelle incertitude. Paris: Galilée. du Crest, Sabine, ed. 2018. Exogenèses. Objets frontière dans l’art européen. Paris: de ­Boccard. Filipovic, Elena. 2014, ‘The global white cube.’ ‘Politics of display’, On Curating, 22: 45–63. Floating islands. 2013. Floating Islands/ Shanghai Biennial. Shanghai: Shanghai ­Biennial. Florida, Richard. 2009. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gee, Gabriel N. 2019. ‘Trans-industrial pressure in Formosa: Taipei Biennial 2018.’ Teti Group. Accessed 15.06.2021. http://www.tetigroup.org/taipeibiennial2018.htm. High, Steven. 2017. ’Brownfield public history: arts and heritage in the aftermath of deindustrialization.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Public History, edited by Paul ­Hamilton and James Gardner, 423–444. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Labrusse, Rémi. 2018. ‘Objet frontière, intérieur frontière, état frontière. Une situation moderne.’ In Exogenèses. Objets frontières dans l’art européen, edited by Sabine du Crest, 129–46. Paris: de Boccard. Lee, Gregory B. 1996. Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, nationalism and hybridity in China and its others. Durham: Duke University Press. Lowry, Glenn D. 2009. The Museum of Modern Art in this Century. New York: MOMA publications. MacIntyre, Sophie. 2018. Imagining Taiwan: The role of art in Taiwan’s quest for identity. Leiden: Brill. O’Doherty, Brian. 1986. Inside the White Cube: The ideology of the gallery space. Santa Monica: The Lapis Press. Ong Zhen Min. 2015, ‘Nanyang Reverie,’ Szewee Low; ed., Siapa nama kamu? Art in Singapore since the 19th century, Singapore: National Gallery of Singapore, 42–53. Pratt, Marie-Louise. 1991. ‘Arts of the contact zone.’ Profession

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Savage, Victor. 2019. ‘The National University Singapore at Kent Ridge: reflections on changing landscapes.’ In Kent Ridge: an untold story, edited by Kevin Tan, 1–27. ­Singapore: NUS Press. Seng, Loh Kah. 2011. ‘The British military withdrawal from Singapore and the anatomy of a catalyst.’ In Singapore in Global history, edited by Derek Heng and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, 195–214. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wang, Tianfu. 2016. ‘Remodeling and regeneration of urban industrial landscapes: a case study of Huashan 1914 creative park in Taiwan.’ Journal of landscape research 8 (3): 31–38. Yao Jui Chung and Lost Society Document. 2016. Mirage: Disused public property in Taiwan. Taipei: Garden City Publishing. Yu Wei. 2008. ‘Concerning history, Yao Jui Chung’s examination of the remains.’ In Yao , 26–33. Taipei: Garden City Publishing.

CHAPTER 7

Framing Negative Heritage in Disaster Education: School Memorials after 3.11 Julia Gerster and Flavia Fulco Abstract The disasters of March 11, 2011 washed away whole villages on the coast of N ­ ortheast Japan and destroyed the lives of thousands. Meskell (2012, 558) describes such impacted places as ‘negative heritage, a conflictual site that becomes the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary.’ As the recovery of the Tōhoku region in ­Northeast Japan continues, debates have arisen about which disaster ruins, or shinsai ikō, should be kept as memorials. Most places chosen to be preserved represent cases of good evacuation practice. However, some survivors have fought for also keeping those places in which their relatives died and the evacuation procedures failed to save them. In this chapter, we explore the construction of the narratives surrounding two schools preserved as memorials in Miyagi Prefecture. While Arahama Elementary became a safe haven for 320 people, Okawa Elementary became an example of bad evacuation practice that led to the death of 74 children and 10 teachers. Drawing on the analysis of these ‘exhibitions’, the preservation efforts, and firsthand accounts offered at the two sites, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the importance of negative heritage in disaster education. Examining the process of framing negative heritage within the collective memory of these communities is also crucial to understanding the effects of the disaster on local identities.

Keywords 3.11 – disaster education – negative heritage – kataribe – Bosai – Tohoku

Survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster, or ‘3.11’, often describe the early hours of March 11th, 2011 as a normal day. They prepared meals, brought their children to school, and went to university or work. Later, an offshore magnitude 9 earthquake struck close to Miyagi Pre fecture, producing a tsunami that destroyed the cities and villages at the coast © Julia Gerster and Flavia Fulco, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_008

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of Northeastern Japan (Tōhoku) and caused the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster. 15,899 people have died, and more than 2,000 are registered as missing persons as their bodies have never been found (National Police Agency 2020). At the peak of the disaster more than 450,000 people affected were not able to return home (Recovery Agency 2011). The tsunami destroyed more than 500 kilometers of coastline leaving many communities to deal with places that can be defined as ‘negative heritage:’ ‘a conflictual site that becomes the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary’ (Meskell 2009, 558). How negative heritage is utilized, whether by countries or communities, can differ tremendously. Some communities may choose ‘not to remember’, whereas others may try to preserve the negative experiences as a defining part of their collective identity. Further, some parts of the past may be emphasized, while others may be omitted or ­rearranged. Meskell (2009, 558) notes that negative heritage may diverge into different roles: ‘it can be mobilized for positive, didactic purposes (e.g. Auschwitz, Hiroshima, District Six) or alternatively be erased if such places cannot be culturally rehabilitated and thus resist incorporation into the national imaginary (e.g. Nazi and Soviet statues and architecture)’. Though, as in Meskell’s work, the notion of ‘negative heritage’ is commonly associated with contested pasts derived from conflicts and terrorist attacks, in this chapter we show how disasters triggered by natural events can be as divisive and controversial on a community level as wars and terrorism can be on a national level. Which parts of heritage are considered valuable for didactic purposes does not always meet a consensus. Boyle (2019) stresses the existence of ‘borders of memory’ among different memory collectives that may have contradictory views on the representation of certain events. Heritage sites can be simultaneously affirmed by some while being contested by others (Boyle 2019, 293; Bull and Ivings 2019; Gordon 2019; Littlejohn 2021; Sakaguchi 2019; 2020). Many, but not all, examples of such borders of memories are embedded in international conflicts, such as disputes about the registration of Meiji Industrial Sites as UNESCO World Heritage sites, which has been criticized by China and Korea due to the lack of explanations on colonial Japan’s forced laborers at these sites (Boyle 2019, 295). The conflictual handling of other negative heritage, such as recurring visits of politicians to the Yasukuni shrine in Japan or the museumification of the Nanjing massacre in China, are also strongly connected to inter national tensions. These tensions indicate the existence of multiple versions of memory turned into different national narratives. Also see the chapter by Aukema in this volume which discusses a local site in southern Kyoto city connected to the memory of the Nanjing massacre through its former role as a military garrison.

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Similar to major historical wars and previous large-scale disasters like the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995, the 3.11 disasters became a defining event for the entire nation. The whole world was watching as the tragedy unfolded and critical eyes followed Japan’s efforts to overcome the effects of the tsunami and the nuclear disaster. Therefore, the question of how to create a discourse that could fit the 3.11 disasters into the Japanese identity became entangled with the problem of Japan’s international image. The term ‘3.11’ which is used in Japan to describe the events of March 11th reminds also of ‘9.11’ in the US—a catastrophe which was so shocking for the US that it would forever be intertwined with the country’s identity (Samuels 2013, X). Internationally, magazines and news stations reporting on the disaster highlighted an image of Japanese people as good mannered, strong, and able to endure any kind of hardship (Gerster 2019; Tagsold 2013; Kingston 2012). However, not everyone felt represented by this collective image and by its corresponding disaster response. Due to the national emphasis on social cohesion, in the disaster-stricken areas, and especially in the regions severely affected by the nuclear disaster, survivors felt deprived of the ability to voice critique against the way the recovery efforts were handled. These critiques include varying perceptions of safety within the communities – such as the places being defined as safe to return to according to radiation levels or the heights of future tsunamis, or, more generally, how the disasters had been represented (Gerster 2019; Slater et al. 2013; Kimura 2016; Morioka 2013; 2014). Although the 3.11 disasters are seen as a defining event for the whole nation, individuals were affected in different ways and therefore their coping m ­ echanisms, expectations towards the representation of the events, and associations with negative heritage may differ tremendously. In this sense, ‘borders of memory’ can emerge even between neighbors through different kinds of loss. A person who did not experience any physical loss may have ­differing expectations towards the representation of negative heritage than a person who needed to evacuate due to radioactive fallout, lost property in the ­tsunami, or even lost family members (Gerster 2019). As a result of these debates on collective memory and heritage and their varying connotations, discussions on how to remember the tragedy after the 3.11 disasters yielded widely different results within various communities. For example, even more than a decade after these devastating events, the recov ery of disaster-stricken areas is still ongoing. Most of the debris formed by the tsunami was cleared in the years following the disaster. However, soon voices advocating the preservation of some of the damaged buildings emerged as the memories connected to these places might be forever lost once they had been dismantled. Deciding which sites to keep was not an easy task and often caused frictions within communities. While some people wanted to keep

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certain buildings as reminders of possible hazards for future generations, others saw them as places of shame or did not want to face the buildings where their loved ones had passed away (Sakaguchi 2019; 2020; Littlejohn 2021, 15). In addition to the countless memorialization efforts conducted by individuals, volunteer groups, universities, and local companies, which ranged from passing on first-hand accounts, improvised monuments, or the preservation of private property damaged by the disaster, there began a series of official ­memorialization and preservation activities (Boret and Shibayama 2017). These activities were supported by the national government but it was the prefectures, which appointed their own expert committees, that eventually decided which sites would be deemed disaster ruins, or shinsai ikō (­Littlejohn 2021, 14). Yet, as Sakaguchi (2019; 2020) notes, not all damaged buildings would be preserved as disaster heritage sites. With only a few exceptions, mostly places which produced positive messages of survival have been turned into disaster memorial museums or kept as disaster ruins, while the remains of those places characterized by physical damage and the loss of human life were soon d­ ismantled. These findings lead to a larger scholarly discussion on negative heritage in Japan, and more broadly opened up the field of disaster memorialization worldwide. In the following we would like to discuss the attempts to preserve two particular school buildings that have been severely damaged by the Tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake 2011 in the broader context of reframing negative heritage in Japan for educational purposes.2 The findings of this research are based on the analysis of previous research on negative heritage as well as the authors’ long-term ethnographic field research in the Tōhoku area from 2013 onwards. Further, site visits at the Arahama and Okawa Elementary and participants observation at tours guided by survivors, and narrative interviews with guides and key stakeholders in the preservation process have been conducted since 2016. 1 Bringing Light into the Dark: Approaches to Negative Heritage in Japan The 3.11 disasters were, of course, not the first disasters which Japan went through—natural hazard induced or manmade. Past tsunamis, earthquakes, and wars have led to the preservation of many damaged buildings and infrastructure as historic relics. The stories told by these ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1989, 7) 2 This chapter analyzes the state of the exhibitions in the timeframe of 2019-2022. Please note that both memorial sites have been renovated and their exhibitions updated after this chap ter was written.

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are remarkably often framed for positive didactic purposes: learning experiences to prevent similar tragedies from happening again. The most famous example of negative heritage used for positive didactic use may arguably be the city of Hiroshima. With the Atomic Bomb Dome (­genbaku dōmu) as its main symbol, Hiroshima recreated its whole image around the negative heritage of World War II and the destruction and human losses resulting from the atomic bomb, and today the city is known worldwide as an emblem of peace. Although the Atomic Bomb Dome represents an example of a positively transformed negative heritage, its preservation was not decided without conflicts. As Yoneyama (1999, 70) reports, […] despite its firm grounding within the ceremonial map, the Dome’s status as an artificially preserved ruin remained unstable until the late 1960s. Between 1966 and 1968, when the city first initiated efforts to prevent the decaying structure from disintegrating, public opinion was fiercely divided. During the campaign to preserve the Dome, survivors were known to be generally less supportive of retaining this painful visual reminder of destroyed buildings, while the city administration clearly recognized its symbolic capital. In contrast, during the late 1980s there was remarkable public consensus about maintaining the Dome ruin, in part because in the previous two decades it had acquired a central status among Hiroshima’s mnemonic images. The long preservation process of the Atomic Bomb Dome highlights the ­significance of time that is needed by the communities to decide how to cope with their experiences and how to (re)frame and continue living with ­negative heritage. It also shows how opinions may change over time and how certain buildings can be infused with new meaning.3 Today, the Peace ­Memorial Museum and the Atomic Bomb Dome are deeply intertwined with Hiroshima’s identity and also with its international image. For people worldwide the name ‘Hiroshima’ may not only evoke images of war but as mentioned in Yoneyama’s report, is nowadays deeply connected with positive connotations of preserving peace. However, the controversy of Japan’s imperialism and war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers being barely addressed in the Peace Memorial Museum exhibition has been noted. According to Zwigenberg, ‘Commemo rative work in Hiroshima was largely used to normalize and domesticate the memory of the bombing’ (Zwigenberg 2014, 2). The chapter by Ivings in this volume similarly shows how sites at the port city of Hakodate associated with the negative specter of Western imperialism have eventually come to be embraced as cosmopolitan heritage.

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In his book Hiroshima: The origins of global memory culture, Zwigenberg states that the rebuilding of Hiroshima and the memorialization of the bombing was the product of a discourse that aimed to transform Hiroshima’s tragedy by the particular way in which it was remembered. The way that Hiroshima negotiated its negative heritage within the collective memory, and more broadly within national identity, testifies that the process of sedimentation for collective memory is long and controversial. The results of Hiroshima using its negative heritage for positive didactic purposes provides a successful example of reframing negative heritage that has inspired communities affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, such as the town of Rikuzentakata (Iwate Prefecture) which aims to become the ‘Hiroshima of the North’ (Martini and Minca 2021, 11). It may be questionable whether the use of such a catch-phrase by Rikuzentakata will have a sustainable impact on the recovery of the affected regions, for instance by attracting tourists. Yet these attempts underline messages of hope within a tragedy and thus exemplify the aim of reframing the negative experiences. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a difficult heritage related to a massive conflict which resulted in the reorganization of international relations. The issues related to the memorialization of this contested past are diverse and have changed according to the shifting of international principles. However, the experience of war is not the only negative heritage that Japan has received over time. In particular, as a country prone to natural hazards, the Japanese nation has had to negotiate the memory and teachings of these catastrophic events repeatedly. Several museums around the country are dedicated to conveying lessons learned from previous disasters. The largest and most well-known of these pre-3.11 museums is the ‘Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute’ (Hito to Bōsai Mirai Center) in Kōbe, which has an attached research institute. Although Kōbe became another major symbol of hope and strength due to the enormous devastation that hit the city during the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 and the recovery process that followed, not all earthquake survivors were pleased with the way the disaster was remembered. Because this disaster was known as the ‘Kōbe Earthquake’, affected people from smaller neighbouring regions, such as the Awaji Islands, felt omitted and criticized the memorialization for being too centered on the larger city of Kōbe. ­Therefore, the earthquake was renamed as the ‘Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake’ to include the larger area that was affected by the disaster (Interview with the Planning Director, Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution, 27.1.2020). In the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute, various exhi bitions memorialize the earthquake of 1995. In addition to exhibitions on the

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earthquake itself, visitors can learn about the mechanisms behind earthquakes, tsunamis, and torrential rainfall, emergency preparations, and predicted ­disasters for Japan in the near future, such as the Nankai Trough Earthquake and Tsunami. Disaster education (bōsai) is therefore integrated significantly into the museum. With the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute in Kōbe as a forerunner, municipalities all across the Tōhoku region are building their own disaster-related museums, memorials or exhibits and are consequently seeking to connect their disaster remains with disaster risk education. 2 Bosai: A Connection of Disaster Risk Reduction and the Preservation of Disaster Remains Disaster education (bōsai kyōiku) is a significant part of Japanese education for both school children and adults. While the ‘ultimate goal is to save lives’ (Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan 2017), the central aims of this education are described as raising risk awareness, providing knowledge on preparation skills, showing how to help others during and after a disaster, and understanding possible risks in a natural environment (MEXT 2019). After 3.11, disaster remains and related exhibitions were used not only to give local communities places to mourn and remember (Boret and Shibayama 2017), but also as tools to enforce disaster education targeting Japanese people as well as foreign visitors. To spread the teachings of ‘Japanese style disaster education’ internationally the term ‘Bosai’4 is often romanized and combined with tourism as ‘Bosai + Tourism’. The website of the Bosai + ­Tourism (Miyagi Prefecture 2020) project describes its goal as follows: The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 claimed as many as 20,000 precious lives, but more people could have been victims without our past experiences of disasters. Local communities in Tohoku region proactively engage in BOSAI learning to get prepared for possible disas ters in the future and to pass our experiences of the disasters in the past to the next generation and people around the world.

With the aim of dispersing the term ‘Bosai’, in advertisements targeting an international audience it is mostly used without the phonetic symbol for long vowels and sometimes in capital letters. We kept the original usage in quotes but adjusted the romanization in the rest of the text.

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The Bosai + Tourism project only focuses on Miyagi Prefecture and lists several ­hundred disaster remains and disaster education related experiences in Japanese and English (Miyagi Prefecture 2020). However, Iwate and Fukushima Prefectures are also promoting Bosai activities linked to their negative heritage in a similar way. These uses of negative heritage reveal examples of strong desires to redefine the experience of past disasters by considering them as lessons for future generations. If used for didactic purposes, the sharing of such experiences contributes to saving lives in future disasters and turning Japan, and especially the Tōhoku region, into a leader of disaster education. Whereas some ­disaster remains may have been easier to preserve for educational purposes, others stirred discussions and controversies among various memory collectives. In the next sections we seek to explain how disaster remains (shinsai ikō), in particular Arahama Elementary School (Sendai City) and Okawa Elementary School (Ishinomaki City), perform educational functions that help to reframe negative heritage into a positive and useful narrative as proposed by Meskell (2009). However, the debate on what stories and places should be remembered and how these lessons should be conveyed in these examples is still ongoing. 3

Schools as Disaster Remains

Among designated disaster remains, the number of school buildings is remarkable. Seven schools are already or nearly registered as ‘shinsai ikō’ as of July, 2020 (Interview Densho Road, 7.8.2020). One of the reasons for this high num ber is that only public facilities can become designated disaster remains by the cities and can receive support funding to be preserved. Schools in Japan are usually built from reinforced concrete, which makes them more resistant against earthquakes. Therefore, many schools, although badly impacted by the tsunami, were still standing after the water receded. Because schools can reveal the impact of the tsunami and yet are still sturdy enough structures for preservation, they became examples which convey the history and lessons learned through 3.11. Arahama Elementary in Sendai City became one of the first schools to be reopened to the public as a designated disaster ruin, and the decision to keep the building was supported by the municipality early on in the recovery process (see Figure 7.1). By contrast, the decision to preserve Okawa Elementary in Ishinomaki City was controversial, as the bereaved parents of the children who died at Okawa fought for justice by starting a lawsuit against Ishinomaki City and Miyagi Prefecture (see Figure 7.2). In 2022 Ishinomaki City also opened another school, Kadonowaki Elementary, as an

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The ruins of Arahama Elementary School in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture photograph by Julia Gerster, November 2020

official disaster heritage site. Thus, Ishinomaki City is among one of the few municipalities to preserve the ruins of two affected schools. It is important to note that at the time of our research, Okawa ­Elementary was still lacking an organized artificially prepared exhibit as the official ­decision for the school’s preservation as a disaster remain and the spread of Covid-19 further delayed the activities on the school grounds.5 When we refer to exhibitions, we mean physical objects that can be viewed on the grounds of the two schools. Whereas in Arahama Elementary these include videos, panels with explanatory texts, or small models about disaster mitigation measures, in Okawa Elementary, at the time of research, these were mainly the school ruin itself, and some panels added by the Okawa Densho no Kai, a group formed mainly of bereaved parents. Some of the interiors of the buildings are partially accessible on specific occasions with the kataribe.6 Inside some of the 5 Okawa Elementary was opened as a disaster heritage site with a newly built memorial facility next to the school building in July 2021. However, the exhibit in the new building is not part of the analysis in this chapter. 6 Though in a different context, the chapter by Solomon in this volume covers the important role play by kataribe in the preservation of local memory and culture.

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The ruins of Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture photograph by Julia Gerster, December 2019

b­ uildings are items like desks and books. Currently, efforts at preservation are ongoing, and some of these objects will be included in the new exhibitions. These disaster displays are made more compelling by the explanations of kataribe-storytellers. Kataribe is the Japanese word used to define traditional storytelling that includes elements from local history and culture (Fulco, 2017). In the case of 3.11, most kataribe are disaster survivors themselves. Like in many other places, the kataribe-storytellers guiding visitors at Arahama and Okawa Elementary are volunteers. However, some kataribe are employed by hotels or the city for their activities. Kataribe-storytelling is now a widespread practice in most of the communities of Northeast Japan affected by 3.11. These storytelling practices are fundamental to the memorialization of both the Arahama and Okawa Elementary Schools. 4

Learning through Examples of Good Practice: Arahama Elementary

The remains of Arahama Elementary School are located about 700 meters inland from the sea in Sendai City’s Wakabayashi district. After the tsunami warning was issued on March 11, local residents evacuated to the school, joining

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students and staff members there. In total, 320 people made it to the building. Except for one child that was picked up by relatives, all the school children and all of the evacuees at Arahama Elementary survived. The children were picked up one by one by helicopter after the tsunami, and subsequently the remaining evacuees made it safely through the debris and mud to reach emergency shelters by the following day. After 27 hours, the rescue was completed. Remarkable in the Arahama case is that according to the evacuation manual the designated place for evacuation was the gymnasium, located right next to the school building. Yet, after a tsunami warning in 2010 (luckily not followed by a tsunami), the principal of Arahama Elementary decided to change the evacuation drill. Fearing that a tsunami higher than a one-story building could reach the school, the principal altered the evacuation drills to reach the third floor. Furthermore, he took the initiative to move all the emergency goods to the third floor as well. Due to the principal’s revisions to the evacuation manual, all the evacuees at the school were saved (Sendai City 2017). The main exhibition at the Arahama elementary school describes the 27-hour long wait of the evacuees for their rescue, the threat of tsunamis, and the necessity to always be prepared. Visitors can see the physical damage caused by the tsunami waves, learn about disaster preparation, and also understand daily life in the area prior to the tragedy of March 11, 2011. The school grounds as well as the majority of classrooms have been transformed into a museum to convey the lessons learned through the disaster and the recovery process. Markings on the outside of the school building show the run-up height of the tsunami, while destroyed iron railings on the veranda depict the incred ible force of the waves (see Figure 7.3). The debris that was washed into the school has been cleared out, but pictures from the day of the tsunami and its following days are displayed around the floors to give an impression of what the school looked like at the time of the disaster (see Figure 7.4). Splashes on the walls and the ceiling indicate the height of the tsunami and debris that swamped up to the second floor. The empty classrooms on the first floor depict the strength of the tsunami as the torn ceilings and bent pieces are clearly visible. The third floor is not accessible by the public, but the fourth floor is focused on the themes of ‘ ōsai’, disaster education, and memories of Arahama. One of the classrooms exhibits the gymnasium clock which stopped tsunami hit, and banners with pictures and accounts describing the rescue efforts (see Figure 7.5). Further, visitors can watch a video with live footage from the helicopter rescue efforts and interviews with the principal and the head of the neighborhood association at that time. The two survivors talk about their experiences on that day, the organization of the evacuation

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Figure 7.3 Plates outside of the building show the reach of the tsunami photograph by Julia Gerster, November 2020

The debris has been cleared but pictures on the walls show what the building looked like in the direct aftermath of the disaster photograph by Julia Gerster, November 2020

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Figure 7.5 Visitors investigating the clock from the former gymnasium that stopped at photograph by Julia Gerster, November 2020

process, and their fear for the children. Moreover, they emphasize how they did not expect such a big disaster to occur in their neighborhood. The video ends with the narrator’s strong plea for heightened disaster risk awareness: ‘We can say for sure that a tsunami will come again. What can we do as to not suffer this tragedy again? We should be sure to pass on the lessons we’ve learned and prepare ourselves for the next eventuality.’ Another room on the fourth floor is titled: ‘Remembering the Disaster and Preparing for Tomorrow’ (Sendai City 2017). Visitors can learn about emergency food and goods such as emergency blankets and toilets (see Figure 7.6). Sendai City’s tsunami countermeasures are explained with models and pictures. The last room thematizes the history and culture of the Arahama area. Videos and pictures show how the area looked before the tsunami and how festivals were celebrated at and around the school. The most remarkable exhibit in this room may be the model of the Arahama area. As part of the “lost homes project” (Tsukihashi Laboratory), professors from Kōbe University distributed similar models to various ­disaster-stricken towns and asked former residents to participate in coloring the objects and adding little flags with descriptions of places that include their personal memories. Some of them have comments

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Exhibit of emergency goods in one of the former classrooms: blankets, emergency food, water, and an emergency toilet photograph by Julia Gerster, November 2020

such as: ‘This is the house of Mr. X’, ‘I used to pick mushrooms here’, or ‘I watched the fireworks at the beach every summer’ (see Figure 7.7). This way, the exhibition does not only aim at educating people who are not from the area. It connects recollections of the past with visions of recovery and invites locals to gather at the school and share their thoughts and memories. This plastic model is not the only way for visitors to receive first-hand accounts of the disaster. Kataribe-storytellers, survivors who guide visitors through the facility, answer questions and offer additional ­explanations. They do not only convey facts like the height or speed of the tsunami and the magnitude of the earthquake. They also share personal m ­ emories about their former neighborhoods and thus make the site and its tragedies more ­relatable through emotional connections. Some of the information shared at ­Arahama would be hard to otherwise grasp without the kataribe’s guidance. The ­gymnasium which used to be the designated emergency evacuation area is no longer there, and a plate describing its background story is located opposite to its entrance. The kataribe, however, would explain in detail how the school principal made the decisions that eventually saved the lives of the evacuees.

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A plastic model depicts the Arahama area before the Great East Japan Earthquake with flags of memories attached to several locations photograph by Julia Gerster, November 2020

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, visitors from all over Japan and overseas visited Arahama Elementary. These visitors included students and school groups, tourists, journalists, researchers, and many others.7 The school’s exhibition was designed in a way that visitors can explore the building on their own. Detailed plates with descriptions and multilingual pamphlets explain what happened on that day. However, it is these first-hand accounts by the kataribe, who are requested and booked via the city, that make the visit more emotionally engaging. 5 Transforming an Example of Bad Practice into a Place of Learning: Okawa Elementary School Unlike other schools in Tōhoku during the 3.11 disasters, where no children lost their lives while under the supervision of the staff, Okawa Elementary School, 7 During the pandemic visitors were mainly domestic school groups. Japan implemented strict border controls in the wake of the pandemic and started reopening for international visitors only slowly and in strictly organized tours as of June 2022.

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located in Ishinomaki City became known for the loss of 74 children and 10 teachers. The accident at Okawa Elementary led to acrimonious discussions in the community and a court trial that some of the bereaved families initiated against the city of Ishinomaki and Miyagi Prefecture. Although the school complex was located a short distance from the Kitakami River, the ocean was about 4 kilometers away and therefore the risk of a tsunami was not listed in the manual for emergency evacuation procedures. When the earthquake struck at 2:46 pm on March 11, the students were brought to the school yard, as the protocol for earthquake management required. After the tsunami warning was launched, some parents picked up their children from school. There were 78 students left, in addition to 11 teachers. The evacuation manual for the school only provided instructions to evacuate to vacant land or parks nearby, and did not specify any location. The principal was not at school that day. The principal’s absence, as well as the absence of a clear evacuation procedure in the event of a tsunami, caused confusion in the chain of command and resulted in none of the teachers taking responsibility for evacuating the school. Despite many tsunami warnings diffused in the area and the advice to evacuate launched by the authorities and neighboring people, the teachers remained uncertain on what to do. Although the school building was close to the river, it was also directly ­adjacent to a hill where children went periodically to collect mushrooms (see Figure 7.8). In areas of Japan prone to tsunami risk, the practice of evacuating to a higher ground is well known. According to witnesses, some students ran towards this hill but were reprimanded by teachers who continued to keep them in the courtyard. Just one minute before the tsunami hit the area (15:37),

A kataribe on the hill next to the Okawa Elementary School tells the visitors that the students and the teachers could have escaped there photograph by Flavia Fulco, December 2017

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the teachers decided to leave the school yard—not to climb the hill, but to go towards the bridge over the Kitakami River, into the direction of the incoming tsunami. During a tsunami, rivers will bring water inland. The narrow waterbed of the river increases the speed of the incoming waves which are also made more destructive by the debris they carry. Okawa Elementary was hit twice: first by the waves that went up the river, encountering a long driveway bridge as an obstacle, and then by the waves coming directly from the ocean. For 74 children and 10 teachers there was no escape anymore. The tsunami went on all night. Only 4 children survived in a fortunate way, while the only surviving teacher was unable to provide an explanation for his rescue. On the grounds of post-traumatic stress, he refused to meet with the victims’ families and provide further explanations about what had happened. More than a decade later, some of the parents of the children are still telling their stories. They founded the Okawa Densho no Kai, an association that seeks to keep the memory of the children alive by telling visitors about the accident at the school, and reminding them that this tragedy was the only case where students lost their lives while under the supervision of an institution. Since 2016, this association has organized guided visits to the site of the school ruins to tell the truth about what happened. In the beginning, the aim of the parents’ association of Okawa Elementary School, in which a small number of the bereaved families—especially the fathers—participated, was to provide the growing number of visitors with ‘correct information’ about what had happened at the school. In the years following the disasters, many visitors started to go to Tōhoku to see the disaster areas and with its infamous story, Okawa was a destination for many of these tours. The parents of Okawa Densho no Kai claim that initially some improvised guides were telling a different story about what had happened that day. According to the kataribe, some guides that were accompanying visitors to the ruins of the school were pointing out a different hill as the desired evacuation spot, weakening the parents’ argument that the lives of their children could have been saved. Consequently, some of the parents decided that it was their duty to reveal the truth about the last moments of their children’s lives: ‘As adults spared by the disaster, we could not only cry, but it was our duty to do something concrete’, one of the kataribe stated (Kataribe guided tour, Okawa Elementary School, 24.2.2020). The stories told by the kataribe parents focus on what happened in the 51 minutes between the earthquake and the tsunami, in a search for truths impos sible to determine, such as why the children were kept in the yard for so long, why they were not brought to the hill, and what was the goal of the delayed

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evacuation (see Figure 7.9). At the end of the three stages of trial, while providing families with compensation for their losses, the Japanese Supreme Court ascribed some responsibility of the accident to the teachers who also became victims in the tsunami. The ruins of the school make the story of what happened on that day more engaging for people who are not familiar with it. Initially the building, heavily damaged and unusable, was condemned and scheduled to be demolished. However, following a formal request from one of the surviving students, joined by other voices in the community, the Town Hall and the Prefecture decided to allow for the remains to be left standing (see Figure 7.10). This decision was obviously controversial: while preserving the physical memory of the school may be important for many, some of the bereaved families are unable to look at those remains, which for them are pervaded by trauma and feelings of loss. For the whole community, the remains also call to mind the mistakes which led up to the accident, the failure to prepare proper evacuation procedures in the manual, and the cascade of wrong decisions by the teachers substituting for the principal’s leadership on that day. Nine years after the disaster, the kataribe claim that keeping the school ruins aids them in their storytelling, since they would not be able to explain what happened to their children in a compelling way without this physical support.

One moment of the kataribe tour. Two kataribe-storytellers, using pictures, tell the story of the school and the tsunami photograph by Flavia Fulco, December 2019

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View of the interior of the school building. Classrooms have been cleaned and organized but what was left of books, pictures and furniture was preserved inside. Visitors are not yet allowed to enter the buildings photograph by Flavia Fulco, February 2020

As one of the kataribe illustrated during the visit: ‘How can we explain how close the hill was, without allowing visitors to climb it?’ (Kataribe guided tour, Okawa Elementary School, 15.12.2019) After the completion of construction to consolidate the school’s structure, which started in April 2020, the school remains were reopened as an official place of memory in July 2021. As of June 2022, visitors are not allowed to enter the damaged building but can look into the class rooms from outside. Many of the bereaved parents criticized the lack of explanation about the tragic deaths in the newly built memorial facility next to the school. Yet they also expressed their hope that the shocking sight of the disaster ruin itself, which cannot hide the tragedy that unfolded at this place, will serve as a useful tool for disaster education, specifically regarding ­tsunami evacuation (see Figure 7.11). 6

Renegotiating Negative Heritage through Disaster Education

Choosing which narratives to preserve, as well as how they are transmitted, is an important part of the memorialization process of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Such processes take place through negotiations within communities and are not always limited to the results of open round table discussions between the different stakeholders. Sometimes these processes also stem from an unconscious sedimentation of collective memory (Halbwachs 1992) that requires many years, and may never be fully completed.

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View of Okawa Elementary School yard photograph by Flavia Fulco, October 2017

Although Arahama Elementary and Okawa Elementary were struck by the same tsunami, the way the disaster unfolded was very different. Since the ­successful story of evacuation shaped Arahama Elementary’s disaster ruins into a good example of disaster education for future generations, the decision to preserve it was uncontroversial and supported by the local government early on. By contrast, the tragic events of Okawa Elementary School triggered questions of responsibility and blame, revealing the unsettling reality of the consequences of a lack of disaster preparedness. The exhibitions at Arahama Elementary were based on the lessons that can be learned from the locals’ experiences during 3.11. In the video and throughout the exhibition, there are several times where the disaster being unexpected in this lifetime (sōteigai) is emphasized. This narrative is common throughout Japan. However, disaster experts often argue that a disaster beyond any ­previously experienced could hit anytime, anywhere, and it is therefore important to remind people of such risks. This trend to prepare for an u ­ nexpected large-scale disaster is supported through the highlighting of good practice at ­Arahama Elementary, beginning with the principal who changed their evacuation manual. It was due to his preparedness that the evacuees were not surprised by the tsunami in the gymnasium which was too low to withstand the waves’ power. Furthermore, thanks to the decision to store the emergency goods on the third floor, the survivors were partially provided with blankets and food, although there were not enough for all the evacuees.

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The kataribe at Arahama also stress the importance of continuously being prepared for a disaster, explaining the hardships of the rescue process, such as how cold it was and how long they had to wait. As survivors and first-hand ­witnesses their explanations of disaster risks are conveyed on an emotional level. These explanations are often followed by a strong plea to be prepared so that others will not have to endure the same hardships. This wish becomes increasingly significant when considering the high risk of various natural ­hazards in Japan. While the exhibitions at Arahama are organized to be accessible to visitors without guidance, at Okawa the role of the kataribe is crucial. Since the decision to preserve Okawa Elementary as a memorial was determined in 2019, visitors cannot access the building itself. The narrative completely relies on the kataribe guiding visitors through the disaster ruins. On rare occasions the kataribe bring the audience inside the remains of the school building. Without their storytelling, the ruins would appear only as a destroyed school, and a visitor with no knowledge of the disaster would potentially never know what had happened to it. Since the ruins’ educational function is integral to its preservation, volunteers at the site continually aim to justify the ruins’ existence by reframing the events of the disaster into a proactive educational tool. Most of the buildings designated as disaster remains from 3.11 were ­minimally controversial places in which no lives were lost during the disaster (Sakaguchi 2019; 2020; Littlejohn 2021). Although Okawa is often viewed as the most tragic example of wrong evacuation procedures during 3.11, the kataribe stress that no one died within the school premises. According to the kataribe, the ruins of the school should not be seen as a sad place: in preserving the ruins they intend to preserve the memory of their children as they were happy playing and learning at the school. While the site which preserves one of the most emotional stories of 3.11 is meaningfully presented as a site where no one died, some of the kataribe admit that they initially wanted the school to be destroyed as soon as possible. But through the passage of time and the crystallization of pain, new ways of utilizing negative heritage unfolded. Arahama was more readily used as an example of framing negative heritage positively through the good practices of the principal and its evacuees. ­Connecting the story of survival at Arahama Elementary to disaster ­education thus allowed the city to turn the negative heritage of the 3.11 into a positive learning experience. For these reasons, Arahama Elementary became a less controversial representative of heritage preservation than Okawa Elementary, although both memorials sought to reframe negative heritage through proac tive disaster education. Controversies regarding emotional trauma are intricately connected to borders of memory which can cut through communities. While some of the

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bereaved parents at Okawa were eager to uncover the truth of events on March 11th, others wanted to grieve silently, or did not want to be confronted with questions of responsibility connected to their tragic loss, since the teachers who died on that day had families as well. As Boyle (2019) argued, preserving disaster remains in communities is always complicated by opinions and discussions influenced by trauma and grief, and the potential to relive these feelings through the preservation of these sites. As we mentioned, ongoing construction to consolidate the structure of the Okawa Elementary ruins will turn it into a place of mourning, yet also into a site of learning. This transformation may cause this site of memory to become divisive or inclusive according to the different ways individuals were affected by the disaster. Another significant element in the preservation procedure already touched upon is time. Time, or a lack thereof, can lead to memories vanishing in the recovery process. When asked if they tried to engage in preservation activities, many interviewees in the Tōhoku area replied that they were afraid that preserving damaged private buildings as memorials would eventually hinder the recovery process. Yet later on they regretted their decision, being left without any physical reminder of their former life or the impact of the disaster. Hasty decisions for preserving certain buildings can also take time away from the bereaved to cope with their loss. Especially those who lost family members may have a hard time engaging in decision making processes right after a disaster. After the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Reconstruction Agency was founded to secure a swift recovery and fast financial aid for the hardest hit regions. However, the initial recovery time frame and the planned dissolution of the agency after ten years (although extended by 10 years in 2020), also led to a fear that after its dissolution no money would be left for preserving disaster ruins and therefore a sudden increase in exhibits, designated disaster ruins, or museums can be seen around the Tōhoku coast during the past few years. Regarding time, again, the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, often serves as a reference by informants who point out that it took decades to reach the decision to formally preserve the building; time they see as necessary in the recovery process that includes representations of the disaster. Although students do not commute to the schools anymore, through the preservation of their remains, the buildings continue their purpose of e­ ducating future generations. Disaster ruins that showcase good practice such as Ara hama Elementary help to preserve the positives within a generation-defining tragedy, and therefore readily become part of the collective identity of a nation. The value of disaster ruins such as Okawa Elementary, which memorialize the loss of children’s lives, may be initially ambiguous. However, these ruins are

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likewise providing a necessary lesson for future generations. Transmitting only successful stories may yield undesirable results from disaster education as mistakes can be repeated if they are willingly forgotten. Due to the efforts of the surviving students and the bereaved families, Okawa Elementary became one of the very few 3.11 heritage sites to convey lessons learned through tragic mistakes. Yet, through revealing the tragedy of these bad practices, future ­generations may be less inclined to ‘willingly forget’ and repeat such tragedies again. 7 Conclusion Throughout this chapter we have shown how the negative heritage (­Meskell 2009) produced by 3.11 disasters can be as difficult to negotiate for its ­fragmented communities as the lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989) regarding wars and terrorist attacks. Decisions to preserve tsunami remains, officially and unofficially, were related to the events that occurred on the proposed sites and how the site’s narrative could adhere to what the local community wanted to transmit about their disaster experiences. These decisions also relate to how the site’s narrative connects to a wider discourse on a national level. What characteristics are required from a site to be included in such a palimpsest? As we mentioned, most of the preserved sites are characterized by the fact that no one died on the premises. We have also discussed how the story of the controversial Okawa Elementary School ruins needed a long negotiation period contrary to Arahama Elementary School which exhibited good practices. Following examples of museumification (Littlejohn 2021) of previous disasters, including wars and natural hazards, negative heritage of the Great East Japan Earthquake is being reshaped for positive, didactic purposes. Disaster remains such as Arahama and Okawa Elementary have become places of learning as well as contributions to understanding the Tōhoku Region’s significant role in disaster education (bōsai). Successful stories of resilience amidst tragedy and salvation due to preparation have been c­ hosen as the heritage for the generation of 3.11. As we have also shown in this c­ hapter, which sites are chosen to be representative of a disaster and which narra tives are told are always bound to borders between memory collectives and questions as to whose stories are being heard. The case of Okawa Elementary therefore shows a significant example of people fighting not to be forgotten, and enforces the necessity to learn from failed disaster practices as much as from successful ones.

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Acknowledgements This project was supported by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up 19201523 (Julia Gerster) and by the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Overseas Researchers (P15787) and the Toshiba International Foundation Grant 2018 for the project: ‘Kataribe in post-disaster Japan. Traditional s­ torytelling and collective memory’ (Flavia Fulco). References Bosai + Tourism Website. 2020. Accessed 14.9.2020. https://bosaikanko.jp/attraction/. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of memory: affirmation and contestation over Japan’s heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Bull, Jonathan and Steven Ivings. 2019. ‘Return on Display: Memories of Postcolonial Migration at Maizuru.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 336–357. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan Website. Accessed 2.2.2020. http://www.bousai .go.jp/kohou/kouhoubousai/h21/01/special_01.html. Fulco, Flavia. 2017. ‘Kataribe. A Keyword to Recovery’. Japan-Insights website. Gerster, Julia. 2019. ‘Hierarchies of affectedness: Kizuna, perceptions of loss, and social dynamics in post-3.11 Japan.’ International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 41. Gordon, Andrew. 2019. ‘Dark Tourism’ in Japan: Global, National, and Local P ­ erspectives, Presentation at Tokyo University, Tokyo, Japan, June 21, 2019. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kimura Aya. 2016. Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima. Durham: Duke University Press. Kimura, Aya. 2017. ‘Citizen Science in Post-Fukushima Japan: The Gendered Scientization of Radiation Measurement.’ Science as Culture, 117 (2): 1–24. Kingston, Jeff. 2012. Natural disaster and nuclear crisis in Japan: Response and recovery after Japan’s 3/11. London: Routledge. Littlejohn, Andrew. 2021. ‘Museums of themselves: disaster, heritage, and disaster ­heritage in Tohoku’. Japan Forum, 33 (4): 476–496. Martini, Anna and Claudia Minca. 2021. ‘Constructing Affective (Dark) Tourism Encounters; Rikuzentakata after the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Disaster.’ Social and Cultural Geographies, 22 (1): 1–17. Meskell, Lynn. 2009. ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology.’ ­Anthropological Quarterly, 75 (3): 557–574. Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Technology Website (MEXT 2009). Accessed 2.2.2020. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/chousa/kaihatu/006/shiryo/atta ch/1367194.htm

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Miyagi Prefecture. 2020. Bosai + Tourism Website. Accessed 7.7.2020. https: //bosaikanko.jp/attraction/. Morioka Rika. 2013. ‘Mother Courage: Women as Activists between a passive ­Populace and a Paralyzed Government.’ In Japan copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters of March 2011, edited by Tom Gill, ­Brigitte Steger, and David Slater, 177–200. Bern: Peter Lang. Morioka Rika. 2014. ‘Gender difference in the health risk perception of radiation from Fukushima in Japan: the role of hegemonic masculinity.’ Social Science & Medicine, 107: 105–112. National Police Agency. 2020. About the Great East Japan Earthquake [Higashi Nihon Daishinsai ni tsuite] https://www.npa.go.jp/news/other/earthquake2011/index.html accessed 7/8/2020. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.’ Representations, 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (1989): 7–24. Recovery Agency. 2011. Evacuee numbers in the whole country [Zenkoku hinansha no kazu] https://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main-cat2/sub-cat2-1/hinanshasuu. html accessed 7/8/2020. Sakaguchi, Nao. 2019. ‘Sanriku Kaigan Gyogyō Shuraku no seikatsu keiken to shinsai iko - Iwate-ken Otsuchi-cho no jirei’, PhD diss., Tohoku University. Sakaguchi, Nao. 2020. Why didn’t the residents preserve the disaster remains? A case of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, Presentation at the 2020 World Disaster Kataritsugi Forum, Kōbe, Japan, January 25, 2020. Samuels, Richard. 2013. 3.11: Disaster and change in Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sendai City. 2017. Ruins of the Great East Japan Earthquake: Sendai Arahama ­Elementary School. Display Guide. Slater, David, Morioka Rika and Danzuka Haruka. 2014. ‘Micro-Politics of Radiation.’ Critical Asian Studies Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zwigenberg, Ran. 2014. Hiroshima: The Origin of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Marketing the Semi-Colonial as Cosmopolitan: Treaty Port Heritage and the Remaking of Hakodate Steven Ivings Abstract With its celebrated view from the peak of Mt. Hakodate and the cosmopolitan ­ambience of its historic port townscape, Hakodate has become a popular tourist destination. Yet this is a relatively recent development. Hakodate first rose to prominence in the nineteenth century as a regional trading centre, becoming the clearing house of Japan’s northern imperial expansion. From 1855 to 1899, Hakodate was also a treaty port and hosted a small population of foreign consuls, merchants and missionaries. Though this gave the port international connections, treaty port status stemmed from the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ which bestowed extraterritorial rights to foreign resi dents, a semi-colonial arrangement that undermined Japanese sovereignty. Following the collapse of the Japanese empire, Hakodate’s days as a vibrant port city drew to a close. Faced with the prospect of terminal decline, a contest over Hakodate’s future social and industrial strategy ensued and produced a resolve to refashion Hakodate as a ‘city of culture’. This entailed the mobilization of Hakodate’s historical assets as marketable heritage to cultivate the tourist industry. In this chapter, I chart Hakodate’s transformation from a port city closely linked to imperial expansion to a port of heritage. Furthermore, I show how this has been based on a bordered invocation of the port’s treaty port past, largely to the exclusion of Japan’s own imperial expansion and links with Asian neighbours.

Keywords Hakodate – treaty ports – heritage – history – tourism

Located on the southern tip of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, Hakodate has become a popular tourist destination. Almost 5.4 million tourists visited Hakodate in 2019, with just under 500,000 overnight stays from overseas visitors, principally from Taiwan and China (Hakodate-shi © Steven Ivings, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_009

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Kankōbu Kankōkikakuka 2020, 1–3). Tourist traffic of this scale leaves a large imprint on the economy of a city of a quarter of a million inhabitants. In 2010, tourism and its multiplier effects contributed an estimated 9.2% of Hakodate’s economic output and 11.3% of employment and this share is thought to have risen since. The municipal authorities view tourism as one of Hakodate’s key industries and its growth potential is considered promising, particularly after the bullet train network was extended to Hakodate in 2016 and as the number of visitors to Hokkaido from East and Southeast Asia has surged in recent years (Hakodate-shi Kankōbu Kankō Shinkōka 2014, 42). Hakodate’s touristic appeal is based on its natural and historical assets. The famous night view from Mt. Hakodate and the Yunokawa hot springs are the main natural attractions, whilst a cluster of mostly Western-style or ­Western-Japanese hybrid buildings in the old port town of Hakodate provide the majority of historic landmarks. This area, known popularly as Motomachi, maintains a sense of cosmopolitan ambience reflecting its history as one of the first Japanese ports opened to international trade in the nineteenth century (see Figure 8.1). A few kilometres away from Motomachi in the Kameda district, there is another popular historical landmark dated to the mid-­ nineteenth-century, a star-shaped fortress (goryōkaku) which was modelled on European designs and housed the administration of the Hakodate ­Governor who was charged with administering Japan’s northern frontier region in the last days of the Tokugawa period. The site also became the headquarters of

Figure 8.1 The waterfront area of the historic Motomachi district in the foreground, with red-brick former warehouses now converted into a shopping and restaurant plaza; in the background, Mt. Hakodate with an observation deck Photograph by the author

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the last Tokugawa resistance during the Boshin War (1868–9) which established the Meiji regime in a process popularly known as the Meiji Restoration. Hakodate City visitor surveys conducted between 2005 and 2012 consistently found that over 80% of respondents picked the night view from Mt. ­Hakodate as among the reasons for their visit, whilst 60 to 70% each year stated an interest in H ­ akodate’s historical architecture. The same surveys also found that the Motomachi area and Mt. Hakodate were visited by upwards of 80% of visitors and thus together they form the core of Hakodate’s touristic appeal (­Hakodate-shi Kankōbu Kankō Shinkōka 2014, 34). Despite being somewhat removed from the country’s main population centres and international airports, Hakodate has successfully cultivated a regional brand based on the ‘romantic charm’ of its historic townscape—ranking first in a 2019 regional brand survey (Burando Sōgō Kenkyūjo 2019). Yet the emergence of Hakodate as an attractive tourist destination is a relatively recent development. Hakodate was once primarily a port town based on the export of Hokkaido’s marine products to other Japanese ports and onwards to foreign markets, especially China (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 1987, 874–891). The city first rose to prominence in the nineteenth century as the Tokugawa Shogunate made it the headquarters of its increased efforts to solidify a somewhat frag ile Japanese hold on Hokkaido and extend Japanese influence further north. These efforts continued after the Meiji Restoration, and Hakodate became the clearing house for Japanese fisheries that extended as far north as Sakhalin (Karafuto) and Kamchatka, particularly after the Russo-Japanese War 1904–5. In this sense the city has an undeniable link to the northward territorial and pelagic expansion of the Japanese empire. Furthermore, Hakodate was opened to international trade in 1855 as a result of American gunboat diplomacy. This made Hakodate one of Japan’s first treaty ports, commercial spaces in which the subjects of Western imperialist powers could reside and trade with extraterritorial rights that effectively put them beyond the reach of Japanese law. Though this arrangement undermined Japanese sovereignty and has been described as semi-colonial in nature, treaty port status provided Hakodate with stronger links to the outside world and saw the establishment of a small foreign community which in turn left an imprint on Hakodate’s townscape. In this way, Hakodate’s flourishing as a port city was intensely intertwined with both the expansion of the Japanese empire and the spread of Western imperialism in East Asia. The collapse of the Japanese empire in 1945 endangered Hakodate’s a vibrant port city and raised the prospect of terminal decline. In this chapter, I show the response to this crisis and how a contest over Hakodate’s future social and industrial strategy produced a resolve to remake Hakodate as a city

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of culture. At the heart of this new vision was a mobilization of H ­ akodate’s historical architecture as heritage that could serve as key assets in the cultivation of the tourist industry. As such, I chart Hakodate’s transformation from an imperial trading port city into a port of heritage. Furthermore, I show how this transformation has been based on a selective, or ‘bordered’, invocation of Hakodate’s treaty port past which is presented positively, and largely to the exclusion of Japan’s own imperial expansion and links with its Asian neighbours. 1 Hakodate as Treaty Port and Northern Hub of Japanese Imperial Expansion Treaty ports were established in East Asia in the wake of China’s defeat to ­Britain in the Opium War of 1839–42. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking, which ended the conflict, saw the existing system of foreign trade which was conducted on ­Chinese terms and limited to the southern port of Canton (Guangzhou) replaced by a new system which opened further ports to foreign commerce and reversed the power dynamic in favour of Britain and later other Western powers (Nield 2015, 2–4; Van Dyke 2005). At these ports newly opened by treaty (hence treaty ports) fixed tariffs were set on trade and foreign concessions were established in which foreign merchants could reside, own property and enjoy extraterritorial rights enforced by resident consuls and visiting gunboats. The Treaty of Nanking initially saw trade extended to only four additional ports—Amoy (Xiamen), Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Shanghai—whilst Hong Kong was ceded to Britain—but over time as conflict between China and Western imperial powers continued additional ports were added. Eventually this network of ports stretched along the entire Chinese coastline and to inland riverways (Bickers and Henriot 2000). The extent and impact of this forcible opening of Chinese markets to Western commerce and the unequal nature of the relationship has meant that treaty ports have been considered a hallmark of China’s so-called ‘century of humiliation’ from the Opium Wars until the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. Consequently, in China, treaty ports have long been viewed in unambiguously negative terms (Wang 2012). Though Japan’s treaty ports were established without the level of violence seen in China, the coercive pressure of Western gunboat diplomacy was still at play. In the mid-to-late 1850s, Japan’s first treaty ports, Hakodate and Shimoda, were opened as ports of call to American vessels following a United States mis sion led by Commodore Mathew Perry. The threatening spectre of Perry’s now infamous ‘black ships’ in Edo bay saw the Tokugawa Shogunate conclude with

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the United States the first of several treaties which provided access to these ports for refuge and resupply. As other Western imperial powers concluded further treaties with Tokugawa Japan, and as the United States pushed for additional concessions, trading rights were established and the ports of Nagasaki (previously only accessible to Dutch and Chinese merchants), Yokohama (replacing Shimoda), Kobe, Osaka, Edo and Niigata were added to the ranks of Japan’s treaty ports/cities (Mitani 2003; Iokibe and Minohara 2017). Just as in China, Japan’s treaty ports became spaces in which the subjects of Western imperial powers could trade under low fixed tariffs and reside with extraterritorial rights that put them beyond Japanese jurisdiction. Given the coercive nature of their establishment and the extension of rights that undermined Japanese sovereignty, treaty ports have been viewed as semi-colonial spaces. Scholars of imperialism have conventionally viewed treaty ports as prime examples of ‘informal empire’ and the ‘imperialism of free trade’ which characterised mid-nineteenth century Western imperialism (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Phipps 2015, 5–9). In this scheme, Western powers favoured the threat of colonization to ensure access to markets and economic concessions as opposed to direct colonization. In Japanese historiography the treaties that led to the establishment of the treaty ports have been popularly described as ‘unequal treaties,’ the revision of which became a priority for both the Tokugawa regime and its Meiji ­successor (Auslin 2009). After several rounds of failed negotiations and a concerted effort to modernise the country, which entailed beginning to build its own colonial empire, Japan was finally able to phase out extraterritorial rights by 1899 and then to restore tariff autonomy in 1911. In the meantime, Japan’s treaty ports became the sites through which it became closer integrated into the global economy and connected with global flows of people, knowledge, technology and culture. As travel and residence for foreigners was restricted to the treaty ports and their immediate vicinity, the treaty ports were the main sites of mutual encounter and interaction for Japanese and foreigners alike (Partner 2018; Wakita 2013). This interaction was not always friendly. Significant tension between local and visiting Japanese and the foreign communities in the treaty ports characterised the first few decades of their existence (Hoare 1994; Partner 2018). In the 1850s and 1860s in particular, anti-foreigner sentiment was rife in Japan and several lethal attacks on foreigners were made. These created what Hoare describes as ‘an atmosphere of fear and apprehension for Japanese and for eigners alike’ (Hoare 2018, 276). Fearful of seemingly random attacks made by disgruntled samurai, foreign residents called for the permanent stationing of militia in Japan and welcomed regular visits by gunboats to the treaty ports.

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For the most part, they took a dim view of Japanese culture, officialdom and the local justice system. Yet whilst they may have looked down on their Japanese counterparts, foreign residents’ behaviour was often decried by their own resident consuls. That they often went about armed and engaged in ‘routine displays of arrogance’ which meant that together with the samurai caught up in the wave of anti-alienism that accompanied the opening of treaty ports, many of the foreign residents also ‘contributed [to] the air of slight lawlessness’ (Hoare 2018, 273, 284). When we also consider that treaty ports hosted a regular flow of transient sailors and whaling crew who were prone to rowdy behaviour, the image of treaty ports worsens still. Whatever the historical reality of treaty port society, in Japan (in contrast to China) the former treaty ports are viewed in a positive way and associated with the Meiji-period slogan ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika) (Hoare 2018, 271). In Kobe, Nagasaki, Yokohama and Hakodate in particular, sites connected to the treaty port era are promoted as evidence of each towns’ cosmopolitan, exotic and ‘high-collar’ culture. The memory invoked of these historical international connections is purged of any hint of the colonial. In one typical example of this positive spin, a piece describing the charm of Hakodate’s Motomachi area in the Asahi Japan Weekly spoke of a past in which ‘Hakodate prospered as a cosmopolitan city’ which has left behind ‘reminders of this adventurous time’ (Asahi Japan Weekly 2011). Hoare suggests that the difference with China in terms of the historical con sciousness on treaty ports stems from their shorter existence in Japan and the fact that Japan was able to successfully revise the unequal treaties upon which they were established. It might also stem from the fact that ‘[a]s Japan edged out of the treaty port system, it was [also] responsible for an intensification of that system in China’ (Hoare 2018, 282–3). Indeed, whilst Hoare is referring to the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 by which Japan, victorious in the first Sino-Japanese War, acquired its first formal colony (Taiwan) and obtained non-reciprocal rights in Chinese treaty ports (Duus, Myers and Peattie 1991), almost two decades earlier it had essentially mimicked Western gunboat diplomacy and brought about the opening of Korea’s first treaty ports with the Treaty of Kanghwa. With a past as both victim and perpetrator, a Japanese critique of the treaty ports is inherently contradictory. This might explain why a more positive view of the treaty port heritage is taken in Japan, with colonial blemishes largely removed. The subject of this chapter, Hakodate, clearly demonstrates this point. The port rose to prominence first as the base from which the Tokugawa regime sought to project its direct power over the northern frontier region of Ezo and in this sense it was already linked to Japanese colonial expansion before

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its opening as one of Japan’s first treaty ports in 1855. Becoming a treaty port raised Hakodate’s political significance and saw the Tokugawa regime and other northern domains increase their presence and seek to fortify the port— including building a large fort on the entry to the port and the aforementioned goryōkaku fortress popular with visitors today. Yet, as a treaty port, Hakodate did not flourish. As a whaling destination it had but a handful of years of promise before the American pacific whaling industry entered terminal decline (Wilson 2020). Its trade with foreign ports was dwarfed by that of Yokohama and Kobe, with Hakodate’s foreign trade largely confined to the export of marine products to Shanghai. As a result, only a handful of Western merchants took up residence in the port. Instead, Hakodate boomed as it became further integrated with markets in the rest of Japan and as Japanese efforts to settle Hokkaido gathered steam in the Meiji and Taisho periods (Ivings 2017). As Japanese fishing activities expanded further north, Hakodate’s mercantile community profited greatly by engaging in or financing such operations, whilst the port also enjoyed steady traffic and great demand for its labour. This was particularly the case in the years that followed the formal recognition of Japanese sovereignty over the Kuril Islands in the 1875 Treaty of St. Petersburg and then after the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth which concluded the Russo-­ Japanese War and secured for Japan the southern half of Sakhalin as a Japanese colony and extensive fishing rights as far north as Kamchatka. ­Hakodate’s geographic location also meant that it was important from a military perspective as it effectively controlled the Tsugaru straits which link the Pacific and Japan Sea. Consequently, several military facilities were installed on Mt. Hakodate from 1898 which became a designated military fortification strictly off limits to citizens of the port. In this way, after the Meiji restoration until Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, Hakodate became an important imperial port contributing to the defence of the realm and serving as the ‘gateway to the north’ (hokuyō no genkan). It served as a hub for Japan’s colonial settlement and commercial expansion in Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, besides an extensive pelagic empire in the Okhotsk Sea and North Pacific (Tsutsui 2013). Treaty port status played only a minor role in Hakodate’s prosperity and though it established international connections these were, whatever the port’s current touristic marketing pitch, largely intra-Asian connections rather than Western. Hakodate’s main exports (kelp and other dried marine products) were not in demand in Europe or the United States, but proved popular in China. Unsurprisingly then it was Chinese merchants who had the great est impact on Hakodate commercially speaking. Even the Western merchants who resided in Hakodate were connected to Chinese merchants or otherwise dependent on the China market (Ivings and Qiu 2019, 298–301). Nevertheless,

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it is the positive impact of the West or Western culture which is most emphasised in Hakodate’s heritage townscape today and the Chinese connection is largely overlooked. Amongst the handful of Western residents there were some important contributions—Thomas Blakiston’s zoological studies and meteorological observations—but to these must be added the disruptions. Western residents were often involved in altercations with Japanese, whalers and sailors were often involved in drunken violence, smuggling was rampant at times, whilst one British consul was involved in the theft and export of Ainu bones (Hoare 1976) and the aforementioned Blakiston was once charged for manslaughter after one of his Japanese staff apparently committed suicide following a beating from his employer (the consul dismissed the charge, fining Blakiston for assault) (Cortazzi 1999). With these darker aspects to the treaty port past and the insignificance of treaty port trade to the eventual prosperity of the port in mind, in the next sections I chart the process by which Hakodate has embraced a positive view of the treaty port era and cast itself as a cosmopolitan port of culture, emphasizing connections to the West rather than its Asian neighbours. 2

From City of Industry to City of Culture

Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War marked the end of Hakodate’s era as an imperial port, but it nevertheless brought some positives to the economy of Hakodate. Allied bombing raids had caused damage to port facilities but this was not extensive enough to cause long term disruption—damage from fires in 1879, 1907 and 1934 had been greater. Instead the end of the war provided an opportunity for the recovery of Hakodate’s core industries (marine products, shipbuilding and commerce) which had been severely curtailed by the requisitioning of civilian shipping for the war effort. The return of peace meant that non-military related industries were again legitimate areas of investment and international trade could restart. The end of the war also provided opportuni ties for new industries to emerge, tourism among them. Defeat meant that Mt. Hakodate ceased to serve as a military fortress. In 1946 ownership and management of the mountain was transferred to Hakodate City by the Ministry of Finance. The mountain was soon opened to citizens, and, as the Japanese economy recovered and entered a period of unprecedented expansion in the mid-to-late 1950s and 1960s, Mt. Hakodate was utilised as a tourist resource. A road to the summit and an observation deck built on top of former military facilities were constructed by 1952 and the number of annual visitors already exceeded 100,000 by 1955 (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002,

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682–6). A ropeway to the summit followed in 1958 (upgraded in 1988) and by this point Mt. Hakodate was voted by the readers of Yomiuri Shinbun as providing the most stunning view in all of Japan (Yomiuri Shinbun 1959). Peace also saw the return of Minato Matsuri (literally Port Festival) in 1946. The festival was first held in 1935 to mark the recovery of the port town from a major fire that had broken out on 21 March 1934, destroying a third of the townscape. As several donations for the recovery effort had come from abroad, it was decided to hold the festival on July 1 which was the anniversary of the opening of Hakodate to international trade. This was meant as a sign of appreciation for the international support received but it was also the first official celebration of Hakodate’s opening as a treaty port. Needless to say, given the historical background of treaty ports as sites where Japanese sovereignty had been undermined by Western powers, the festival was cancelled between 1942 and 1945 as Japan was at war with the United States and Britain, rendering the treaty port past ‘shameful’ (fumeiyō) (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 677–81). In the context of Japan’s occupation by the Allied powers between 1945 and 1952 the festival was revived and in most years images of the treaty port past were evoked to promote it (see Figure 8.2). Today the festival continues as the highlight of Hakodate’s public events calendar and draws tourists from all over Japan for its famed firework display, processions and dances, though it was cancelled in 2020 and 2021, the first time since its postwar resumption, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Japan’s defeat had restored peace and as such lifted the lid on several of Hakodate’s core industries, however, it also introduced several structural problems. In the imperial era, particularly after the Russo-Japanese War, Hakodate had served as the gateway to the northern reaches of the Japanese empire and with the de facto loss of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands to the Soviet Union, Hakodate’s commercial remit was severely curtailed. Additionally, imperial collapse in the north saw an influx of over 300,000 repatriates from these areas to Hakodate which served as a regional repatriation centre (Bull 2018, 791). Though Hakodate’s role in decolonization is barely recognised today, repatriation swelled the ranks of the port’s population at a time when work was hard to come by (Ivings 2018, 161). Besides these problems resulting from the loss of empire, the Cold War context also complicated the resumption of off-shore northern fish eries. These activities resumed in 1952 and were boosted by the resumption of Japan-Soviet relations in 1956, however, fishing activities in the Sea of Okhotsk and north Pacific were consistently plagued by Cold War politics and in the mid-1970s the industry entered a period of irreversible decline. Long before this, in 1959, the Yomiuri had declared that the idea of Hakodate basing itself on the northern fisheries was already ‘a dream of long ago’. The report felt Hakodate

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A poster for the 1948 edition of the Minato Matsuri. A Western ship appears in a book which references the opening of the port Courtesy of Hakodate City Central Library

was at an important juncture in which it needed to reinvent itself as either a city of industry or tourism (Yomiuri Shinbun 1959). This proved a shrewd assessment, though consensus on that direction was not immediate.

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Despite the uncertainty surrounding the future of the northern fisheries, Hakodate’s docks remained relatively buoyant until the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 (Hokkai Taimususha 1983, 136–9). The central government’s ­industrial policy in the early postwar decades favoured shipbuilding by providing cheap credit and guaranteed orders (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 703–7). The dock area thus remained an area of both work and residence until the early 1970s, though new port facilities had long been moving eastwards towards Hakodate’s main train station and then towards Kameda and Nanaehama, away from the old port town (Okamoto 2008, 152–7). The oil shocks, however, saw orders for vessels plummet at a time when Hakodate had just expanded building capacity. In a feature on struggling Japanese shipbuilders that appeared in The Economist in June 1979, the Hakodate Dock company was singled out for its $175m losses in 1978, ‘one of the biggest ever made by a quoted company in Japan’ (The Economist, 30 June 1979). Domestic wages had risen steadily during the high growth era and as the yen began to appreciate in value Japanese competitiveness in shipbuilding was severely undermined. Riddled with debt and with much of the industry shifting to East Asian rivals, the decline of shipbuilding deprived Hakodate and other Japanese port cities of a core industry. The decline of the Hakodate dock area compounded several other ­structural problems that meant Hakodate was unable to fully capitalise on the postwar boom. Hakodate was detached from the core of postwar d­ evelopment in ­Hokkaido centred on Sapporo; it had a structural dependence on the northern fisheries which under Soviet control proved unreliable; trade prospects across the Japan Sea were complicated by the Cold War; and there had been a lack of investment in public facilities and human resources. In this context, Yano Yasushi, Hakodate mayor from 1967 to 1983, sought to revitalise H ­ akodate as an industrial port city through the Comprehensive Plan for the Development of the Hakodate Region, a ten-year plan launched in 1971. The plan sought the redevelopment of Hakodate’s port facilities and the construction of an integrated industrial port complex at Yafurai in neighbouring Kamiiso town (­Hakodate-shi 1972, 184). The complex proposed was a large-scale project involving 5,050,000 square meters of land reclamation and the establishment of several heavy and chemical industrial plants and oil refineries involving the Mitsubishi group, Ajia Sekiyu, Japan Cement, and Hokkaido Electric Power, among others (­Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 339–340). Yano argued that commerce, tourism, fishing and agriculture would be insufficient to reverse the decline of the region. Instead, he argued, Hakodate should be remade as a productive manu facturing and distribution hub which would create jobs and provide a stronger foundation for the local economy (Hokkaido Shinbun, 7 July 1972).

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Nevertheless, the idea to reclaim land at Yafurai for the establishment of an integrated heavy and chemical industrial port complex met with strong opposition from fishing communities in Kamiiso. Concerned about the disruption to marine life in Hakodate bay and mindful of pollution, the Kamiiso ­Fishing Cooperative managed to convince the Mayor of Kamiiso to abandon the plan and Yano had no choice but to follow suit. The Yafurai plan was ­formally abandoned in February 1973 and later that year the first oil shock effectively ended the era of high-speed growth in Japan (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 340–2). Reflecting a growing concern about the environmental effects of rapid industrialization following high profile lawsuits about the effects of industrial pollution in Yokkaichi and elsewhere, in Hakodate too, many began to question the logic of a socioeconomic policy that merely sought to attract large companies with little concern for the environment (Taira 1993, 172–4; Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 340–342). Local residents began to call for a regional development policy that emphasised the welfare of residents and a liveable city of culture. A new regional plan, called the Comprehensive Plan for the Hakodate Region, was implemented between 1977 and 1985 as an immediate result of citizens growing demands. The plan carried the subtitle ‘striving for a Hakodate full of charm, surrounded in greenery—a good place to live’ and represented a major shift in urban planning from attracting and supporting large industrial companies to creating a local economy that centred on the everyday lives of citizens (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 340–2). In this period several public facilities were built but the city’s debts also mounted. And whilst tourism had emerged as an important industry the city was somewhat dependent on Mt. Hakodate as a means to attract tourists. Many tourists came to Hakodate in tour groups with a fixed itinerary, typically limiting their stay to just a few hours in which they climbed the mountain, took in the view and then departed. The head of the Hakodate Chamber of Commerce, Tanaka Seiichirō, and other business people lamented the situation in which Hakodate’s tourism effectively meant ‘Mt. Hakodate only,’ because it brought limited economic benefits with visitors spending little time and money in the city (Hokkaido Shinbun 11 June 1975). As such the plan included efforts to develop other tourist resources to ensure that visitors would explore the port city itself. In particular the historical buildings of the Motomachi area became the focus of development. Initiatives on the part of the Chamber of Commerce and city authorities were joined by various residents and stakeholders from the Motomachi area. The latter were prompted by a sense of crisis as the area began to empty and lose its function as a port. Though by the start of the 1960s the decline of Hako date’s old docks was somewhat evident, it remained an active area of work into

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the 1970s. Reflecting this fact, local efforts to recognise and protect Hakodate’s historical townscape in the Motomachi area came comparatively late—as late as 1962 the budget for Cultural Properties was a mere ¥80,000, largely consisting of administrative costs (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 743–7). Yet, from 1963 onwards, a number of sites and documents were recognised as Hakodate City Cultural Properties (Hakodate-shi Shitei Bunkazai) and others were added to the list of Important National Cultural Properties (Kuni Shitei Bunkazai) including the Former Hakodate Public Hall (1974) and the Tachikawa Family Residence (1971). This growing interest in identifying and protecting Hakodate’s architectural heritage was, like elsewhere in Japan, a response to a boom in residential land and public infrastructure development that endangered older buildings. The decline of the dock area and flight of residents to the spacious new housing developments in Hakodate’s suburbs saw several historic buildings vacated and then fall into disrepair or become derelict sites. These became targets for redevelopers, particularly of hotels and apartment blocks, during the real estate boom or ‘bubble’ in the 1980s (Ōnuma 2002, 302). These trends added to a sense that the historical port area was in danger, but in truth the fire of 1934 had already destroyed much of the nineteenth century townscape, and a number of buildings dating from the Meiji and Taisho periods were in fact pulled down during the era of high-speed economic growth before they were identified as worthy of preservation. These included several brick warehouses representative of the Meiji period and the former Hakodate customs building. In response, a broader movement to protect the historic townscape of Hakodate’s old port town emerged and was crystallised in 1978 with the ­formation of the Association for the Protection of Hakodate’s Historical Properties (Hakodate no Rekishi-teki Fūdo wo Mamoru Kai). The group was initially formed to prevent a planned relocation of the Former Hokkaido Prefectural Hakodate Branch Office—a two-story Western-style wooden construction dated to 1909—to an open-air museum of Hokkaido’s development located in the outskirts of Sapporo (Kaitaku no mura) (Hokkaido Shinbunsha 1991, 57). The group was able to prevent the relocation and have the building registered as a Hakodate City Cultural Property in 1979. The mobilization of local people in this group ensured a greater impetus to preserve Hakodate’s historical townscape and reinforced the shift in urban planning towards remaking Hakodate as a cultural city. It was thought that the added emphasis on maintaining/cultivating Hakodate’s distinct historical and cosmopolitan atmosphere would be a way of providing an urban environment appealing to both residents and tourists. Nevertheless, budgetary pres sures necessitated a commercial approach to maintaining the old port town

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and thus the various sites of the Motomachi area would be primarily seen as ‘touristic resources’ (Hakodateshishi Henshūkai 2002, 344–8). With ongoing construction of the Seikan Tunnel (completed in 1988) which would link northern Honshu with southern Hokkaido by road and rail, there was great hope that Hakodate would be able to attract a much larger flow of tourists. As such, the Hakodate Chamber of Commerce played a leading role in drawing up Hakodate’s first systematic plans for tourism in the 1980s. The plans focused on the Motomachi area and sought to ‘utilise the wealth of historical and cultural heritage’ and ‘form an exotic town’ at the foot of Mt. Hakodate (Hokkaido Shinbun 6 April 1982). In 1989, as a result of these efforts, a part of Hakodate’s west district (namely Suehiro-chō and Motomachi) was designated as Hokkaido’s first (and as of 2020, only) nationally recognised ‘Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings’ (Denkenkyō 2020). In the sections that follow I discuss some of the sites in and around this district, their current use, and why some have featured more prominently than others. 3

Sites in the Foreground

It should come as no surprise that when faced with decline Hakodate’s ­residents and planners turned to the past for inspiration in designing their future. Decline and the prospect of large-scale change foster a sense of loss and nostalgia. Compared to an uncertain future, the past seems ‘tangible and secure’, an anchor during a wave of change. In Hakodate, as elsewhere, the her itage boom has been strongly associated with cycles of economic change— both development and decline—under which ‘nostalgic dreams have become almost habitual, if not epidemic’ (Lowenthal 1985, 4). Lowenthal argued that the early 1970s saw much greater attention given to historical preservation in Europe and the United States as a result of the ‘erosion of older city cores by urban redevelopment’ which was coupled with a wider ‘surge of nostalgia in the wake of post-war social and ecological debacles’ (Lowenthal 2015, 6). This chapter has suggested that Japan might also fit neatly into Lowenthal’s narrative. Yet faced with decline, preservation is rarely the only, nor even the predominant motive for initiatives related to heritage. Nostalgic dreams are highly marketable and thus the potential for commercial gain wields a strong influence on the stakeholders involved. In turn, this influences the sites they develop as heritage and the narratives they create or privilege at such sites. As a port which rose to prominence in the nineteenth century and with several major fires occurring since then, Hakodate has no medieval or early modern buildings and is therefore unable to mobilise the typical icons of

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The Former British Consulate Building Photograph by the author

Japanese national identity such as ancient shrines or temples, or a Japanese castle. Instead, Hakodate emphasises its historical cosmopolitan connections with the West as a way to differentiate itself from other domestic tourist destinations with slogans such as ‘a town teeming with history and romance’ used in promotional materials. That these historical connections coincided and overlapped with Japan’s colonial expansion and the arrival of Western imperialism in northeast Asia is overlooked in favour of a positive story of connection and exchange. As a result, sites such as the Former British Consulate Building, which was established to protect British citizens from Japanese jurisdiction, have been preserved. The British Consulate at Hakodate was established in 1859 at an entirely different location to the heritage site today, and it was relocated several times due to fire (see Figure 8.3). The building in Figure 8.3 is dated to 1913 and served as the British Consulate until 1934 when Britain decided to withdraw its diplomatic post at Hakodate altogether. After this the city acquired the building and it was used as a dormitory for nurses (Hokkaidō Shinbunsha 1991, 59; Sudō 1978, 97). Despite the building’s rather unremarkable design and features, it was designated a Hakodate City Cultural Property in 1979 and was quickly selected for redevelopment by the city as a ‘museum of the port’s opening’ (kaikō ­myuujiamu). The museum opened in 1992 and now the Former British Consulate Building also houses a British-themed gift shop, tea rooms and ­garden—the latter can be hired for photo shoots and wedding parties. As the neutral name of the museum suggests, it presents a positive spin on the

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treaty port era which is credited with introducing ‘high-collar culture’ (haikara bunka) to Hakodate (Former British Consulate of Hakodate 2021, online). Under the management of the city, the Former British Consulate ­Building features prominently in Hakodate’s tourist promotional materials. The museum of the port’s opening attracted just under 60,000 visitors in 2018 which compared favourably to other city-run local history museums such as the Hakodate City Museum (11,655 visitors) and the Hakodate Local History Museum (7,117 visitors) which both offer a more comprehensive local history display and cheaper admission (Hakodate City 2021, online). It is likely that not only is the city promoting the image of a cosmopolitan history and heritage, but visitors too are actively seeking it as reflected in their preference for a museum which focuses on international connections, rather than a fuller picture of local history. This is aided by the fact that the museum is housed in a building which is a visual reminder of those connections. As there are few Western buildings, sites that demonstrate cosmopolitan interactions and the blend of Western and Japanese styles have also featured prominently in Hakodate’s remaking as a city of culture and heritage. The majority of these have been remade for commercial use. One example is the Tachikawa Family House and Store (Figure 8.4). Dated to 1901 the building was the store and residence of the Tachikawa family, merchants who relocated to Hakodate from today’s Niigata Prefecture in 1863, eventually becoming prominent rice merchants and shippers who extended their commercial networks to Karafuto in Japan’s northern colonial frontier and were active in Japanese fishing operations in the seas around Kamchatka (Sudō 1978, 21). The building itself is seen as a representative example of a Meiji period merchant store and became a Nationally Designated Important Cultural Property in 1971—the first private residence/store so designated in Hokkaido (Hokkaido Shinbunsha 1991, 50). The site has remained in private hands and today is available as a rental space for private meetings and dining parties. The adjacent two-story ‘Western Building’ (yōkan), built by the Tachikawa family in 1915 to host and entertain prominent guests—much like the Takatori-tei in the chapter by Satari—has also received designation from Hakodate City. At the time of writing it is available to rent as a guest house for ¥60,000 (approximately US$570) per night (Tachikawa Family’s House 2021, online). The Tachikawa store and western building are examples of how heritage has been put to commercial use in Hakodate and also demonstrate a bordered ­evocation of Hakodate’s past (see Figure 8.4). In promotional materials emphasis is placed on the site’s connection to Hakodate’s ‘cultural and international exchange’ in the Meiji period, even though the Tachikawa family’s business was overwhelmingly oriented towards linking Japan’s main islands with its north ern empire in Hokkaido and Karafuto. The site brushes over the semi-colonial

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The Tachikawa Family House (left) and Store (right) Photograph by the author

nature of the treaty port era’s international exchange in which the Tachikawa family was barely involved in the first place. Instead of international trade, the Tachikawa family was intensely involved the with Japanese development/ colonization (kaitaku) of Hokkaido (particularly in the Date, Monbetsu and Tokachi areas) and colonial expansion into Karafuto. They rose to prominence importing rice and other goods from the main island to this colonial frontier and exporting the products of Hokkaido in the other direction. In this way, the Tachikawa buildings have been redeveloped for commercial purposes in a way that largely strips them of their own history in favour of a narrative that associates them with the image of the exotic cosmopolitan culture at the heart of Hakodate’s tourism branding. Though the Tachikawa buildings were among the earlier sites recognised as heritage sites in the Motomachi area, the biggest draw for tourists is a cluster of red brick warehouses, mostly dating to 1909 (see Figure 8.1), at the waterfront area between Hakodate railway station and Motomachi. These warehouses are owned by Kanemori Shōsen, a shipping company which decided to redevelop them as a beer hall, restaurant facilities and a shopping mall. The redeveloped red-brick Kanemori warehouses are today consistently ranked first or second among the main attractions in Hakodate on most tourism websites and in 2009 they attracted 1.2 million visitors (Asahi Shinbun 2010). The founder of the Kanemori business (including Kanemori Shōsen), Watanabe Kumashirō, was, like Tachikawa, an outsider. Born in Oita Prefecture, Watanabe gained some experience in business at treaty port Nagasaki

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before coming to Hakodate in 1863 where he established his own firm trading in marine products. He later developed businesses in shipping and the importation of Western products—though these were usually sourced from other Japanese merchants at treaty port Yokohama rather than bought from foreign residents of Hakodate. The Kanemori firm also moved into offering warehousing services as it complimented their shipping business. The land on which the redeveloped red-brick warehouses stand today was acquired from foreign merchants who one-by-one decided to abandon Hakodate in the 1870s and 1880s due to poor trade prospects. Like many buildings in the Motomachi area they have been repaired or replaced several times as a result of fire (Okamoto 2008, 162–4; Sudō 1978, 22–3). In the mid-1980s, several rows of Hakodate’s older warehouses at the ­waterfront of the Motomachi area were vacant. The decline of the northern fisheries and shipbuilding industry, as well as the gradual shift of the port facilities eastwards away from the Motomachi area, meant that the warehouse area was ‘pitch black at night’ and somewhat run-down (Asahi Shinbun 2010). The warehouses were even overlooked entirely in detailed guidebooks to H ­ akodate’s urban heritage published at the time (Hokkaidō Shinbunsha 1991). Nevertheless, Kanemori Shōsen decided to redevelop its vacant warehouses and acquire those of other firms for redevelopment. They did this in anticipation of an increase in visitors to Hakodate with the Seikan tunnel scheduled to open in 1988 and with the hope that the recent shooting of several films in the area, including the popular 1983 film Izakaya Chōji starring Takakura Ken, would attract visitors. The completion of the Seikan tunnel meant that visitors from Honshu could now travel to Hokkaido by road and rail, effectively signalling the end of the long-standing ferry services. Stripped of several of its core functions as a port, the waterfront area of Motomachi became vacant and thus an easy target for redevelopment. Starting with the opening of a beer hall, another warehouse was redeveloped as a ‘history plaza’ in 1988. Though ostensibly evoking the treaty port past, in practice the history plaza was simply a shopping mall selling Hakodate specialities and souvenirs, with a few token placards on the walls outlining a streamlined version of the history of the Kanemori company. Expansion continued and the Kanemori red-brick warehouses became the focus of a ‘waterfront boom’ which sought to create a ‘romantic and retro’ atmosphere for visitors with the striking red-brick structures evoking the port’s history as a treaty port without naming it as such (Okamoto 2008, 147). By 2010 the Kanemori warehouses housed forty-nine stores and restaurants, and sev eral other businesses catering to tourists sprang up in the surrounding area (Asahi Shinbun 2010). This commercially driven redevelopment project has been a striking success. It also represents another example of a heritage site

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in which a vague narrative of cosmopolitan connections to the West is emphasised in a way that sidesteps the political realities of the treaty port era and the port’s connections to Japanese colonial expansion. In this sense it evokes a bordered memory. 4

Sites in the Background

A conspicuous absence in the narratives portrayed at the sites mentioned above is Hakodate’s Chinese connection. Chinese actors and interests were prominent throughout Hakodate’s period as a treaty port. The visit of Commodore Perry’s fleet to Hakodate in 1854 following the conclusion of the first treaty with Japan, also marked the first known Chinese visitation. Accompanying the Perry mission was a Chinese-Japanese translator called Luosen who played an important role in negotiating with the local authority at Hakodate (Tao 2005). After the port was opened for trade to western treaty powers in 1859, Chinese merchants began to arrive and the majority of the foreign population in Hakodate, as at other Japanese treaty ports, was Chinese (Sugiyama 1988, 84; Han 2014). Throughout its history as a treaty port, Hakodate’s foreign trade was dominated by China-bound marine product exports and even as western traders struggled to maintain a foothold in the trade in the face of ­Japanese competition, resident Chinese merchants thrived and soon ­organised to push their trading interests (Ivings and Qiu 2019, 307–9). In 1877 a public meeting place for Chinese merchants was established ­utilizing a building that had formerly belonged to a western merchant. The building was on the site of the current Chinese Memorial Hall (see Figure 8.5) and was burned down in a fire in 1907 which destroyed much of today’s historical district. In the aftermath of the fire, the then acting Chinese consul and prominent trader, Zhang Zunsan, began efforts to collect donations for its reconstruction from the network of Chinese traders in Japan and also from Japanese associates. The construction was largely overseen and conducted by Chinese planners and craftsmen who came from China specifically for the purpose. Japanese plasterers, casters and carpenters supported the construction process. Whilst some of the building materials were sourced locally, most of the wood and all of the interior features and furniture were imported from China. Construction of the Chinese Memorial Hall was completed in Decem ber 1910 in an architectural style common to the Qing period (Hakodate Kakyō Sōkai, n.d.; Sudō 1978, 98–9). The red brick exterior and the vermilion and gold interior are equally striking to passers-by and anyone lucky enough to go inside.

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Photograph by the author

Despite the importance of the Chinese to Hakodate’s foreign trade, the port’s trade was dwarfed by that conducted at Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama. ­Consequently, there were never enough Chinese residents at Hakodate for a Chinatown to emerge as it did at those other ports. Instead the Chinese ­residents of Hakodate lived scattered around the Motomachi area and the Chinese Memorial Hall served as the focal point of their community (Ogawa 2010, 24). Today, together with the Chinese graveyard on the outskirts of town, it provides the only reminder of the once active exchange with China. Similar structures were built in Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama. However, as a result of wartime bombing and natural disasters they have not survived (Ogawa 2010, 2). Hakodate’s Chinese Memorial Hall is now considered to be ‘the only purely Chinese-style hall that still remains in Japan’ (Japan News 2004). The significance of the site has duly been recognised with its designation in 2001 as a nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property. The recognition of the Chinese Memorial Hall as a cultural property and the centrality of the Chinese connection to the history of Hakodate as a treaty port aside, the site rarely features in the promotional materials for Hakodate and is closed to the public. This is somewhat surprising in that the site’s unique exotic architecture, red-brick exterior, and historical significance should ­seemingly fit with Hakodate’s effort to cultivate an image of cosmopolitan heritage. Instead the site has been largely overlooked, though the reasons for this are difficult to clearly identify. It might be that the city prefers to project an image of a historical connection with the West because this is considered more exotic to

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J­apanese tourists. It might also reflect that the site is under the private ownership of the Hakodate Chinese Association (Hakodate Kakyō Sōkai) though other privately-owned sites such as the Kanemori Warehouses have featured prominently. Another reason could be the history of conflict between China and Japan, including Japan’s imperial expansion into Taiwan and Manchuria, which problematises the narrative the city wants to project. Whatever the case, Sino-Japanese relations in the postwar period have certainly had an impact on how the site has been utilised. The Chinese Memorial Hall was opened to the public following the improvement of relations between Japan and the People’s Republic of China which culminated in the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Friendship in 1978. ­Subsequently, in most years it was opened for three months and enjoyed a degree of p ­ opularity. Yet a worsening of Sino-Japanese relations in the wake of Prime Minister ­Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine (which enshrines Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals) and several anti-Japanese protests in China, saw the site closed to the public. The Hakodate Chinese Association were advised by the Hokkaido police that they should be wary of the possibility of vandalism. Thus, even though the centenary of the Chinese Memorial Hall’s construction was nearing, the Hakodate Chinese Association decided to close the site to the public in 2005 citing a concern that if it were vandalised there were no craftsmen available who were qualified to repair the building nor the items inside in the appropriate style (Asahi Shinbun 2005). The site was also suffering from a decline in the number of visitors. Around 1990 the Chinese Memorial Hall was attracting approximately 80,000 visitors per year, but this fell to as low as 7,000 by the first half of the 2000s, at which point the cost of keeping it open exceeded the revenue from admission (Yomiuri ­Shinbun 2005). As a privately managed site, incurring losses was not an option in the long-run and the hall has remained closed to the public ever since 2005. Certain groups have been able to visit on special request and in July and August 2008 it was opened to the public in order to raise money for the recovery effort following a major earthquake in Sichuan, China (Asahi Shinbun 2008). In 2010 a special symposium was organised by academic researchers and the Hakodate Chinese Association to mark the centenary of the Chinese Memorial Hall’s construction. In the opening remarks, the head of Hakodate’s Education Committee stated that ‘the Chinese Memorial Hall, together with Churches and former consulates, gives Hakodate a rich international atmosphere’. Yet in private hands the site has proved difficult to market to tourists and in truth the city has done little to emphasise the Chinese connection. With the member ship of the Hakodate Chinese Association in decline, one academic researcher of Japan’s Chinese minority suggested at the symposium that in the long-term

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one way to preserve the site would be to transfer ownership to the city on the condition that it would be maintained as a place the Chinese community could use for communal purposes (Ogawa 2010, 29). Whether there is an appetite for such an arrangement on either the part of the city or the Hakodate Chinese Association remains to be seen. The Chinese Memorial Hall remains a unique reminder of Sino-Japanese exchange at Hakodate and a structure of significant historical value at the national level, even if a line seems to be drawn between it and Hakodate’s other heritage sites. 5 Conclusion This chapter has argued that Hakodate turned to its port city heritage in the wake of a contest over its economic future. As the port city lost many of its former functions and its citizens rejected the vision of developing large-scale industrial complexes to halt the decline, Hakodate turned to cultivating tourism as a pillar of its economy. This move reduced conflict and saw citizens rally around an effort to preserve and redevelop what was left of the old port town at the foot of Mt. Hakodate, much of which was already derelict or at risk from outside property developers seeking to build apartment blocks. Hakodate’s old town is a space replete with the memory of Japan’s northward colonial expansion and retreat, which itself overlaid a period when Japan was subjected to coercive Western imperialism. Yet it is the former which is emphasised, gutted of almost any hint of the historical context of gunboat diplomacy and the undermining of Japan’s sovereignty. At Hakodate the ‘competing meanings invested in the site[s], and the struggle over the[ir] narrative’ (Boyle 2019, 300) have been largely sidestepped in an effort to remake the space as cosmopolitan, sophisticated and romantic, rather than colonial, for the purpose of attracting tourists with an image of a cultural city (Otaru, near the prefectural capital Sapporo, has pursued a similar strategy). As such, the case of Hakodate shows how the efforts of a local memory community might pro duce a bordering of memory in which complex, warty history such as Japan’s lost empire north of Hokkaido and Japanese subjugation to unequal treaties is relegated to the background and glamorous marketable heritage is promoted to the front. In this way the urge to foster a local brand marketable to tourists has exerted its own narrative and resulted in a bordering of the memory of Hakodate’s treaty port past that is evoked in the city’s historical townscape. Whilst this largely commercially driven effort has seen Hakodate’s heritage sites ‘cut through with borders of memory,’ these borders are not necessarily fixed (Boyle 2019, 306). Heritage ‘is always bringing the past into the present

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through historical contingency and strategic appropriations, deployments, redeployments, and creation of connections and reconnection’ (Silverman, Waterton, and Watson 2017, 4). Indeed, in recent years a shift in domestic tourism from group tours to individual travellers, has prompted various stakeholders, including amateur historians, hoteliers and restauranteurs in the Motomachi area, to organise a historical research association and develop detailed guides for visitors seeking a deeper engagement with the port’s history (Hakodate Gaikokujin Kyoryūchi Kenkyūkai 2015; Study Group of Foreign Settlements in Hakodate 2015). It remains to be seen whether such activities will alter the overall framing of Hakodate’s heritage, but they do indicate that the gap between history and heritage may narrow. Additionally, as the flow of tourists to Hakodate becomes increasingly international (at least prior to the Covid-19 pandemic), with visitors from China, Taiwan and other nations with large Chinese minorities particularly prominent, the border of memory may yet be refined so as to more firmly incorporate the port’s Asian connections. It remains to be seen whether an improvement in Sino-Japanese relations is required to enable this to take place. References Asahi Shinbun. 2005. ‘Hakodate chūka kaikan kōkai chūshi nitchū kankei no akka kenen.’ Asahi Shinbun, 26 May 2005. Asahi Shinbun. 2008. ‘Shikawa daishinsai shien e tokubetsu kōkai.’ Asahi Shinbun, 24 June 2008. Asahi Shinbun 2010. ‘Hyakunen kigyō@Hokkaidō – kanemori shōsen akarenga, ­Hakodate no kokoro tsunde.’ Asahi Shinbun, 20 October 2010. Asahi Weekly Journal. 2011. ‘Japan Heritage – Hakodate: Northern gateway to Japan retains 19th-century charm.’ Asahi Weekly Journal, 5 August 2011. Auslin, Michael. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Bickers, Robert and Christian Henriot, eds. New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of memory: affirmation and contestation over Japan’s heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Bull, Jonathan. 2018. ‘Karafuto Repatriates and the Work of the Hakodate Regional Repatriation Centre, 1945–50.’ Journal of Contemporary History, 53 (4): 788–810. Burando Sōgō Kenkyūjo. Chiki Burando Chōsa 2019. Burando Sōgō Kenkyūjo 2019.  Accessed 10 October 2020. https://news.tiiki.jp/data/upload/2019_city _ranking.pdf

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Cortazzi, Hugh. 1999. ‘Thomas Wright Blakiston (1832–91)’, In Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits Vol. III, edited by James. E. Hoare. Surrey: Curzon Press. Denkenkyō. 2020. ‘Dentōteki kenzōbutsugun hozon chiku daichō.’ Denkenkyō. Accessed 10 October 2020. https://www.denken.gr.jp/archive/hakodate-motomachi /file/ledger.pdf. Duus, Peter, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds. 1989. The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Economist. 1979. ‘Salvaging Japan’s shipbuilders.’ The Economist, 30 June 1979. Former British Consulate of Hakodate. Accessed February 20, 2021. https://hakodate -kankou.com/british/. Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. 1953. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade.’ Economic History Review, 6 (1): 1–15. Hakodate City. Shiritsu Hakodate hakubutsukan kyōdo shiryōkan gaiyō. Accessed 20.2.2021. https://www.city.hakodate.hokkaido.jp/docs/2015121000073/. Hakodate City. Shiritsu Hakodate hakubutsukan no gaiyō. Accessed 20.2.2021. https: //www.city.hakodate.hokkaido.jp/docs/2015121000080/. Hakodate Gaikokujin Kyoryūchi Kenkyūkai. 2015. 150mai no gazō ga kataru bakumatsu-meiji nokokusai toshi Hakodate. Hakodate: Hakodate Gaikokujin Kyoryūchi ­Kenkyūkai. Hakodate Henshūkai. 2002. Hakodateshishi tsūsetsu daiyonkan. Hakodate: ­Hakodate-shi. Hakodate Henshūkai. 1987. Hakodateshishi tōkeihen. Hakodate: Hakodate-shi. Hakodate Kakyō Sōkai. n.d. Chūka Kaikan. Hakodate Kakyō Sōkai: Promotional ­Material. Hakodate-shi. 1972. Me de miru Hakodate no utsurikawari. Hakodate: Hakodate-shi. Hakodate-shi Kankōbu Kankō Shinkōka. 2014. Hakodate-shi Kankō Kihon Keikaku 2014–2023. Hakodate: Hakodate-shi. Hakodate-shi Kankōbu Kankōkikakuka. 2020. Raibako Kankō Hairikomikyakusū Suikei 2019. Hakodate: Hakodate-shi. Han, Eric C. 2014. Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama 1894–1972. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoare, James E. 1976. ‘Mr. Enslie’s Grievances: The Consul, the Ainu and the Bones.’ Bulletin of The Japan Society of London, 78: 14–19. Hoare, James E. 1994. Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements: The Uninvited Guests . Folkestone: Japan Library. Hoare, James E. 2018. ‘Memories of Times Past: The Legacy of Japan’s Treaty Ports.’ In Life in Treaty Port China and Japan, edited by Donna Brunero and Stephanie V. Puig, 271–291. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hokkai Taimususha. 1983. Sengo no Hokkaidō sangyō Keizai hen. Sapporo: Hokkai ­Taimususha. Hokkaidō Shinbunsha. 1991. Hakodate Rekishi Sanpo. Sapporo: Hokkaidō Shinbunsha. Iokibe, Makoto, and Tosh Minohara. 2017. The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to the Present. Singapore: Palgrave-Macmillan. Ivings, Steven. 2017. ‘Trade and Conflict at the Japanese Frontier: Hakodate as a Treaty Port, 1854–1884.’ Transcultural Studies, 8 (2): 103–137. Ivings, Steven. 2018. ‘The economic reintegration of former colonial residents in ­postwar Japan.’ In The Economic and Business History of Occupied Japan: New ­Perspectives, edited by Thomas French, 149–170. Abingdon: Routledge. Ivings, Steven, and Qiu Datong. 2019. ‘China and Japan’s Northern Frontier: Chinese Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Hokkaido.’ Canadian Journal of History, 54 (3): 286–314. Japan News. 2004. ‘Historic buildings link Japan with world.’ The Japan News (Yomiuri Shinbun), 14 August 2004. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge U ­ niversity Press. Lowenthal, David. 2015. The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Mitani, Hiroshi. 2003. Perii raikō. Tōkyō: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan. Nield, Robert. 2015. China’s Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840–1943. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ogawa, Masaki, ed. 2010. Kakyō no Bunka Shigen no Genkyō to Kadai – Toshi Hakodate no Rekishi to Chūka Kaikan no Kenchiku. Hakodate: Hakodate Chūka Kaikan Sōritsu 100 Shūnen Kinen Shinpojiumu Jikkō Iinkai. Okamoto, Satoshi, et al. 2008. Minato-machi no kindai: Moji Otaru Yokohama Hakodate wo yomu. Gakugei shuppan. Ōnuma, Morio. ed. 2002. Hokkaidō sangyōshi. Sapporo: Hokkaidō daigaku tosho kankōkai. Partner, Simon. 2018. The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. Phipps, Catherine. 2015. Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 Cambridge : Harvard University Asia Center. Silverman, Helaine, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson. 2017. ‘An introduction to heritage in action.’ In Heritage in Action: Making the Past in the Present, edited by Helaine Silverman, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, 3–18. Cham: Springer. Study Group of Foreign Settlements in Hakodate. 2015. Hakodate through 150 Images: Japan’s Surprising Pioneer. Hakodate: Study Group of Foreign Settlements in Hakodate.

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Sudō, Ryūsen. 1978. Furusato no omide shashinshū Meiji Taishō Shōwa Hakodate. Tōkyō: Kokusho Kankōkai. Sugiyama, Shinya. 1998. Japan’s Industrialization in the World Economy, 1859–1899: Export, Trade and Overseas Competition. London: The Athlone Press. Tachikawa Family’s House. Accessed February 20, 2021. https://tachikawafamilyhouse. com/. Taira, Koji. 1993. ‘Dialectics of Economic Growth, National Power, and Distributive Struggles.’ In Postwar Japan as History, edited by Andrew Gordon, 167–186. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tao, De-min. 2005. ‘Negotiating Language in the Opening of Japan: Luo Sen’s Journal of Perry’s 1854 Expedition.’ Japan Review, 17: 91–119. Tsutsui, William. 2013. ‘The Pelagic Empire: Reconsidering Japanese Expansion.’ In Japan at Nature’s: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, edited by Ian Millier, Julia Thomas, and Brett Walker, 21–38. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Van Dyke, Paul. 2005. Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University. Wakita, Mio. 2013. ‘Sites of ‘Disconnectedness’: The Port City of Yokohama, Souvenir Photography, and its Audience.’ Transcultural Studies, 2: 77–129. Wang, Zheng. 2012. Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Noell H. 2020. ‘Western Whalers in 1860s Hakodate: How the Nantucket of the North Pacific Connected Restoration Era Japan to Global Flows.’ In The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation, edited by Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess, 40–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yomiuri Shinbun. 1959. ‘Hakodate hokuyō kichi mo mukashi no yume kankō seisan toshi mezasu.’ Yomiuri Shinbun, 19 November 1959. Yomiuri Shinbun. 2005. ‘Chūka kaikan ga kon shiizun kaikan kyū.’ Yomiuri Shinbun May 2005.

CHAPTER 9

Politics of Heritage: Karatsu’s Takatori-tei as a Meiji Status Symbol, Monument of Modernity, and Symbol of Regional Identity Arisha Livia Satari Abstract During the Meiji period emerging professional groups, such as entrepreneurs and ­politicians, aspired to represent their new status in visual and physical terms, especially through residential architecture. This chapter focuses on one example of this trend, the Former Takatori Residence in Karatsu (Saga Prefecture). The large compound was created and owned by the industrialist Takatori Koreyoshi (1850–1927) and is characterized by an eclectic mixture of traditional Japanese and Western architectural styles. While the building exemplifies Meiji and Taishō period hybridity, it also can illuminate the negotiation of tradition and identity in a community distant from the epicentres of modernity in central Japan. The estate was inhabited by members of the Takatori family until the 1990s. It was then handed over to the public and granted the national designation of Important Cultural Property. It is widely recognized in the region and beyond as a historical landmark and touristic destination. The Takatori Residence represents several strands of contested memory, including modern versus traditional, Western versus Japanese, and capital (Tokyo) versus provincial (Karatsu). This chapter analyses the initial motivation and architectural styles, then the process by which the estate was designated a national heritage site and concludes with a discussion of distinct views on the contemporary site by the local community and administration.

Keywords coal mining heritage – transcultural architecture – elite residential estate – periphery – collective identity – Meiji entrepreneur

The Former Takatori residence (Kyū Takatori-tei) is an example of elite archi tecture from the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō periods (1912–1926). Located in the city of Karatsu, in Saga Prefecture in the northwest of Japan’s Kyushu © Arisha Livia Satari, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_010

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Island, the estate is a remarkable and well-maintained architectural ensemble. Furthermore, it boasts a number of unusual features—notably, a classicist parlour that is attached to its main facade and a large room that can be converted into a private Noh stage—that betray its creator’s agenda. Idiosyncrasies in construction and design are indicative of the building’s creation in a provincial environment some distance from the glitzy modernity on show in the nation’s capital, Tokyo. The building’s ability to straddle such contradictions is not limited to the period of its construction. The Takatori residence received the status of an Important Cultural Property (jūyō bunkazai) in 1998 and has since then become one of Karatsu’s prominent heritage sites. It features prominently in the city’s promotion of domestic and international tourism and was also advertised in the context of Meiji and early Taishō coal mining, a period that is sometimes described as the golden years of private entrepreneurship in northern Kyushu.1 The estate’s position at the nexus of a series of binary oppositions, between centre and periphery, tradition and modernity, local and international, continues into the present. This chapter analyzes the Takatori residence (henceforth referred as the Takatori-tei) as a site shaped by borders of memory. The residence has become a space in which the ‘collective memories’ of different groups come into c­ ontact with one another, and thus materializes the borders of memory cutting through the site (Boyle 2019, 294). The concept is used to explore the memorialization of the contested elements of the estate during the process of its (re)making as heritage. The meanings attached to the Takatori-tei have changed from when it was first built to its current status as a juyō bunkazai. Initially, the estate was designed to reflect the elevated social identity of its owner, Takatori Koreyoshi, a local coal magnate. Then, in the process of its designation as an Important Cultural Property, different narratives about the estate emerged, due to the meanings attached to the Takatori-tei by the parties involved in the heritage making process. This study investigates the negotiations between the ­contested binaries shaping the identities attached to the site: Japanese and Western, traditional and modern, and local and national. These binaries are observed through the architecture of the estate, which was constructed using a combination of traditional Japanese and Western 1 ‘Emergence of Industrial Japan: Kyushu, Yamaguchi’ https://apjjf.org/data/4332-kyuyama (accessed 2020/10/28). For background, see Underwood, 2015. For a discussion of sites from the same period albeit in the north of Japan see the chapter by Ivings in this volume. The chapter by Mateoc, also focusing on sites in Kyushu, examines the interaction between local, national, and international actors in the production of heritage.

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architectural styles,2 materializing the Meiji elite’s ideals of preserving traditional culture while adopting modernity. Regional–national ideas are also examined through the architectural styles and structure. The Takatori-tei estate was a composite of traditional Japanese and Western-style architectures, modelled on the contemporaneous residential architecture of the Tokyo elite, but diverging, both consciously and unconsciously, from trends visible in the capital. The chapter will show how the borders used to demarcate notions like ‘­provincial’ or ‘modern’ are navigated and traversed by examining the divergent architectural styles between the Takatori-tei’s Western-style salon and popular trends in Tokyo at the turn of the twentieth century. During the ­heritage ­making process, there were negotiations between different interests, represented by the Agency for Cultural Affairs at the national level, by Karatsu City at the local level, and the remaining Takatori family. These are analyzed by scrutinizing the nomination process. In this discussion, the term heritage refers to the legal definition according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō), that is, inherited items/traditions with recognised cultural value that represent Japan and are accorded protection under the legal system (Kakiuchi 2014, 1–2). The estate also represents a lucrative industry that flourished through the hard labours of mine workers, an aspect largely overlooked in the heritage making process. Mikiso Hane and others have discussed the dangerous working conditions coal mine workers faced and their low-wages in the Meiji period (Hane 1982, 226–245; Burton 2014, 28–87), which contrast with the wealth of coal magnates like Takatori Koreyoshi. Although this particular topic is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is a significant consideration in the discussion surrounding the Takatori-tei as a site of bordered memory. In the conclusion, I emphasize and problematize the narrative of the Takatori-tei as a Meiji heritage site; preservation of the estate that was intended to demonstrate the idealized image of Meiji entrepreneurs as an emerging social group. I examine the negotiation between the narratives the estate embodies including the ideal ized and dominant narrative of a harmonious blend between ‘Japaneseness’ and Western elements. In so doing, I emphasize the efforts and circumstances of the involved parties (local–national government and private individuals) in perpetuating this narrative for their own interests. In that respect, Takatori-tei The term Western-style here refers to the classical revivals, particularly the Jacobean and Gothic, along with the Victorian style, which dominated the architectural styles that circulated in Japan brought by the foreign experts (oyatoi gaikokujin) brought by the Meiji government to Japan who were tasked with building Western-style buildings, such as Josiah Conder (Boro 2004, 259). This term was used by Rupert Cox and Christoph Brumann in the introduction to Japanese Heritage (Cox and Brumann 2010, 3).

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is not merely a space of contestation, it is also a place of communication and co-existence between collective memories. 1

The Former Takatori Residence

The Takatori-tei, constructed as a secondary residence, is situated on a site of 7,600 square meters (Takatori 2010, 28). The estate consists of four interconnected building sections enclosing a garden that forms one main building complex. In addition, auxiliary buildings, made up of bathhouses, a warehouse, and a wine cellar, are grouped around the main complex. The building complex (main building structure) was designated as an Important Cultural Property, first at the prefectural level in 1996 (ken shitei jūyō bunkazai), and shortly after, in 1998, at the national level (kuni shitei jūyō bunkazai). This decision was based on a survey that was conducted in 1994–5. Currently, the residence is preserved as a museum for tourism purposes and managed largely by the City of Karatsu’s Foundation of Cultural Promotion with the help of local volunteers (Asahi Shinbun, 2000). Between 2000 and 2005, the site was largely restored to the state it was in the mid-Showa era (1926–1989) (Bunkazai 2005, 9). The Takatori-tei’s overarching architectural and decorative elements are distinctive and suggestive of several meanings and narratives attached to private residential Meiji architecture in the provinces. In large part, the Takatori-tei’s architectural style displays ­characteristics of the vernacular private residential estate of Meiji industrial elites. This can be seen in how the exterior shows a mix of Western and Japanese stylistic e­ lements (see Figure 9.1). The main façade is constituted by a section of the building in what appears to be Western-style stone masonry, positioned off-centre and flanked by a main structure built in traditional Japanese ­timber architecture. This stylistic split can often be observed between front sections for the formal reception of guests and large residential compounds of traditional Japanese wooden construction. This is most clearly visible when the estate is approached through the front gate in the south, and approaching visitors are first confronted by a profoundly contrasting vista composed from what appears to be a neo-classical building section with (plaster imitation) stone masonry set into a traditional timber structure, the estate’s main building. The transition to traditional Japanese architecture was signified by the hip-andgabled roof with sloping karahafu a characteristic of pre-Meiji Japanese roof construction. My research suggests that the traditional Japanese architecture Karahafu is an undulating badger board that flows downward, and it is often used in temples and elite residential estates as a ceremonial gateway. Despite what its name suggests (kara

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Front entrance to the Takatori-tei, constructed from wood by Katayama Ryuji and Mori Kanetsugu in 1918 Photograph by the author

used the shoin (shoin zukuri) with elements of sukiya style (sukiya zukuri) architecture. The use of these two traditional Japanese architecture styles hints at a deeper meaning attached to this type of private estate. Shoin architecture in pre-­ modern Japan was predominantly used for samurai residences,5 while sukiya architecture was strongly inspired by the tea house designs in the lineage of Sen no Rikyū and characterized by the choice of material that champions natural surfaces, particularly illustrated with the selection of aged and patinated surfaces, adopted from the wabi-sabi concept (austerity and agedness) (Itō and Futagawa 1969, 44). These two traditional styles signified pre-modern Japanese traditions that were practiced by and became part of high-ranking samurai cultures. Alluding to the earlier ruling class through architecture was significant for the identity of the Meiji entrepreneur. Furthermore, the utilization of a mix between Western and Japanese architectural styles cemented the image of the Meiji entrepreneurs as both self-appointed leaders of modernisation China), architecture scholar Ota Hirotaro posits that the design of karahafu originated from Japan (Ota 1937, 913). 5 Characterized by these elements: tokonoma 床の間, a raised alcove primarily used to display prized art objects, chigaidana 違い棚, a staggered shelf, chōdaigame 帳台構, decorative door panels on a wall, and tsukeshōin 付書院 a writing alcove (Nishi and Hozumi 1985, 74).

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and keepers of tradition. While the Takatori-tei was typical in this respect, differences from large estates in big cities suggests the existence of a distinct provincial architectural style, also observed in the interior configuration of the estate. The main complex of the Takatori-tei is divided into two sections: the ­reception area (omote) and interior area (oku). The omote, public, area forms the entire eastern wing and parts of the entrance wing, and consists of a ­Western-style salon, a Noh stage, and a sequence of multi-function reception rooms (see Figure 9.2). The oku section in contrast is designed as an informal living space for the resident’s family. The existence of both the ­Western-style salon (and its façade) and the private Noh theatre is significant. The ­Western-style salon, located in the omote area, demonstrates a modern figure (Sand 2003). However, the use of a traditional architectural style and the addition of a private Noh stage, two elements more synonymous with preMeiji traditions, hints at design and interior elements more traditional than would be expected from the exterior. This contrasts with other private residential and public buildings in the Meiji period, where architectural styles used in construction followed ongoing trends, such as the classical revivals (Gothic,

Floor plan of Takatori-tei, from Takatori, Takatori-ke shashinshū Courtesy of Mitoma Masakatsu and the Karatsu City Tourism Department

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Jacobian), Victorian, and pseudo-Saracenic styles championed by architects working in Meiji Japan. 2 Remembering Giyōfū and Provincial Residential Estates Existing scholarship on Western-style Meiji architecture focuses mainly on the development of public buildings in major cities. In particular, buildings designed by Western-trained architects such as Josiah Conder or Tatsuno Kingo are the subject of many studies.6 The diffusion of Western-style ­architecture to the provinces and in the private sector has received little attention—an oversight I seek to address here. Unsurprisingly, the development of Western architecture in the provinces was considerably slower. The provinces were reliant on the limited knowledge of Western-style building by local master carpenters (daiku), who typically acquired their knowledge through studying other buildings constructed in accordance with what Japanese carpenters interpreted as Western-style architecture. This type of architecture is typically called giyōfū (pseudo-Western architecture). Scholars such as David Stewart, Kenneth Frampton, and Kunio Kudo have recently argued that giyōfū refers to ­Western-style buildings designed and constructed by traditionally educated Japanese master carpenters (daiku) using pre-Meiji period building materials and techniques, showing a lack of formal training in Western architectural techniques on the carpenters’ part.7 Instead, the carpenters gained experience by working for foreign experts hired by the Meiji government, the oyatoi gaikokujin, tasked with constructing Western-style buildings in Japan (Stewart 1987, 22; Frampton, Kudo, and Vincent 1997, 120).8 6 Examples include: a chapter dedicated to Western-style buildings in Meiji built by ­Japanese architectures (Tatsuno Kingo, Katayama Tokuma, etc) in William Coaldrake’s book Architecture and Authority in Japan (Coaldrake, 1996, 208–250); Toshio Watanabe’s study of the Rokumeikan (A building to house foreign dignitaries, completed in 1883) designed by Josiah Conder as a representation of Imperial Meiji architectural style (­Watanabe 1996, 21–27); and Alice Tseng’s examination of the architectural style of the Ueno Museum designed by Josiah Conder (Tseng 2004, 472–490). 7 Pre-modern Japan, carpenters’ studios were usually formed as family workshops. ­Handing down techniques and skills through hereditary transmission, craftsmen worked by relying on modules handed down from generations of practice. The construction would be guided by simple grid plans for pillar placements set in a field, and precision was a result of practice and technique (Coaldrake 1990, 13–22). 8 One of the examples of giyōfū in the prefectural area can be seen in the still surviving f­ ormer Kyū-kaichi gakkō) in Nagano, built by Tateishi Seiju (1829–1894), a local carpenter.

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This was the context for the emergence of a new form of residential estate in the Meiji period—the hybrid of Western-style and traditional Japanese-style architecture, known as wayō secchū jūka (eclectic Japanese-Western residence).9 Sand has shown that the typical configuration for this style was a Western-style structure as a reception area while the Japanese style buildings were used as the living space (2003, 40–41). This type of estate was predominantly employed as a secondary residence for Meiji elites, such as statesmen and entrepreneurs. Meiji-period entrepreneurs sought to construct a public identity that reflected the elite social status they coveted. This was done by referring to their profession as jitsugyōka10 a term which scholars agree means business leaders possessing financial means and technical expertise, combined with samurai spirit (Yamamura, 1968; Fujimori, 1992; Guth, 1993; Sagers, 2018). These new men also sought to embody traditional practices associated with elite groups of the Tokugawa period, such as the samurai and court aristocracy (Guth 1995, 145). In this way, Meiji jitsugyōka, as a social group, promoted industrialism and technological development, and by extension westernization, while simultaneously acting as arbiters of Japanese traditional culture. Thus, the ownership of wayō setcchū jūka for entrepreneurs was highly significant. The estates they built were designed to legitimize the authority of their owners as a new social group. In the subsequent preservation and memorialization of material structures, like the Takatori-tei, associated with this group, the chapter illustrates how narratives are negotiated between national and local institutions. The conflict of meanings and narratives attached in Japanese heritage sites, for example, can be seen in Japanese castles and how they illustrate tensions between local and national, tensions in which the larger context of Japanese history rubs up against regional narratives and identities connected to such sites and their associated historical figures (Benesch and Zwigenberg 2019, 4). In a similar vein, the discussion of heritage at the Takatori-tei narrates such structures as part of the modern heritage of Meiji Japan, the drive to modernise the nation, and how the local community responded, participated and was somewhat left behind by this process. While the regional understanding of the site is anchored by its association with Takatori as local entrepreneur and his connections to the area, the national meaning is attached to the estate’s significance as an 9 10

Scholar Jordan Sand credits the Meiji period architect Kitada Kyūichi as coining the term (Sand 2003, 40–1). In this chapter, the term jitsugyōka will be used interchangeable with entrepreneur,

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architectural representation of an entrepreneur, a profession associated with Japan’s transition to a modern state. In this way, the Takatori-tei adds to our understanding of heritage in Japan, speaking to tensions between local and the national interests. 3

Takatori Koreyoshi: The Provincial Entrepreneur

In the Meiji period, Tokyo was the centre of Japan’s development and its efforts to learn from the West. This meant that enterprising men from humble backgrounds (farmers or low-ranking samurai) would gravitate to Tokyo as a place where they might elevate themselves and acquire knowledge and education. Indeed, the majority of successful entrepreneurs in Tokyo in the Meiji period originated from the outer provinces.11 Even so, many important industries such as coal mining were concentrated in rural areas. Thus, it is necessary to look at Takatori Koreyoshi’s background to understand the extent to which Tokyo affected his outlook, as this manifested itself in the outcome of Takatori-tei’s architectural design. Takatori Koreyoshi was born in 1850, the late Tokugawa period, as the third child of a low-ranking samurai of a feudal domain in Ogi, one of the sub-­ domains in Saga Prefecture (Nichigai 2011, 362). In 1858, he was adopted into the Takatori family, a vassal of Ogi domain, and was appointed as the heir of the family (Nichigai 2011, 362). The practice of high-ranking samurai adopting children from lower-ranking families was common during the Tokugawa period (Moore 1970, 620), but it was the dissolution of the Tokugawa period’s social stratification system during the Meiji period which enabled social mobility and the creation of a new business elite (Fujimori 1992, 157). Meiji social stratification was more intricate than the new government’s abolition of status would suggest. In the early Meiji period, a peerage s­ ystem kazoku) modelled after the Prussian system was developed. European titles such as duke, prince, and baron were awarded to former feudal lords called daimyo who were landowners and vassals of the former shogun; court aristocrats; and to people who performed outstanding service to the nation (Ruoff 2001, 23). Most of the latter were also from samurai families. Meanwhile, becoming an entrepreneur was predominantly determined by merit and Examples of people in this category are: Yasuda Zenjirō (1838–1921), a prominent banker from Toyama Prefecture and Masuda Takashi (1848–1938), a director of Mitsui company who was born on Sado Island (Niigata Prefecture), see Yamamura 1968, 146; Yamamura 1969, 115; Guth 1993, 15.

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commercial success. People who had ranked during the Edo period among the low-level samurai, merchant, or even peasant classes could become highly-­ regarded entrepreneurs, among the top tiers of society by the end of Meiji period (Fujimori 1992, 157). As already noted, entrepreneurs differentiated themselves from the merchant class of the Tokugawa period by recasting their profession as jitsugyōka, literally ‘one who does real work’ (Guth 1993, 145). Coined by Shibusawa ­Eiichi (1840–1931), the term legitimated the standing of these businessmen by imbuing the two qualities of the samurai class—culture (bun) and military knowledge (bu)—into the philosophy of the entrepreneur. The assimilation of culture by the industrialist was accomplished through demonstrating their knowledge of classical Japanese art and tea practice. Entrepreneurs therefore had similar cultural values to the samurai class, to the point that Christine Guth has dubbed them ‘The New Daimyo’ (Guth 1993, 129). Takatori was emblematic of this new, upwardly mobile class. From 1870 to around 1874, Takatori first attended an English language school and then Keio Private School. Subsequently, he focused his attention on mining, and entered the Board of Mines at the Ministry of Public Works, which had jurisdiction over government-owned mines (Nichigai, 2011, 362). After his period with the Ministry, Takatori’s career trajectory was focused on the coal sector. His first foray into the field was with the Takashima coal mine in 1874. Takashima was initially the only mining company supplying coal for the nation, and its business practices became a model for other mining companies that followed later (McMaster 1963, 217). Takatori then moved between jobs at other mining ­companies in Nagasaki Prefecture, and between 1885 and 1899, he developed several coal mining companies in northern Kyushu, including Hashima coal mine (better known today as Gunkanjima), earning the moniker ‘Hizen Coal King’ (Hizen no tankō ō) (Bunkazai 2005).12 Takatori’s career was mainly in Kyushu. All of the companies that he was involved in as shareholder, including the Kijima coal mine which he would later own, were based in the Karatsu region. Takatori’s role in Meiji industrialism was largely concentrated in the periphery rather than centre of Japan. Takatori’s background demonstrates two important ideas. First, the capital was a developmental school for rural areas, as seen by Takatori’s migration to Tokyo during his youth to pursue higher education. Second, though, Takatori’s return highlights the strong ties to his home area and his local identity. A lucra tive coal industry located in Kyushu but connected to metropolitan capital Hizen was a province located in modern Saga and Nagasaki Prefectures.

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and national development implies a close relationship between Tokyo and the periphery. This is relevant to the discussion of Takatori-tei’s designation as a heritage site because it influenced not only the process of turning the estate into an Important Cultural Property but also how this heritage site is remembered and viewed by locals as a representation of local identity. 4

Enterprising Behaviour

Borders of memory emerge at the Takatori-tei site due to the circumstances of its construction, which were closely tied to Takatori’s identity as a Meiji coal magnate. As a provincial industrialist whose business was largely concentrated in the periphery, it was essential to embody the ideals of the Meiji entrepreneur in order to legitimize himself to politicians and industrialists in Tokyo. The Takatori-tei played a huge role in the construction of Takatori’s identity as a provincial businessman who could embody the values of Tokyo industrialists. The composite design of Western-style and traditional Japanese architecture demonstrated Takatori’s financial prowess as an emerging businessperson able to build a ‘modern’ house modelled upon those in Tokyo, and his grasp of the ideals expected of someone in his social group. Nevertheless, there are sev eral architectural elements that made the Takatori-tei distinct from estates in Tokyo, and marked it as a product of a provincial entrepreneur. These points of contention emerged in the architecture of the Takatori-tei, the construction of which suggested contested binaries: Western versus Japan, and centre versus periphery. The estate, which was begun in 1895 during Takatori’s early years as an entrepreneur, used a composite of Western-style and traditional Japanese architecture. The Western section represented the progressive side of the Meiji entrepreneur while the traditional Japanese architecture spoke to the traditional culture validated within the jitsugyōka ideal. In the Takatori-tei’s case, this is clear from the existence of a semi-public space which consists of two distinct rooms functioning as receiving rooms: the private Noh stage and Western-style salon. The Takatori-tei estate was constructed to receive select visitors, and both rooms were specifically constructed to demonstrate to distinguished visitors their owners’ credentials as one who embodies jitsugyōka values. The Noh stage, located on the eastern side of the mansion omote area, consists of three interconnected multi-function rooms—1) a The whole eastern section of the estate is separated from the inner, informal parts of the house and has its own entrance.

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The private Noh stage assembled in 1904, from Takatori, Takatori-ke Courtesy of Mitoma Masakatsu and the Karatsu City Tourism Department

private noh stage and audience seating, 2) a formal sitting room Ōhiroma, 3) and an ­overnight guest room—the space of which could be adjusted by changing the configuration of the sliding doors and tatami mats (see Figure 9.3).14 The existence of the Noh stage is significant. In 1877 Noh theatre, which was previously in decline, experienced a revival pioneered by the Meiji statesman, Iwakura Tomomi (1825–1883). He elevated Noh theatre into an art performed for the nobility while simultaneously presenting it to visiting foreign dignitaries as a uniquely Japanese theatre (Pellechia 2011, 26, Rath 2004, 221; Okutomi 2003, 337).15 From then on, despite the patronage of several industrialists, Noh was considered as an aristocratic art (Rath 2004, 223; Okutomi 2003, 338). ­Construction of the Takatori-tei began around this period. As a provincial entrepreneur, Takatori Koreyoshi was someone outside of the exclusive Noh 14 15

Murakami Yukiko (staff of Takatori-tei) in discussion with the author, March 28, 2020. In early modern Japan, Noh theatre was a theatrical performance that was heavily coded as entertainment for the samurai class, a social group one level below the nobility (Gerstle 2017, 39).

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Side view of Takatori-tei’s front entrance Photograph by the author

set, but the presence of a Noh stage on the estate signifies Takatori’s familiarity with and patronage of cultural tradition. The Western-style salon is located at the main entrance of the estate and serves as the main architectural vista. Its juxtaposition between traditional architecture and Western-style construction reflected the duality of Meiji entrepreneurs (see Figure 9.4). It is not stylistically monolithic and calls for further analysis; my research suggests that the design bears Art Nouveau, Neoclassic, and Jacobian characteristics. The exterior is a square-shaped structure with windows and a tall chimney jutting out from the Japanese style rooftop. The façade’s straight-line structure and tall windows with triangle-shaped pediment bear characteristics of Neoclassical architecture. The interior decorative elements are in a variety of styles that are likely Art Nouveau and Jacobian, with the former represented in the lampshade motif and wallpaper, and the latter in the furniture styles. There are several distinct elements in this Western-style salon design. First, although the material of the Western-style salon exterior appears to be stonework, it is a plaster imitation of masonry. Second, the building’s structural foundations were timber, which was not common for Western-style structures in the industrial age: brick, masonry, or steel were the more typically utilized building materials (Coaldrake 1996, 218). Third, the roof of the salon uses the traditional Japanese hip roof, employing the same shape and material as

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the other parts of the building. All of these are characteristics of the giyōfū, the early period of pseudo-Western architectural styles which existed in the first half of the Meiji period. This architectural style is distinct from the Western-style buildings of the mid-Meiji period, such as the ones designed by Katayama Tōkuma. Unlike the later university-educated Japanese architects, carpenters of the e­ arly-Meiji period obtained their knowledge of Western architecture by working with foreign specialists or visual observation. While carpenters emulated the ­ appearance of Western brick and stone structures, their prevalent building material remained wood. This giyōfū style did not last very long because of the emergence of Japanese architects formally trained in Western styles, particularly in the capital, and as a result, was slowly phased out. This eclectic hybrid design was halfway between tradition and modernity, and is largely seen as an incomplete blending of Japanese tradition and the modern, Westernized values in Meiji Japan. The Takatori-tei was built contemporaneously with residences of other entrepreneurs in Tokyo, and like them had exterior Western-style structures.16 According to the wooden tag inscription, the carpenters responsible for Takatori-tei’s construction project were Kayama Ryuji and Mori Kanetsugu (Bunkazai 2005, 14). Not much is known about these two figures, but it may be inferred that they were provincial master carpenters. In the practices associated with both the residence’s owner and its builders, then, the Takatori-tei illustrates this fusion of Japanese and Western. Yet while the house was, and is, able to represent modernity in the provinces, it also materializes the distinction between Tokyo and the rest of the country. 5

Conflicting Architectural Elements

Takatori-tei occupies an interesting position in the context of Meiji ­architec­ture, partly due to its location in Kyushu. The design of the estate follows the trajectory of the architectural development in the capital city by incorporating a Western-style receiving room, which was the vernacular by mid-Meiji Tokyo. However, there are distinct differences between the architectural structure and elements of the estate and the common trends prevalent in Tokyo’s residential architecture, and the site represents a provincial deviation of Japanese archi tectural development from trends in the capital. By 1895, elite entrepreneurs in Good examples are the Iwasaki-tei in Ueno, Tokyo and the Shimazu-tei in Chiyoda, Tokyo.

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Tokyo abandoned the giyōfū style in favour of the works of classically trained architects, such as Josiah Conder from Britain, who would later teach architecture in the Imperial College of Engineering (Watanabe 2006, 241), while the first graduates were sent abroad on a government scholarship to study and gain first-hand experience of Western architecture (Coaldrake 1996, 233). ­Consequently, it was the prominent architectural styles in Western ­countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which came to be present in elite Tokyo estates, particularly visible in the various classical revivals (Gothic, Jacobian, Romanesque, etc.) and in Art Nouveau. Such elements were also present at the Takatori-tei, but in a distorted form. In terms of building configuration, the late Meiji residences of Tokyo elites were designed with the Western-style structure dominating the entryway. This building plan hid the traditional Japanese structure from the view of guests. This type of configuration is found in Iwasaki-tei, designed by Josiah Conder and built in 1897, for instance. The estate’s Western-style building, which functioned as a guest reception house, was eclectic, incorporating the Gothic and Jacobian revivals, Victorian, and a pseudo-Saracenic style that Watanabe Toshio deemed characteristic of Josiah Conder’s signature design (­Watanabe 2006, 243). Although the living environment of the estate’s owner was in the ­shoin-sukiya style, externally it was the Western-style elements which dominated the buildings. By comparison, in the Takatori-tei, the salon stood between the omote and oku sections and was connected by a corridor overlooking the interior garden. Besides the salon, the exterior of the Takatori-tei was constructed in a ­traditional Japanese style. The building stands out because of its architectural isolation and its presence in a location surrounded by sukiya architecture. There are also still elements of traditional Japanese architecture present in the salon structure, particularly the roof, which deploys a common ­traditional ­Japanese hipped roof (yosemune yane) with tile as the material. The presence of Japanese architecture in the Western sections is due to the giyōfū ­construction of this building, as the Western sections relied on traditional Japanese building techniques. Moreover, traditional Japanese elements are evident throughout the structure of the house. The whole of the guest reception area in the house, including the Noh stage was constructed and decorated using traditional Japanese architecture and art, such as door paintings sugido-e) with seasonal subjects, a staple decoration in traditional Japanese elite residences. The reception area was designed with a strong emphasis on traditional Japanese architecture and art. This absence of Western-trained architects in northern Kyushu shaped building practice even during the Taisho period.

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Close up of the Western-style salon exterior Photograph by the author

This is also shown by the design of the Western-style salon room of the ­Takatori-tei. In comparison with contemporary developments in Tokyo, the architectural style was slightly outdated, predominantly Neoclassical with J­acobean furniture. This is characterized by the simple geometrical shape of the exterior structure and the interior structure elements, particularly the triangular shape of the arch pediments (see Figure 9.5). Since the salon section was not finished until 1918, it is likely that this was not planned until late in the construction stage. The visit of Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922), a ­prominent politician and Prime Minister at the time, to the still unfinished Takatori-tei in 1913 might have prompted Takatori’s decision to add the Western-style salon. This is also indicated through the construction of a private indoor ­Western-style toilet shortly before the arrival of Ōkuma Shigenobu, created solely with his visit in mind (Bunkazai 2005, 5). Takatori likely realized prior to this visit that to be acknowledged as part of a national elite, he needed to further demonstrate his embrace of Western modernisation. 6

The Takatori-tei as National Cultural Property and Local Heritage

After the death of Takatori Koreyoshi, his family inherited the Takatori-tei and the remaining members of his son’s family resided there until the mansion

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was opened to the public.17 The land and property was donated by the Takatori family to the city of Karatsu in 1996,18 although the family lived there until 1998 (Takatori 1993, 1). Currently the estate is under the management of Karatsu City and acts as a local tourist spot. The mansion was turned into a museum open to visitors who can tour the estate almost in its entirety and is managed by the Board of Education’s Cultural Division. The estate was given the status of National Important Cultural Property (jūyō bunkazai) in 1998 (Asahi shinbun, 2000). This legislation was created to protect and preserve historical sites in Japan and is considered to be the highest designation for heritage sites. The law works by providing assistance (financial and technical) towards the conservation of designated properties. In order to receive the status of National Important Cultural Property, nominated sites have to undergo an arduous selection process and after selection need to maintain the highest standards (Liebs 1998, 681). The designation of a building that belongs to what is often regarded as a formative and unaccomplished style is remarkable. There are two reasons why there was a strong push from Karatsu City’s ­municipal board and the Takatori family to have the estate nominated as a National Important Cultural Property. First is the heavy involvement of the ­Karatsu City’s municipal board and the Takatori family in promoting the estate as part of Japanese heritage. The city of Karatsu today is very proud of its place in history as the origin of several influential figures of the Meiji period, such as Tatsuno Kingo, the famed Meiji architect, and Amano Tameyuki, a Meiji politician and economist.19 Posters with pictures of these figures are plastered in the centre of Karatsu City and at other architectural sites related to the Meiji period.20 This is part of Karatsu’s effort to perpetuate the narrative of their 17 18

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His son’s wife, Noriko and their daughter Hideko. Accounts varied in terms of the exact year the estate was donated. According to Takatori’s granddaughter Hideko, in 1996, the family donated the land and the building to the city of Karatsu, although they still lived there until 1998 (Takatori 1993, p.1). However, based on the article from the newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun, the residence was donated a year later in 1997 (Takatori 1993, p.41). There is an interesting contrast between Tatsuno Kingo and Takatori Koreyoshi. Kingo was born in Karatsu, but left his birthplace for Tokyo and contributed to Japan’s ­modernisation by building Western-style architecture. Meanwhile, Takatori ­Koreyoshi sought to r­epresent his modernity in Karatsu through construction with Western ­elements that resembled the residential mansions of Tokyo. The Karatsu Bank, designed by Tatsuno Kingo, is one of these sites. The architecture differs from the Takatori-tei in architectural style and the materials used for construc tion. Karatsu Bank was designed by a formally trained Japanese architect and largely used masonry for its building material. Meanwhile, the Takatori-tei was constructed by Japanese carpenters as a giyōfū structure and constructed primarily used timber as its

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city as an influential location for the development of Japanese modernisation. Although Takatori Koreyoshi was not a native of Karatsu, he decided to build one of his residences there and with it he hoped to demonstrate his accomplishments in the region. Moreover, Takatori Kurō, Koreyoshi’s son, contributed to the city’s prosperity by opening a series of businesses21 that supported Karatsu’s tourism industry (Takatori 1993, 1). To have the estate of a successful local entrepreneur recognized as a National Important Cultural Property meant that the city’s status as a meaningful location for the development of Meiji Japan is also acknowledged. Second, the more practical reason was because the Takatori family could no longer afford to maintain the house. In 1991, when the Takatori family still lived there, a strong typhoon caused damage to the roof of the house which made it difficult to repair and maintain for Takatori’s daughter-in-law, who inherited the house after her husband’s passing (Takatori 1993, 1). This event was a big factor in the decision to donate the estate to the city, as the remaining family was unable to take care of the property. They supported the city’s decision to nominate the estate as a National Important Cultural Property because financial and technical support is provided by the Agency of Cultural Affairs for preservation. Just prior to this, the estate received the status of prefectural Important Cultural Property in 1997. This law allows the local and prefec tural governments to designate local buildings as cultural sites and preserve them using local funds (Liebs 1998, 681). This was likely orchestrated by the Karatsu municipality due to the tight selection criteria required by the Agency of Cultural Affairs for national nomination. If the site was acknowledged as cultural heritage and repaired using prefectural funding, it would benefit the nomination process at the national level. Soon after it was officially granted the status of Important Cultural Property, a comprehensive restoration project was conducted between 2000 and 2006, in which the city of Karatsu participated extensively. In 2000 a committee made of experts was created and along with a citizen’s group they met to plan and execute the restoration process. It was decided that after the restoration was finished, the house would be open to the public for a fee of 500 yen per visitor (Asahi Shinbun 2000). The city initially planned to open the building from April 2007, but according to the Asahi Shinbun, they decided to move this forward due to heightened interest from local citizens (Asahi Shinbun 2006). main material. Hence the there are differences in designs of architectural details and building proportions. These included the development of Kagamiyama trail, opening a golf course, and reconstruction of the old town in Karatsu (Takatori 1993, p.1).

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The estate was prominently promoted on Karatsu’s tourism website, usually just behind Karatsu Castle, and has become synonymous with both the historical legacy of the Meiji period and a person who made a huge contribution to the city’s prosperity. This, though, is commemorated through a building which reveals the divisions between Takatori’s provincial status and modernisation in the capital. It is through being recognized as a site of national heritage that such borders of memory can be seamlessly overlooked. 7

Negotiating Heritage Making

There is a conflict of diverging interests regarding Takatori-tei as a heritage site. From the perspective of the Agency of Cultural Affairs, the estate was designated for its representation of ‘modern heritage,’ hinting at the prominence of the Western-style structure in their selection. Meanwhile, Karatsu City, although acknowledging the property as industrial heritage, focused more on the traditional elements and its economic significance to the city. The first question to ask is why the Agency of Cultural Affairs decided to bestow the title of National Important Cultural Property to the estate exactly at this time? The answer lies in the existing legislation of the national cultural protection and the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995. Due to the destruction of much cultural heritage during World War II, in 1950 the government created new legislation to designate and give protection to various historical sites. This was entitled the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties (Bunkazai Hogohō) (Liebs 1998, 681; Scott 2003, 362, 380–1), and under it the category of Important Cultural Properties was established to provide a means to designate historical places with heritage value. This law would allow the owner of a property to receive subsidies from the national government for conservation efforts (Liebs 1998, 4). It also extended to the local level where local authorities would have the power to designate buildings as cultural properties to be preserved with prefectural funds (Liebs 1998, 681). Moreover, under this category, there is a strict regulation to preserve the exterior and interior of designated buildings (Kakiuchi 2014, 6). This further explains why soon after the ­Takatori-tei was granted the Important Cultural Property status it underwent a heavy restoration project. Initially, the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties focused on shrines and temples (Scott 2003, 346–7), but in the 1990s it was made to include struc tures that represent Japan’s ‘modern heritage’ (Liebs 1998, 686). This meant that buildings displaying Western influences that were built from the mid-nineteenth century onwards began to gain recognition as Japanese heritage. The reason for

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this shift was that these buildings were seen through a Japanese lens and built according to Japanese sensibilities (Liebs 1998, 686). As such, the ­Takatori-tei, an example of architecture constructed in line with the ideals of the Meiji industrialist, fits neatly into this category. The building, particularly the giyōfū structure, was an interpretation of Western architecture from a firmly Japanese perspective. It was made by Japanese carpenters using traditional materials and guild practices of pre-modern Japan. The Takatori-tei is thus a significant site of modern Japanese heritage because: (1) It has a distinctive exterior, particularly considering how the Western-style façade only functioned as a parlour room, unlike similar residences where Western-style buildings usually function as a separate house; (2) Despite its provincial location and industrialist owner, it has a Noh stage at a time when Noh was considered an art form exclusive to aristocrats and statesmen (moreover, the Takatori-tei is one of the few residential estates that has a Noh stage in the interior); (3) It is an example of the giyōfū architecture, a Japanese interpretation of Western-style architecture. There was also another, more practical reason for incorporating ‘modern heritage’ buildings as cultural properties: newer buildings are easier to conserve while restoring traditional buildings often requires both materials and skills that are either expensive or have grown scarce in recent years (Liebs 1998, 687). All of this could be interpreted as post-war Japan slowly accepting cosmopolitan elements as part of the nation’s heritage narrative. Previously, the past drive to Westernise was commonly derided because although it was part of Japan’s history (see the chapter by Ivings), this aspect of Japanese culture did not fit with an essentialised demonstration of Japaneseness. This heritage means the culture and lifestyle of the elite rather than the daily life of common people, and is usually selected because it ‘perform[s] Japaneseness,’ derived from the high art of Heian period (794–1185) aristocratic culture (Cox and ­Brumann 2010, 3–4). That the Agency of Cultural Affairs are now willing to adopt ‘modern ­heritage’ sites demonstrates an acceptance of architecture characterised by Western mimicry as part of Japan’s heritage. Prior to this, most owners of historic buildings were reluctant to have their property designated as National Important Cultural Property. The Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995 became a huge factor in this shift because many historic buildings were destroyed by the force of the quake and subsequent fires in its aftermath. The severity of the damage further demonstrated the need for greater protection and conservation efforts from the government for historic sites. This also further pushed the Agency for Cultural Affairs to make an official national list of heritage prop erties. The list highlighted the reduced numbers of endangered heritage sites and encouraged owners to have their buildings designated (Liebs 1998, 687).

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The granting of the status of Important Cultural Property to the site meant that it was acknowledged as having a deep cultural significance and ­exceptional merit based on the 1950’s criteria: (1) Outstanding design; (2) Excellent t­ echnology; (3) High historical value; (4) Representative of regional characteristics (Aoyagi, Iwatsuki, and Fujioka 2012, 2001). Thus, the estate has become a visual representation of the era of Japan’s transition from a traditional feudalistic society into a modernized industrial nation. The designation also implies that it recognized what the estate symbolized during the time of its construction. It represented the habitus of a Meiji jitsugyōka and ­Takatori’s interpretation of it through architecture: the balance of appearing as the ­proponent of ­technology and the keeper of traditional culture. Meanwhile, from the perspective of Karatsu, the site is more commonly associated with the legacy of Japan’s coal industry, as frequently highlighted in tourism and promotional brochures. In these materials the site is hailed as the former residence of the ‘Hizen Coal King’ or the ‘King of Mines,’ ­highlighting Takatori’s legacy as an entrepreneur in the coal industry. As such, the ­Takatori-tei represents the economic rise of Karatsu based on the wealth generated from the numerous coal mines worked in the region during that time.22 The promotional materials do not dwell much on the existence of the ­Western-style salon and what it means in the context of the period. Rather it often focuses on those aspects that ‘perform’ traditional Japanese culture, such as the reception area. The restoration records also reveal that Takatori Koreyoshi lived at the estate at one point, during the time of its construction, but it was unclear whether he spent most of his time there (Bunkazai 2005, 5). Moreover, Takatori passed away in his other residence in Taku City, Saga Prefecture. It was also unclear whether his son primarily resided at the estate, although his wife and daughter lived there before it was donated to the city. From these accounts, it is evident that the estate was created and used predominantly for the reception of guests, particularly during Takatori’s lifetime and it is likely that he did not intend the estate as his primary residence. The estate is understood by locals today through its role in performing traditional Japanese culture, and place in the legacy of the coal industry, which boosted the economy of the city of Karatsu, and to which Takatori Koreyoshi contrib uted as a successful provincial Meiji industrialist. By pushing the Takatori-tei as the city’s representative heritage site to be recognized nationally, it also, by extension, legitimised the city’s narrative of itself as an important location in An example of this can be seen in Karatsu city tourism website under the ‘historical monument’ heading.

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the Meiji period. Yet Takatori’s intention for the building and the construction practices of the carpenters involved confirm Karatsu’s provinciality, at least within a Meiji industrialist’s social world. Moreover, the narrative of ­Karatsu as an important site of industrial and cultural heritage, exemplified in the awkwardly built Takatori-tei, is problematic for other reasons. The estate represents an elite and thus exclusive building constructed in an era of rapid social, economic and political change. Whilst rigid social class distinctions and barriers to social mobility were removed in the Meiji period, the drive to industrialise was characterised by striking economic inequality which served to reinforce such divisions in practice. Takatori Koreyoshi built his house in K ­ aratsu on the backs of the labour of coal miners. However, in adopting this elite residence as the prime symbol of its Meiji period industrial and cultural heritage the city passes over the history of the coal industry and its treatment of workers. Additionally, despite heavily advocating the Takatori-tei as the house of a coal industrialist, the estate’s promotion was self-contained. There was no attempt by the custodians and the city to connect the estate with the region’s modern industry and economic heritage, rather it strictly focused on its aspect as an excellent example of a residence of Karatsu’s elite in the Meiji period. Looking at all of these elements, Karatsu’s decision to designate the ­Takatori-tei as part of its cultural heritage represents an example of elite heritage being seamlessly adopted as the heritage of a provincial locality as a whole. 8 Conclusion In the process of making the Takatori-tei a heritage site, it was made to stand as a representative of multiple narratives, namely: (1) Japan’s encounter with foreign-Western culture; (2) the emergence of a new elite social group that appropriated existing cultural traditions; (3) a Japanese population which enthusiastically adopted aspects of Western culture yet remained Japanese. All these stories, inconsistent as they may be, can be told through the house. The building’s design manifests Japan’s encounter with and emulation of a foreign culture, the Western type of modernity. The study of this encounter and the reinvention of Japan as an industrialized and imperialist nation were plotted and prefigured almost exclusively in the metropolitan centre of Japan. The discussion of the Takatori-tei’s architecture addresses the often-overlooked study of private Meiji Western architecture in the provincial areas. The estate can also be understood as indicative of dichotomies between the modern capital and its provincial hin terland, that is, the advanced metropolitan culture on the one hand and a region

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lagging behind and where ‘tradition’ was still strong.23 The estate was modelled on similar elite residences in Tokyo but with remarkable differences in style, construction, and configuration which largely owed to the local paucity of architects and masons trained in Western building techniques. Dichotomies are present in the Takatori-tei’s building construction and these reflect the various elements being brought together in jitsugyōka ­identity at the time. Moreover, commemoration as heritage reveals the contrasting elements that were brought together as modern Japan. The private home of a wealthy family gradually came to be understood as a local landmark that positively contributed to the image of Karatsu as a place of history and culture. The eventual designation as an Important Cultural Property formalized this re-­ evaluation and afforded it national sanction. Yet, in the process of the estate’s the designation as Jūyō bunkazai, the collective memory of this site could not be neatly set into the official national narrative. The reasoning for bequeathing national status highlights the estate as an example of Japan’s ‘modern’ heritage when, strictly speaking, only the relatively small Western-style salon qualifies for this definition. A significant aspect in the nomination process was that the Agency of Cultural Affairs was interested in having the category of Japan’s ‘modern building’ heritage protected under the law. In contrast, the city of K ­ aratsu which lobbied intensely for designation argued differently. Karatsu city views the estate as an embodiment of traditional Japanese culture on the one hand. Whilst on the other, it highlights the contribution of the Takatori family to the economic rise of city and region during the Meiji and Taishō eras. In this reading the estate is primarily memorable for its owner and his role in making Karatsu a key location in Japan’s modern history. References Aoyagi, Norimasa, Noriyuki Iwatsuki, and Hiroyasu Fujioka. 2012. ‘Process of Reform ing the Concept of ‘National Treasure’ Buildings Under the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties.’ Journal of Architecture and Planning, 77 (678): 1997–2005. Asahi Shinbun. 2000. ‘Kyū Takatori-tei to kyū karatsu ginkō no katsuyō kōkai ichibu zantei de karatsu, saga.’ March 23, 2000. Asahi Shinbun. 2006. ‘Kyū Takatori-tei muryō de senkō kōkai fukugen ni go nen shōwa shoki no sugata ni karatsu-shi de asukara, saga.’ October 7, 2006. The chapter by Solomon in the volume also explores tensions between metropolitan and provincial culture and heritage, albeit with a focus on intangible and vernacular culture.

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Benesch, Oleg and Ran Zwigenberg. 2019. Japan’s Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boro, Alexia. 2004. ‘“Wayo Secchu” Meiji Architecture as an Interpretative Device for Tokyo Modern Space.’ Urban Morphology and the History of Civilization in East Asia 21: 257–266. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Brumann, Christoph and Rupert Cox. 2010. ‘Introduction.’ In Making Japanese ­Heritage, edited by Christoph Brumann and Rupert Cox, 1–17. Oxon: Routledge. Bunkazai Kenzōbutsu Hozon Gijutsukyōkai. 2005. Jūyō bunkazai Kyū-takatori-ke jūtaku omoya (kyoshitsu tō, ōhiroma tō) hoka shichi-tō hozon shūri kōji hōkokusho. Karatsu: Karatsu-shi Kyōiku Iinkai. Burton, W. Donald. 2014. Coal Mining Women in Japan: Heavy Burdens. New York: ­Routledge. Clancey, Gregory K. 2006. Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Policies of Japanese Seismicity, 1868–1930. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coaldrake, William. 1990. The Way of the Carpenter: Tools and Japanese Architecture. New York: Weatherhill. Coaldrake, William. 1996. Architecture and Authority in Japan. London: Routledge. Devine-Eller, Audrey. Rethinking Bourdieu on Race: A Critical Review of Cultural ­Capital and Habitus in the Sociology of Education Qualitative Literature. Unpublished ­manuscript, May 2 2005, typescript. Finn, Dallas. 1995. Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan. New York: Weatherhill. Frampton, Kenneth, Kunio Kudo, and Keith Vincent. 1997. Japanese Building Practice: From Ancient Times to the Meiji Period. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Fujimori, Mitsuo. 1992. ‘The Formation of Business Elites in Japan: With Emphasis on Yukichi Fukuzawa’s View on Business.’ Keio Business Review, 29: 157–67. Gerstle, C. Andrew. 2017. ‘Flowers of Edo: Kabuki and Its Patrons.’ In 18th Century Japan: Culture and Society, edited by C. Andrew Gerstle, 33–97. London: Routledge. Guth, Christine M. E. 1993. Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gutschow, Niels. 2017. ‘Identity; Integrity.’ In Authenticity in Architectural Heritage ­Conservation: Discourses, Opinions, Experiences in Europe, South and East Asia, edited by Katharina Weiler and Niels Gutschow, 4–7. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Hane, Mikiso. Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Itō, Teiji, and Yukio Futagawa. 1989. The Elegant Japanese House: Traditional Sukiya Architecture. New York; Kyoto: Weatherhill; Tankosha.

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Kakiuchi, Emiko. 2014. ‘Cultural Heritage Protection System in Japan: Current Issues and Prospects for the Future.’ GRIPS Discussion Paper, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. Kameda-Madar, Kazuko. 2011. ‘Pictures of Social Networks: Transforming Visual Representations of the Orchid Pavillion Gathering in the Tokugawa Period (1615–1868).’ PhD diss., University of British Columbia. Karatsu-shi Kyōiku Iinkai. 2017. Kyū Takatori-tei. Karatsu: Karatsu-shi Bunka Jigyō-dan. Liebs, Chester H. 1998. ‘Listing of Tangible Cultural Properties: Expanded Recognition for Historic Buildings in Japan.’ Washington International Law Journal, 7 (3): 679–97. Moore, Ray A. 1970. ‘Adoption and Samurai Mobility in Tokugawa Japan.’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 29 (3): 617–632. NDL. 2017. ‘Kobushō kōzan ryō nitsuite’. Accessed 27.6.2020. https://crd.ndl.go.jp/refer ence/modules/d3ndlcrdentry/index.php?page=ref_view&id=1000210250. Nichigai Associates. 2011. Meiji Taishō jinbutsu jiten. Kyōto: Ōhasi Toshio. Nishi, Kazuo and Hozumi Kazuo. 1996. What is Japanese Architecture? Translated by H. Mack Horton. New York: Kodansha USA. Okutomi Toshiyuki. 2003. ‘Meiji shoki ni okeru nōgakudo tanjō no ikisatsu aoyama gosho nōbutai, nōgakusha no kensetsu o tōshite’. Nihon kenchiku gakkai keikaku-kei ronbun shu, 565 (73): 337–342. Pellechia, Diego. 2011. ‘Aesthetics and Ethics in the Reception of Noh Theatre in the West.’ PhD diss., University of London. Rath, Eric C. 2004. The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Reynolds, Jonathan M. 2001. Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reynolds, Jonathan M. 2004. ‘The Formation of a Japanese Architectural Profession.’ In The Artist as Professional in Japan, edited by Melinda Takeuchi, 180–236. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press. Ruoff, Kenneth J. 2001. The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945 – 1995. Honolulu: Harvard University Asia Center. Sand, Jordan. 2003. House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Scott, Geoffrey, R. 2003. ‘The Cultural Property Laws of Japan: Social, Political, and Legal Influences.’ Washington International Journal Law, 2 (12): 315–402. Shirane, Haruo. 2012. Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press. Stewart, David B. 1987. The Making of Modern Japanese Architecture: 1868 to the Present. New York: Kodansha International. Stovel, Herb. 2008. ‘Origins and Influence of the Nara Document on Authenticity.’ APT 2 (39): 9–17.

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Takatori, Noriko, Hideko Takatori and Mitoma Masakatsu. 1993. Takatori-ke shashinshū. Saga: Takatori Noriko. Takatori, Noriko, and Hideko Takatori. 2010. Takatori-ke shashinshū tan. Setsumei shiryōhen. Saga: Takatori Noriko. Tang, John P. 2011. ‘Technological Leadership and Late Development: Evidence from Meiji Japan, 1868–1912.’ The Economic History Review, 64 (1): 99–116. Underwood, William. 2015. ‘History in a Box: UNESCO and the Framing of Japan’s Meiji Era.’ The Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 13 (26): 1–14. Watanabe, Toshio. 2006. ‘Japanese Imperial Architecture: From Thomas Roger Smith to Itō Chūta.’ In Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-­ Century Japanese Art, edited by Ellen P. Conant, 240–253. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Yamamura, Kozo. 1968. ‘A Re-Examination of Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan (1868–1912).’ The Economic History Review

PART 3 Layered Memories

CHAPTER 10

At the Border of Memory and History: Kyoto’s Contested War Heritage Justin Aukema Abstract This chapter examines the postwar fate of Japan’s Asia-Pacific war relics and sites through the example of the Imperial Japanese Army 16th Division garrison in Kyoto’s Fushimi Ward. Since its move to Kyoto in 1907, the 16th Division played a major part in the Asia-Pacific War including some of its darker episodes such as the 1937 ­Nanking Massacre. After the war, the 16th Division garrison was repurposed as schools and ­residential areas, while various veterans and war bereaved groups sought to memo rialize and commemorate the former Japanese Army there. Yet in the process, much of the site’s ruinous past was forgotten or downplayed. This changed in the 1980s when groups of civic activists and historians sought to reinsert critical memories and histories at the garrison, as well as to use the site to teach about the horrors of war and the importance of peace. But these efforts were met with fierce resistance from some of the former garrison’s other stakeholders, and the issue of how to narrate and remember the past remains contested at the site today. This chapter argues that the roots of this contestation lie in the underlying tension between memory, history, and heritage. While no longer a simple ‘site of memory’, the garrison remains averse to being incorporated into critical histories of its past, and is thus stuck at the border of memory and history.

Keywords 16th Division garrison – Kyoto – war sites – history – memory – heritage – Nanking Massacre

© Justin Aukema, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_011

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Kyoto usually brings to mind ancient temples or traditional arts and crafts, not war and destruction.1 But Kyoto’s modern history is deeply connected to war.2 Tangible evidence of this is found in the remains of military facilities from the former Japanese Army and Navy still scattered around the city and prefecture today. This chapter focuses on one of Kyoto’s most notable military sites, often called ‘war sites (senseki or sensō iseki)’ in Japanese: the main garrison for the Army 16th Division which was stationed in Kyoto’s Fushimi Ward from 1907 until the end of the Asia-Pacific War. The 16th Division acquired a dark and painful legacy after its involvement in the 1937 Battle of Nanking and its near total destruction in the 1944 Battle of Leyte. Yet, in the postwar, the garrison became detached from this history as it was repurposed mainly as a school and two universities. The issue of how to narrate and remember the 16th Division’s past is contested at the site today. This chapter argues that the roots of this contestation lie in the underlying tension between history, memory, and heritage. In the postwar, various memory communities including veterans and war bereaved groups, as well as the garrison’s main postwar inheritor, a catholic Women’s school called Seibo Jogakuin, laid stake to the garrison, reshaping it to fit their aims and working it into their biographical identities. For these groups, the 16th Division garrison was a ‘site of memory (lieux de mémoire)’, based largely on positive—and highly localized and bordered—interpretations of the past, and which functioned to reaffirm and solidify group identity and narratives of self.3 Yet as the Asia-Pacific War moved from memory to history, so too did its tangible relics. Later generations of historians and activists from the 1980s sought to clarify the historical 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Japanese as: Aukema, Justin. ‘Nihon no senseki to rekishininshiki: kyōto no gunji shisetsu o jirei ni’, Kyōto joshi daigaku gendai shakai kenkyū, No. 23, Jan. 2021. 2 This has been made much clearer recently thanks to the work of Jonathan Bull and Steve Ivings, who shed light on the history of Japanese repatriates from Manchuria after WWII illustrated through the example of the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum (Bull Ivings 2019). Somewhat similarly, but from the perspective of ‘dark tourism’, Andrea De Antoni has investigated memories of Korean forced laborers at the Kiyotaki Tunnel in the northwest part of Kyoto City (De Antoni 2019). The term ‘site of memory’ is from Pierre Nora. Nora described history and memory as being in an antagonistic relationship. Memory on the one hand reaffirms and forms the basis for self and group identity. History on the other hand threatens to destroy memory by writing a history of memory. The combination of multiple group memories into history, in other words, undermines any single memory group’s claims to individual ownership of the past. This reading of Nora’s concept forms the foundational theoretical framework on which this chapter’s argument rests (Nora 1989). The idea of ‘borders of memory’ comes from Edward Boyle who explained heritage sites as bordered spaces where various mnemonic groups interact (Boyle 2019).

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s­ ignificance of the garrison by synthesizing the narratives of multiple memory groups into a critical history of the site. But this undermined previous memory groups’ exclusive claims to ownership of the past at the garrison. Moreover, activist-historian’s attempts to construct a more cosmopolitan memory by uncovering and confronting painful events from the garrison’s past such as the Nanking Massacre, and by including voices of Asian victims of Japanese militarism and the 16th Division in their accounts, drew fierce opposition from the garrison’s other stakeholders. The garrison’s partial designation as a Cultural Property, Japan’s version of cultural heritage, in 2016 seemed to provide no solution to this impasse, either: the 16th Division garrison had become stuck at the border of history and memory. This chapter examines how this situation came about, beginning with an overview of the 16th ­Division garrison’s history, continuing through its postwar transformation into a bordered site of memory, and finally concluding with the return of ­history and the ensuing contestation this has engendered. 1

A History of the 16th Division Garrison

Part of the reason for the problematic nature of history and memory at the 16th Division garrison has to do with its function as a military base. Military bases are by nature liminal spaces. They are deeply intertwined with their surrounding local communities, often even becoming critical parts of regional economies and identities. Yet for the individual troops who train there, they are transitional places where a short period of months is spent before being deployed. At the same time, military bases become entangled in foreign affairs when troops are dispatched to conduct missions abroad. Military bases there fore interact with the local, national, and global on multiple levels, and they host diverse memory communities (e.g. soldiers and community members) in the process. Concurrently, military bases can become highly contested over the issue of whose memories and histories to emphasize there. Individual memory groups may attempt to write their own histories. But insofar as they fail to account for military bases’ multidimensional aspects, they are likely to remain incomplete. The 16th Division was no different. The Division was stationed in Kyoto’s Fukakusa-mura (present-day Fushimi Ward, and a stone’s throw away from the famous Fushimi Inari Shrine) in 1907, shortly after the end of the For an excellent history of how local, national, and international forces intersect in the space of military bases see Lutz 2001.

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Russo-Japanese War. At that time, the Japanese military placed divisions as permanent garrisons throughout Japan. Their role was to provide training and socialization for troops, as well as serve as a home base while the divisions were deployed on missions abroad. It was considered a great honour to have a division garrison in one’s community, and the perceived economic benefits of hosting one were highly sought after. The 16th brought with them between ten to twenty-thousand troops from each branch of the army – infantry, cavalry, and transport soldiers – and occupied a vast site which stretched 1.6km east-west and 2.3km north-south. Surrounding landowners were happy with the move since they were compensated nearly double the market value of their land.5 Local business owners, too, were pleased with the arrangement, and services for the troops, such as a public bath ‘Soldiers’ Bath (Gunjin-yū)’, flourished. Thus the 16th made itself present in nearly every aspect of daily life, and Fukakusa was transformed into a ‘military city (gunto)’. This included the local geography: the nearby Fujinomori Station was given the affectionate nickname of ‘Division Station (Shidan mae eki),’ the road running parallel to the base from Kyoto Station was named ‘Division Highway (Shidan-kaidō),’ and the diagonal roads running through the base were labelled ‘Military Road’ one through three (see Figure 10.1). Other defining features of the 16th Division garrison included a massive military parade ground and a distinctive red brick headquarter building (Fukubayashi 2015, 42–70). The 16th Division garrison was located at the intersection of local, national, and global affairs. This was revealed when the 16th was dispatched on two separate occasions, first in 1929 and again in 1934, to provide defence of Japan’s Manchurian territory. The massive displays of public support on these occasions, shows the extent to which the division had become fully integrated into the community. Already in 1929, the Kyoto Hinode Shinbun (hereafter KHS) described masses of spectators gathering at Kyoto Station for the division’s departure and return to their ‘beloved Kyoto (natsukashiki Kyōto)’ (Hinode Shinbun 1929). This intensified during the second deployment which occurred during a time of ‘national emergency’ following Japan’s military takeover of Manchuria in 1931. 20,000 spectators, for instance, gathered to watch when the 16th held a huge military parade and simulated military exercises on Army Day, March 11, 1934. The division’s second deployment in April 1934 was accompa nied by even more festivities. The wrote how, ‘burning with patriotism and desire for national defence’, rows of flag-waving, Kyoto residents and school

The same could not be said of their tenant farmers, however, who were dismissed without compensation (Fukubayashi 2015, 42–70).

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A contemporary street sign at the intersection of Division Highway and Military Road One indicates that the 16th Division’s legacies are still reflected in Kyoto’s physical and geographical landscape Photograph by the author, August 25, 2020

children lined the division’s route as it marched from the Fukakusa garrison to Kyoto Station (Hinode Shinbun 1934a). The 16th was subsequently at the forefront of Japan’s empire building project in Asia. While stationed in places such as Qiqihar and Heihe, the 16th engaged in ‘pacification (senbu)’ and ‘subjugation (tōbatsu)’ campaigns against local ‘bandits (hizoku)’ – the euphemism for Manchurian civilians who opposed Japanese rule and the military expropriation of their land and labour (Dai-Jūroku Shidan Shireibu 1936). But in Kyoto, the national and international significance of these activities was perceived through decidedly local and personal connections to the 16th troops. The KHS typically reported simply that the beloved ‘hometown division (kyōdo shidan)’ was fighting for ‘peace in Asia and to maintain the security of Manchukuo (Manshūkoku)’ (Hinode Shinbun 1934a; 1936). And when sending off troops, families typically uttered lines such as ‘we’ll take care of the house while you’re gone, so go give your all for the country’ (Hinode Shinbun 1934b). After the outbreak of full-scale war between Japan and China in July 1937, the perception gap between the 16th Division’s image at home and its actions abroad grew wider. The division was first dispatched to Manchuria before transferring to Shanghai in November, and it was one of the main divisions

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participating in the December 1937 Battle of Nanking. At this time, 16th ­Division troops including the 20th Artillery Regiment and the 9th Artillery Regiment engaged in the mass murder of Chinese civilians and POW s, as well as in widespread rape, arson, and looting. The 1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that the Japanese military killed 200,000 while a 1946 Nanking tribunal for class B and C war criminals reached a number of 300,000 (Kasahara 1997, 11–2). Japanese historian Kasahara Tokushi calculated that the 16th Division alone may have killed upwards of nearly 60,000 POW s between the period from December 13, 1937 to January 5, 1938 (Kasahara 1997, 225). 16th Division Chief and operational commander for the battle, General Nakajima Kesago, wrote at the time that, ‘as a general rule, our policy is to not take prisoners’ (Shimozato 1987, 125). Individual soldiers from the 16th Division also described the massacres in their personal diaries. But the Japanese media hid these atrocities and instead glorified the battle and heroized Japanese troops. The KHS, for instance, gleefully reported which of the ‘beloved (natsukashi)’ Kyoto units would be the first to capture the city.6 ‘On to Nanking’ shouted a December 2 headline and ‘The Noda Unit takes the lead’ cheered another on December 7. These were accompanied by glamorized accounts of the troops’ ‘heroic hand-to-hand combat’ and their ‘brilliant fighting with the spirit of ‘bushido’’ (Hinode Shinbun 1937a; 1937b). Even death and destruction were jubilantly reported with headlines such as ‘100,000 of the enemy, completely wiped out’ and ‘Between 80 to 90,000 enemy corpses left abandoned’ (Hinode Shinbun 1937e; 1937f). Other aggrandized accounts portrayed Japanese benevolence toward Nanking residents. One story stated: ‘Nanking returns to peace; under the protection of our strong and affectionate troops, 100,000 refugees are diligently going back to their work. Now totally at ease, the cheerful faces of the Chinese (shinajin) abound’ (Hinode Shinbun 1937g). In this milieu, the Kyoto public was ecstatic when the fall of Nanking was announced. On December 10, residents poured into the street throwing flow ers and waving flags. The following day witnessed even larger celebrations. 4,000 city, military and business officials, and veterans’ associations (zaigō gunjin-kai senyūkai) held a ceremony near Maruyama Park which was followed by a four-hour-long lantern parade around the city that culminated at the 16th Division garrison (Hinode Shinbun 1937d). At least 100,000 school The paper’s local favourites were the Ōno Unit (20th Artillery Regiment), the Katakiri Unit (9th Artillery Regiment), and the Noda Unit (33rd Artillery Regiment). In fact, the Noda Unit was made up of troops from Mie Prefecture, but it could apparently claim Kyoto connections as part of the 16th Division (Hinode Shinbun 1937c).

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children and other Kyoto residents marched in a separate procession from the KHS headquarters to the Imperial Palace grounds. The lionization of the 16th Division continued apace throughout the Asia-­ Pacific War. In December 1941, seven thousand 16th Division troops mainly from the 20th Infantry Regiment, attacked U.S. and Philippine Army forces in the Battle of the Philippines and were virtually wiped out in the successive rounds of fighting which lasted until May 1942. But the Japanese media covered up these details and reported only beautified and sensationalized accounts of the war. In December, the KHS hosted a local version of the National Convention to Annihilate the Americans and British (Beiei gekimetsu kokumin taikai) which was attended by approximately 19,500 people (Hinode Shinbun 1941a). Meanwhile the KHS mocked the Philippine Army as ‘not even being worthy of the name ‘enemy’’ and printed bellicose headlines such as ‘Take that America! Look how strong Japan is!’ (Hinode Shinbun 1941b; 1941c). 16th Division military elites also worked to militarize the Kyoto public. In 1940, 16th Division commander and architect of the 1931 Manchurian Incident, Ishiwara Kanji, published The Final World War (Sekai saishūsen-ron) in which he urged readers to prepare for a ‘final war (kessen)’ against America in which half of the world’s population would be killed (Ishiwara 1940). If any group questioned the wisdom of war it was 16th Division soldiers. Their diary accounts give a much more complex and nuanced picture than that which was painted in the media. Azuma Shirō, a private first-class with the 16th Division’s Fukuchiyama 20th Infantry Regiment, for instance, became profoundly disillusioned with war and militarism after witnessing and engaging in mass murder and atrocity during the 1937 Battle of Nanking. Azuma described his experiences in his diaries which were later released as a book in the 1980s. Shimomura Minoru, meanwhile, was drafted into the 16th later in 1939. Born into a farming family of eight in Kyoto Prefecture’s Nantan City, S­ himomura was not particularly inclined toward the military and instead inspired to become a teacher. He spent two years undergoing military and ideological training at the 16th Division garrison before being sent to the Philippines in November 1941 where he was killed in battle. In his diary accounts, Shimomura wrote of the dif ficulty of adjusting to the military as well as of the loneliness of living on the base away from his family. In one instance, after meeting with his brother who came to visit him in Fushimi, Shimomura wrote poems such as the following: My hometown and family; the mountain village where I was raised. How I long for them. (Shimomura 2018, 32–3)

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Shimomura also later wrote of the despair of waiting to be sent to the battlefield – in his mind, the equivalent of a death sentence. In October 1941, for example, he struck a sombre tone, writing ‘I await the orders which are to determine the course of the rest of my life. They are like an immovable wave coming toward me with inexhaustible power’ (Shimomura 2018, 45). Much of the bravado rampant in the mass media was also absent in other soldiers’ accounts, particularly after 1941. Around that time, second lieutenant Utsumi Tatsuo, for example, gave a melancholy description of the troops as they marched from Fushimi to Umekoji Station on their way to the Philippines: I cried as we marched. Even though no one spoke, it seemed as if a low, rumbling commotion which had been suppressed was now ­frantically bursting forth like the sigh of wind blowing through the grass reeds and reverberating down the dark night road. The sound of ­marching boots and bayonets was drowned out in this frenzied murmur. (Kutsuma 1976, 11) The Japanese occupation and subsequent defence of the Philippines lasted two years. When U.S. troops led by General Douglas MacArthur landed on October 1944 to retake the islands from Japanese control, approximately 13,000 16th Division troops resisted for nearly two months but were finally almost all killed in battle.7 When division commander Makino Shirō committed suicide on Leyte Island on August 10th, 1945, the curtain was drawn on the history of the 16th Division. The above history reveals the formation of divided memories. Already by this time, distinct memory groups had arisen, whose unique and multivariate experiences would influence how they would later remember the 16th Divi sion garrison. First among these was local Kyotoites who, influenced by the local media, seemed to hold generally positive images of the 16th Division. Of course, Japan’s wartime loss and defeat did much to affect public opinion. And with 189,000 total war deaths associated with the 16th Division throughout the war, many Kyoto residents joined the ranks of war bereaved, who formed another mnemonic community in their own right. But many war bereaved remembrances were less focused on critical historical examinations of the past than with increased national recognition of their loved ones’ military sacrifices. Only 620 survived. At the same time, 10,380 Americans were killed on Luzon and an estimated one million Filipinos died during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (Fukubayashi 2015, 42–70).

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Second were the 16th Division soldiers themselves. These should be further sub-divided by military rank, whether one had enlisted or was drafted, and when and where soldiers experienced combat. Each of these things played a role in influencing whether individual troops had negative or positive impressions of their time in the military – and, by extension, of the garrison. The next section introduces additional memory groups. After the war, Japan’s military was dissolved, and its lands were sold off and repurposed. Consequently, this made the postwar inheritors of the former 16th garrison into default stakeholders in the memories and history of the 16th Division. 2

The 16th Division Garrison as Memory

In the postwar, ownership of former military lands (gunyōchi) was ­transferred to the Ministry of Finance and placed under the administration of various regional finance bureaus. In addition, many former military lands were ­requisitioned by the occupying Allied forces and maintained their function as military bases into the postwar. Indeed, Kyoto’s 16th Division garrison was briefly utilized by occupying U.S. troops and repurposed as Camp Fischer. However, even during that short interlude, the Japanese central government, as well as Kyoto Prefecture and Kyoto City were already planning for the site’s new postwar applications. This was first achieved in 1949 when it was decided that the site would be the new home of Seibo Jogakuin, a private Catholic women’s school (see Figure 10.2).8 Leaving aside the particulars, the main reasons why Seibo Jogakuin came to occupy the former 16th Division site were that the plan had the support of Kyoto governor Murakami Jun and various individuals within the Osaka Finance Bureau (OFB), and that the Kansai branch of the General ­Headquarters (GHQ) looked favourably on establishing the first Catholic school in Kyoto. Initially, Seibo purchased the former 16th Division headquarter building and some other buildings including the division clothing depot and those belonging to the former cavalry regiment. Despite the buildings and property already being in a significant state of decay and disrepair, officials from that time highly eval uated the chance to establish a school at the site. For instance, Tsubota Akira,

For another example of the repurposing of former military sites in postwar Japan see Ivings’ discussion of Mt. Hakodate in his chapter in this volume. The chapters by Gee and Iitaka in this volume also cover such sites in Singapore, Taiwan and Palau.

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The distinctive red brick former headquarter building of the 16th Division, today used as the main building for Seibo Jogakuin Junior College Photograph by the author, August 25, 2020

one of those in the OFB who had pushed to sell the site to Seibo, recounted the following: Most of the property was a mess and was completely overgrown with thick grass. The buildings were still covered in the dark black, charcoal camouflage from the war. […] The outsides of the buildings were pretty ugly, but the structures themselves were quite sturdy and splendid. During the two to three years since the end of the war, the site had really fallen into disrepair. But we were all convinced that this was the best location [for the school]. (Seibo gakuin 1974, 16) In addition, it is clear that Seibo officials were motivated by a strong sense of religious zeal and mission in relation to the site. To cite an example, one of the officials involved in relocating the school to Fukakusa (Fushimi Ward), Father Michael J. Makirop, stated that the establishment of a Catholic school was part of God’s plan to ‘rescue Kyoto from a state of spiritual confusion’ (Seibo gakuin 1974, 28–9). In any case, whether it was praise of the ‘sturdy and splendid’ buildings at the site or part of a divine mission, there is little indication that involved officials had a negative impression of the former 16th Division garrison. Far from it, some Seibo administrators rather recalled the garrison’s

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history in a positive and nostalgic way. For instance, Sister Shimoda, a nun at Seibo and who had grown up around the Fukakusa garrison, recounted the following impressions: Fukakusa was a peaceful military town which awoke every morning to the sound of the reveille and went to sleep to the call of the lights-out bugle. […] [The military base] was a wonderful place for us kids to play, and the officers would often let us in to pick wildflowers. But eventually, before we were even aware what was going on, they no longer allowed us into the base because of that terrible war. One of my fond memories was when the various regiments would hold their anniversary ceremonies ). On those days, the usually strict and rigid military base would be filled with decorations and a friendly atmosphere and opened to the public. […] But such peaceful scenes as this eventually disappeared, and I remember many nights when I would hear the sound of marching boots going past our house as the troops shipped out to the battlefield. And then, before long, the war was over. (Seibo gakuin 1974, 32) As the above makes evident, Shimoda nostalgically recollected the 16th Division garrison. Not only did she describe Fukakusa as a ‘peaceful military town’ but she also remembered many ‘fond memories’ of and inside the base. At the same time, as her comments about the ‘peaceful scenes’ of the garrison being severed by the war indicate, Shimoda perceived the military and war as being almost entirely unrelated rather than as two sides of the same coin. That is to say, she interpreted the 16th Division’s past entirely through her personal memories of the base, thus underscoring its function as a ‘site of memory’. In addition to Seibo Jogakuin, two other schools inherited the 16th garrison – Kyoto University of Education purchased part of the site in 1957 and Ryukoku University yet another in 1961. Administrators and officials from those two universities had varying views on the former military structures then under their possession. Yet among these, there were very few positive impressions or attempts to rescue and preserve the buildings. Especially at Ryukoku University, some administrators saw former 16th Division buildings as reminders of painful wartime experiences and sacrifices. For instance, one school officer recounted that, while the Fukakusa Campus was, on the one hand ‘the origin of our school’s postwar history’, it was also, on the other hand, ‘where the Fushimi Regiment [16th Division] was stationed’ and thus ‘a place of bad dreams where, in our youth, we were forced to conduct military drills and training’ (Ryūkoku Daigaku 2000 v.1, 800). Moreover, university officials from the time lamented the ‘desolate landscape’ of the Fukakusa Campus and

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described it as being ‘unsuited for a university’ and that ‘the campus could even be described as having a distinct lack of culture’ (Ryūkoku Daigaku 2000 v.2, 6). As a consequence, many former 16th Division war sites and buildings gradually disappeared from the landscape. These examples demonstrate how, for many of the former garrison’s postwar inheritors, a practical concern with ‘postwar recovery (sengo fukkō)’ as well as personal subjective memories of the site took precedence over a detailed analysis of the 16th Division’s history. Still another group of stakeholders in the former garrison site was bereaved family members of the approximately 189,000 war dead from the 16th ­Division. These groups had strong motivations for preserving memories of the 16th ­Division and, in this respect, the former garrison site and other associated 16th Division sites often served as backdrops for their remembrances and ­commemorations.9 For instance, Takagi Shigetarō, head of the Bereaved ­Family Members Association in Fukuchiyama City, where the 16th Division’s 20th Artillery Regiment had been stationed, captured the feelings of many bereaved when he expressed the following sentiments in 1953: Although eight years have already passed since the end of the war, for we bereaved family members, the sadness of having lost a loved one has never left us even for a day. Far from fading, this grief has only grown in intensity over time. At the end of the day, this is because our loved ones are being forgotten, both by the state and Japanese citizens, a result of the merciless reality of wartime defeat. This is the source of our unbearable sadness, the bereaved, who hold the strong conviction that our loved ones offered their lives for the state. (Fukuchiyama-shi Izoku-kai 1953, preface) As the above comment illustrates, Takagi and other bereaved were not ­content with the current state of affairs in which, they felt, memories of the 16th ­Division – and especially memories which emphasized soldiers’ wartime sacrifices ‘for the state’ – were being forgotten. These comments should be read in the context of the repurposing of former military buildings in the process of Japan’s postwar reconstruction. For bereaved such as Takagi, any reconstruction which excluded a particular set of memories, their memories, would remain incomplete. One method of memory preservation that Takagi and his group eventually settled on was to compile a register of the names of slain 16th Division soldiers, which they titled The Cornerstone of Peace (Heiwa no ishizue See the chapter by Iitaka in this volume for a discussion of commemoration efforts by veterans at overseas battlefield sites.

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But how to deal with the actual physical objects and buildings associated with the former 16th Division garrison was a more complicated issue. This was because the visceral emotions evoked by many of these objects and sites was still too painful for many who had lost loved ones in the war. For example, in the same Cornerstone of Peace, Yoshida Yoshio, president of the San’in C ­ entral Newspaper Company (Sanin chūō shinbun-sha) described how the sound of the train whistle leaving Fukuchiyama Station had become, in his mind, indelibly intertwined with memories of the town as a ‘military town’ and with images of young soldiers leaving for the battlefront. In the context of Japan’s wartime defeat, Yoshida wrote, even this steam whistle had become a lamentable symbol of a bitter past. ‘Standing at the train station of this former military city, where we once sent our loved ones away, the bereaved now wail and raise sorrowful voices for the forever departed’ he explained (Fukuchiyama-shi Izoku-kai 1953, preface). Yet despite the painful nuances of objects and sites associated with the former 16th Division garrison, some veterans and bereaved family member groups found an alternative method of in situ remembrance more acceptable: building commemorative monuments. For instance, in 1968 – the same year as the Meiji centennial anniversary – veterans and bereaved family members constructed a two- to three-meter-tall commemorative Monument to the Kyoto Artillery Regiment (Kyōto hohei rentai ato) in one corner of the Fujinomori Shrine on the former 16th Division garrison grounds. In its accompanying description, the monument proudly recounted the ‘regiment’s magnificent history’. Moreover, it described the 16th Division garrison in the following way: The curtain of the past is now attempting to close on and to erase the former remnants of those nostalgic soldiers’ barracks of old. Yet the glorious history of our troops, who out of love and concern for their fatherland went forth into battle and offered their lives to the state in its time of need, as well as their honourable traditions, must be forever conveyed to future generations. […] We consecrate this land as an historical site (shiseki) to forever honour and commemorate the meritorious deeds of our brothers in arms who went before us. And we have erected this marker upon this sacred site (seichi of remembrance to bring solace to the spirits of the many heroic war dead (eirei), and to offer a prayer for world peace and the prosperity of the nation. (On site monument, recorded by the author, February 28, 2020) The 1968 monument illustrates how some veterans utilized the space of the former garrison site as a backdrop to commemorate the 16th Division and

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The 1968 monument to the Kyoto Artillery Regiment Photograph by the author, February 28, 2020

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its history (see Figure 10.3). The once painful feelings associated with former garrison objects and buildings seems to have been partly assuaged by recasting them as ‘nostalgic’ and ‘glorious’ reminders of the Division’s ‘honourable ­traditions’. While these veterans were not the actual legal owners of the garrison site, by building a commemorative monument, they could nevertheless utilize it as a space in which to make an ownership claim over its past. While the garrison lacked legally preserved status at this time, by referencing it as an ‘historical site’, the same term used for protected Cultural Properties, the group bestowed on it a kind of rhetorical preservation. Similarly, the idea that it was a ‘sacred site of remembrance’ was a clear attempt to prioritize one utilization of the garrison over others. The monument’s builders can be said to have engaged in constructing a kind of ‘history’ for the site, but only in the narrowest sense of the word: one which exclusively reflected and bolstered the memories of a single group. In this way, the 16th Division garrison was a highly bordered ‘site of memory’ in the postwar. Each of the groups examined here – school and university officials, former veterans and bereaved family members – sought to reinterpret, re-evaluate, and mould the former garrison site through the lens of their personal and subjective wartime remembrances. Some of these were positive while others were decidedly negative.10 Yet what united each of the groups was their inability to transcend these personal memories and to compile a complete picture of the garrison’s history. Some of this was most likely a problem of generational proximity to the events in question. But by the 1980s, the 16th Division garrison was ready to move from memory to history. 3

The 16th Division Garrison as History

One important memory group that has so far been missing from this analysis is 16th Division soldiers themselves. Of course, this group was not silent at this time. As historian Yoshida Yutaka has shown, ‘war-experience writings’ and ‘war tales’ written by former military men were in fact quite popular during the 1950s and 60s (Yoshida 2005). Some of these, especially those written by lower-ranking soldiers, were critical of the Japanese military, while others writ ten by former officers often beautified or sought to justify the war. What they See the chapter by Gerster and Fulco in this volume for a discussion of conflicted remembrance among the bereaved, educational institutions and other stakeholders in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and resultant tsunami of March 2011.

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shared in common, however, was their bordered focus on the Japanese wartime experience and their audience: the wartime generation in Japan. But this changed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Vietnam War prompted some Japanese to reconsider their role as victimizer in Asia during the Asia-Pacific War. The normalization of diplomatic relations with Korea in 1965 and China in 1972, and the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1971 also occasioned reflection on the negative effects of Japanese militarism. In this milieu, some soldiers’ wartime accounts became more revealing and critical of Japan’s war crimes. And their audiences changed, too. Japanese war memory, by this point, had become an issue of international attention. On top of this, the postwar generation now outnumbered the wartime generation. Lacking the war as common referent for remembrance, postwar generations needed accompanying historical explanation to fully comprehend not just first-hand accounts, but wartime heritage objects as well. In other words, this marked the introduction of history into a realm that had previously been the sole purview of memory. In the case of the 16th Division, the effects of these social and demographic changes were first observed in the 1976 book Sentinel’s Song: Testimonies of the Ill-Fated Kyoto Division Soldiers (Sakimori no uta: hiun no Kyōto shidan ­shōgen-roku) written by Kutsuma Yasuji and initially serialized in the Kyōto Shinbun. In the series, Kutsuma investigated the 16th Division history from the 1941 Philippines Campaign to the 1944 Battle of Imphal from the perspectives of rank-and-file soldiers. In a sense, the series was a requiem to departed 16th Division troops slain in battle. Yet at the same time, as the term ‘ill-fated (hiun; could also be translated as ‘tragic’)’ indicates, the series eschewed a simple beautification of the war. This point was made more explicit in the preface to the series: The most notable characteristic of this book is the author’s historical perspective of the war. It is not high-ranking generals or so-called able-­ bodied admirals who write their accounts of battle under pen names, but rather the experiences of the many nameless average soldiers, who expe rienced the suffering of war on the front lines, who form the centre of his narrative. For this reason, too, the contents are completely different from the many glorified biographies and life-stories written by admirals and generals, and which have comprised much of the prior literature on the war. Instead, the testimonies of the countless unnamed soldiers and petty officers which appear in these pages vividly and uniquely attest to the that greatest butchery known to mankind: war. (Kutsuma 1976, preface) In other words, Kutsuma sought to make clear the ‘tragedy’ of that ‘greatest butchery known to mankind: war’ by focusing on the testimonies of average

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16th Division soldiers. This was different from the nationalistic approach of veterans and bereaved family members, who emphasized the 16th Division’s ‘glorious history and … honourable traditions’. Indeed, for members of the postwar generation such as Kutsuma and for former soldiers as well, it was difficult to characterize the 16th Division’s history as ‘glorious’. For instance, Kutsuma offered the following comments in reflection on the many soldiers’ testimonies introduced in his series: In the final analysis, on the battlefield of war there are only winners and losers – this is the one true face of battle. It is also the cruel fate of the battlefield that, while the praises of the victor’s glory will be sung, for the defeated there is nothing left other than ‘death’. In that sense, for the first week of the Pacific War – from the onset of hostilities to the occupation of Manila – the Kyoto 16th Division was the ‘glorious’ victor. Yet […] following this, at each battlefield of the Pacific, the Kyoto Division was stripped of its ‘glory’. For its officers and men there was only the sad and painful fate of the ‘defeated’ – death in battle, never again to set foot in their homeland. (Kutsuma 1976, 119) So, Kutsuma strongly emphasized that, regardless of how bravely the 16th ­Division may have fought, they and the other war dead were ultimately ‘­losers’ in the sense that they would never return home again alive. Compared to the earlier nationalistic remembrances and commemorations of the 16th Division by war bereaved groups, this was a fairly major re-assessment. Moreover, ­Sentinel’s Song was novel for another reason: it sought not only to memorialize the 16th Division for the sake of its involved memory groups but instead to ­synthesize multiple first-hand accounts into a critical work of history for ­postwar audiences. This history work continued in 1981 when groups including Kyoto City, the Kyōto Shinbun, and various area universities and academics held the Kyoto Peace Exhibit (Heiwa no tame no Kyōto no sensō-ten; hereafter KPE where various war-related objects and first-hand testimonies were displayed. Organizers explained that the purpose of the exhibit was to ‘fully narrate and reveal the truth of the Fifteen-Year War’ which left ‘painful scars in the hearts of not just Japanese but also many countless people throughout Asia’, and thereby to ‘contribute to fostering peace now and into the future’ (Heiwa no Tame no Kyōto no Sensō-ten Jikkō Iin-kai 1991, 143–4). did not shy away from history, no matter how dark or painful. Rather, organizers actively sought to establish a transnational memory of the war by including accounts of the 16th Division’s Asian victims. Thus, they drew

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special attention to topics such as the infamous Unit 731, the Nanking M ­ assacre, and other issues relating to Japan’s war of aggression. Moreover, in the process of collecting artefacts for display, exhibit organizers uncovered important primary source materials and evidence relating to the Nanking ­Massacre and Japanese war crimes in China such as the diaries and written records of former 16th Division soldiers including Azuma Shirō and Masuda Rokusuke. In his inscription for October 10, 1937, for example, Azuma described witnessing and participating in the slaughter of civilians in a village in Hebei Province in Northern China: I will never forget the monstrous acts of barbarity and scenes of hellish cruelty that I witnessed […]. Villagers had receded to the far recesses of their houses where they huddled and cowered with fear. The word got around that the Division commander had ordered us to kill everyone, women and children included. About thirty villagers were rounded up and brought to the village square where they were made to hunch down on the ground. […] Letting out sharp cries and shouts, we began to stab them with our bayonets, repeatedly. A mix of shrieks and the groans of those in their death throes filled the air. Blood spilled out from their chests and flowed out onto the ground. The spiteful eyes of the villagers pierced us accusingly as they writhed in pain. [...] We, too, became covered in blood, and our red faces resembled demons from hell. [...] The town square was a hellish nightmare (jigokuhen). (Azuma 1987, 43–4) Masuda’s diary described similar horrific scenes in Nanking. His entry for December 14, 1937, for instance, chronicled the mass execution of Chinese POW s: We entered the city’s foreign concession to conduct mop-up operations of Chinese soldiers who were attempting to blend in with the refugees. Our Fourth Company alone rounded up five-hundred people. We then brought them to the Xuanwu Gate side [of the city] and executed them by firing squad. It is reported that the other companies did likewise. (­Iguchi, Kisaka, and Shimozato 1989, 7) In addition to these testimonial sources, KPE organizers saw Kyoto’s military heritage, such as the 16th Division garrison, as important historical materials. Simultaneously, organizers planned a book series titled Narrating Kyoto’s War (Kataritsugu Kyōto no sensō) which began with Ikeda Ichirō’s 1991 Visiting Kyoto ‘War Sites’ Kyōto no ‘sensō iseki’ o meguru). This was the first work to extensively

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catalogue each of the various Asia-Pacific War sites around Kyoto Prefecture. The book gave detailed commentary on site histories, and it included testimonies from 16th Division soldiers who participated in the Nanking Massacre and the Battle of Leyte. Ikeda, who was also one of the KPE organizers, had been leading guided tours of Kyoto war sites from the mid-1980s. He wrote that ‘these ‘remains’ powerfully convey the madness and tragedy of war’. He continued, such war sites ‘enable postwar generations to vicariously experience the war’ and ‘give us the opportunity to reflect on present-day issues of war and peace’ (Iguchi, Kisaka, and Shimozato 1989, 451). A key point for Ikeda and his group the Kyoto Society to Study Peace at War Sites (Sensō Iseki ni Heiwa o Manabu Kyōto no Kai; hereafter ‘Kyoto Society’), which formed in 1994, was to use to war sites to learn about history. As Ikeda plainly stated: ‘there is a strong tendency in society at the moment which seeks to distort history by denying the Nanking Massacre or preventing middle school students from learning about the comfort women. So, this means that it is even more urgent to make ‘ruins and remains’ speak about the truth of history’ (Ikeda 2000, 68). One method that Ikeda and the Kyoto Society utilized to teach the history of war sites such as the 16th Division garrison was a public lecture series that combined history discussions with on-site field work. The following sample of two of the group’s lecture-tours illustrates how civic activists worked to reconnect the garrison to its history (Ikeda 2000, 68): No. 8 Lecture: ‘Ishiwara Kanji, the Manchurian Incident, and Kyoto’ Tour: 16th Division headquarter building, 16th Division officers’ residence, Army officers’ club (Kaikosha) building No. 10  Lecture: ‘The Kyoto 16th Division’s War and the Nanking ­Massacre’ Tour: Remains of the Fukuchiyama 20th Artillery Regiment and resource centre Furthermore, the Kyoto Society moved beyond the borders of Kyoto to include the Chinese victims of Japan’s military aggression. For instance, in 1994, Ikeda led a group of twenty-five Kyoto area teachers and former 16th Division soldiers, including Azuma, on a tour of Japanese war sites in China. The group’s route retraced the steps of the advancing 16th Division as they marched from Beijing to Nanking in 1937. Along the way, they met with Chinese academics and staff from the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by J­ apanese Invad ers. Ikeda elaborated that the purpose of the trip was ‘to investigate and reflect on the truth of the past and, in so doing, to form true bonds of friendship’ (Asahi Shinbun 1994). On top of this, Azuma expressed deep remorse for his

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participation in the Nanking Massacre, stating: ‘From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely apologize to the Chinese’ (Asahi Shinbun 1994). Indeed, ever since publishing his diary records as My Nanjing Platoon (Waga Nankin puratōn) in 1987, Azuma continued to repent for his wartime actions. In addition to his visits to China, he gave interviews in the Chinese, Taiwanese, and American mass-media, and, two to three times each month, he travelled around Japan recounting his experiences. But these efforts to construct a critical history of the 16th Division ­garrison were highly contested. Accounts of Japanese military atrocities such as the Nanking Massacre, in particular, drew fierce opposition from the Japanese right-wing and historical revisionists seeking to beautify the war in hope of fostering contemporary patriotism and support for remilitarization. For instance, when Peace Exhibit organizers tried to display troops’ diaries including those of Azuma in 1984, they faced a barrage of vicious attacks and even death threats. As a result, the offending diaries had to be pulled from the exhibit. Azuma’s account, in particular, attracted the most criticism. In 1994, one of the Japanese officers implicated in Azuma’s diary of committing war atrocities filed suit against Azuma for defamation in the Tokyo District Court. Azuma appealed after he lost the case in 1996, but this appeal was rejected two years later. It is worth noting that, in addition to judges’ highly constructivist reasoning in the case, the court ultimately ordered Azuma to pay for defamation without disputing the actual facts of the Nanking Massacre. Nevertheless, the court’s decision emboldened the Japanese right-wing, who interpreted the ruling as tacit evidence for their claims of outright denialism. Furthermore, when Azuma’s diary was released as a book, members of the Japanese rightwing physically attacked the publisher’s office, and since the book’s publication Azuma was subsequently subject to violent harassment and intimidating threats. For example, he received letters which read ‘someone’s coming to kill you; be prepared’, as well as menacing phone calls on a nearly nightly basis. Right-wing sound-trucks would also park outside his house screaming ‘traitor’ for hours on end (Asahi Shinbun 1995). What were the effects of these memory debates for the 16th Division garrison? Were civic activists and historians ultimately able to transform the 16th Division garrison from beyond a simple site of memory into a critical, transnational history? An examination of subsequent events leads us to the tentative conclusion of, no; or, at least, not yet and not entirely. Proof of this came when many buildings associated with the 16th Division were torn down in the latter half of the 1990s. In 1999, for example, Seibo Jogakuin tore down the former officer’s residence where Nakajima Kesago, Ishiwara Kanji, and others had lived, as well as the two-story wooden Army officer’s club (Kaikosha) build ing, which was built in a distinct blend of Western and Japanese styles (wayō

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setchū), without conducting any prior survey of the structures. Ikeda and the Kyoto Society strongly criticized these moves, stating that ‘the Fukakusa area contains many structures from the former 16th Division, and for this reason it is quite unique in Japan. It is, therefore, incredibly unfortunate that some of those buildings are being torn down without a survey of any kind being done’ (Asahi Shinbun 1999a). Ikeda and others also sought to link the 16th ­Division garrison to a broader national movement to preserve Japan’s war sites. The J­ apanese Network to Preserve War-Related Sites (JNPWS) held their 1999 annual conference in Kyoto, where they issued the following statement. The wartime generation is rapidly aging, and along with this, their vivid memories of the war are fading. In this context, the role of chronicling and narrating the war is falling to war sites, ruins, and remains. It is our urgent task, therefore, to survey and preserve these sites, and to protect them from the danger of neglect and erasure. (Asahi Shinbun 1999b) In fact, this message appealed to other stakeholders in the 16th Division garrison, namely Kyoto City and Seibo Jogakuin, who saw benefits to be achieved not only through the selective destruction of wartime relics, but also through their rebranding as heritage. In this repositioning, however, conservation of actual garrison buildings was secondary to the preservation of a particular image of and set of symbolism relating to the 16th Division garrison. Furthermore, the usefulness of the garrison became contingent less on its ability to teach an historical lesson, and more on its utilization as an economic resource for the present.11 So, for instance, in 2013 Kyoto City designated the red brick division headquarter building as one of the ‘Places and Gardens that Add Colour to Kyoto (Kyōto o irodoru tatemono ya teien)’. And, in 2016 the same headquarter building was registered as a National Cultural Property. In this milieu, the past as heritage (as opposed to history) facilitated an enthusiastic re-discovery of the 16th Division garrison, one that sidestepped tricky and painful past events and history debates in favour of a simplified public relations campaign in which the past could be sold and branded as something old, exotic, and valuable. For example, the Database of Nationally Designated Cultural Properties on the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs web site eschewed an explanation of the 16th Division garrison’s history in favour of an observational description of its facile properties. The ‘unique’ red-brick building, it says, ‘retains an air of dignity’, while its structures and component parts are ‘of the highest quality’ (ACA 2020). A 2013 pamphlet issued by Seibo Indeed, Brian Graham, Gregory John Ashworth, and John E. Tunbridge, defined ‘heritage’ as ‘using the past as a resource for the present’ (Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 2000,17).

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Jogakuin in both English and Japanese made a similar attempt to appeal the former garrison building not as history but rather as a contemporary material resource. The pamphlet noted, for instance, the building’s ‘emphasis […] on flowing beauty’, its ‘impression of refinement’, its ‘magnificent’ stairway, and its ‘exquisite detail’. To its credit, the pamphlet mentioned the garrison’s integration into the surrounding community, and Fushimi’s transformation into an ‘Army town’. But the wartime history was nearly completely skipped over. Rather (or perhaps because of this), Seibo was able to emphasize the ­garrison – and the origins of its inherited past – as something bright and positive both figuratively and literally through its night-time illumination of the building. As the 2013 pamphlet explained, this was done to foster a ‘beautiful night view in Fujinomori’, and to ‘create a new night-time spectacle and dramatically present the inherent beauty of a historical landmark through the use of light’ (Seibo Jogakuin 2013). This was, quite literally, a beautification of the past. Yet, it was less an explicit attempt at the erasure of history and more the effect of a particular memory group trying to remake the past into heritage. Far be it from history to dim the lights of this ornamented memory. 4 Conclusion This chapter analyses the contestation over the site of Kyoto’s Army 16th ­Division garrison as resulting from the inherent tension between history and memory. In the postwar, various memory groups such as veterans, war bereaved, and the garrison’s inheritors including Seibo Jogakuin, laid claim to the site. For them, the garrison was a ‘site of memory’ which reinforced contemporary group identity through a particular interpretation of the past held in common by its members. Some veterans and war bereaved saw the garrison as a place to remember and memorialize 16th Division soldiers’ heroic sacrifices to the nation. Others at Seibo Jogakuin took a more utilitarian approach, seeing the garrison rather as a means to achieve the school’s objectives. Added to this, memories of much of the Kyoto public were largely influenced by war time reporting which sensationalized and beautified the actions of the 16th Division. These memories were selective and exclusive, focusing only on the parts of the past which suited group members’ contemporary needs. The chapters by Chan, Ivings and Mateoc in this volume provide similar examples of the selective use of the past for contemporary needs, especially in terms of the development of touristic resources.

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were also bordered and contained, having significance mainly just for involved group members. But the 16th Division garrison could not remain a site of memory forever. In particular, the influence of memory groups such as veterans and war bereaved declined as their individual members passed away. If the garrison was to have future significance it would have to go one of two remaining routes. One of these was history. The 16th Division garrison could be narrated to future generations not just as memory (i.e. from one particular memory group) but as history, i.e. the weaving together of multiple narrative strands from diverse memory communities. This had added benefits. Examining the historical roles of the 16th Division in carrying out Japan’s war aims and the consequences of this for the victims of Japanese militarism, for instance, drew attention to the fact that military bases are never just local phenomenon but rather are deeply imbedded in national and international structures of power and domination. But this same facet also made the garrison highly contested. This was observed when members of the right wing threatened and attacked the Kyoto Peace Exhibit and former 16th Division soldiers for speaking out about their involvement in war atrocities. Yet another route has been for the 16th Division garrison to become heritage. For many garrison stakeholders, this has been a more palatable route, especially when it comes to uncovering and confronting the painful legacies of a dark history. Indeed, the 16th Division garrison, like many of Japan’s other wartime and military relics, seem to have become part of what David Lowen thal called a global ‘heritage crusade’ (Lowenthal 1998). But regardless of how much some may want to embrace the 16th Division as a positive heritage to be proud of, critical histories of the site are unlikely to go away any time soon. With history biting at its heels, it is improbable that the garrison will revert to a ‘site of memory’ either. Contestation over war sites like Kyoto’s 16th Division garrison is likely to continue, unless, of course, history, memory, and heritage can resolve their differences. References Asahi Shinbun. 1994. ‘Kyōto dai 16 shidan no Nankin shinkō keiro o tadoru.’ , September 15, 1994. Asahi Shinbun. 1995. ‘Gyakusatsu mokugeki shita moto heishe no shōgen.’ , August 11, 1995. Asahi Shinbun. 1999a. ‘Shashin nado kiroku hozon o.’ , August 14, 1999.

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Asahi Shinbun. 1999b. ‘Sensō iseki (heiwa o tsunagu: Kyōto hatsu 21 seiki).’ Asahi ­shinbun, August 19, 1999. Azuma, Shirō. 1987. Waga nankin puratōn: shōshūhei no taiken shita nankin dai-­ gyakusatsu. Aoki shoten. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of memory: affirmation and contestation over Japan’s heritage.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312. Bull, Jonathan and Steven Ivings. 2019. ‘Return on display: memories of postcolonial migration at Maizuru.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 336–357. Dai-Jūroku Shidan Shireibu. 1936. Manshū haken kinen shashin-chō. Kyōto: Dai-Jūroku Shidan Shireibu. De Antoni, Andrea. 2019. ‘Down in a Hole: Dark Tourism, Haunted Places as Affective Meshworks, and the Obliteration of Korean Laborers in Contemporary Kyoto.’ Japan Review, 33: 271–297. Fukubayashi, Toru. 2015. ‘Gunto Fushimi no keisei to shūen.’ In Koto, shōto no guntai: kinki (chīki no nakano guntai), Vol. 4., edited by Harada Keiichi, 42–70. Yoshikawa kōbunkan. Fukuchiyama-shi Izoku-kai. 1953. Heiwa no ishizue. Sanyō chūō shinbun-sha. Graham, Brian, Gregory John Ashworth, John E. Tunbridge. 2000. A Geography of ­Heritage: Power, Culture, and Economy. London: Hodder Arnold. Graham, Brian, Gregory John Ashworth, John E. Tunbridge. 2005. ‘The uses and abuses of heritage.’ In Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader, edited by Gerard Corsane. Abingdon: Routledge. Heiwa no Tame no Kyōto no Sensō-ten Jikkō Iin-kai (eds.). 1991. Kyōto no ‘sensō iseki’ o meguru. Kikanshi kyōdō shuppan. Hinode Shinbun. 1929. ‘Jūroku shidan shireibu kinō Manshū e.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, April 6, 1929. Hinode Shinbun. 1934a. ‘Eikō kagayaku warera ga kyōdo butai’. Kyōto hinode shinbun, March 19, 1934. Hinode Shinbun. 1934b. ‘Yūyaku toman no michi ni.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, April 10, 1934. Hinode Shinbun. 1936. ‘Warera no kyōdo shidan wa kuru roku gatsu aitsuide medetaku gaisen.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, May 11, 1936. Hinode Shinbun. 1937a. ‘Kōgun, Nankin-jō ni sattō su.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 7, 1937. Hinode Shinbun. 1937b. ‘Nyū-jō mae ni kagayaku “bushidō”’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 8, 1937. Hinode Shinbun. 1937c. ‘Nankin kanraku chokuzen no sōretsu!’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 10, 1937. Hinode Shinbun. 1937d. ‘Kono igyō, buchinuku kyōki.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 12, 1937. Hinode Shinbun. 1937e. ‘Jūman no teki Masani senmetsu.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun December 14, 1937.

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Hinode Shinbun. 1937f. ‘Teki no iki shitai hachi, kyūman.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 19, 1937. Hinode Shinbun. 1937g. ‚Nankin ni kaeru heiwa.‘ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 20, 1937. Hinode Shinbun. 1941a. ‚Bei, ei gekimetsu kokumin taikai.‘ Kyōto hinode shinbun, December 11, 1941. Hinode Shinbun. 1941b. ‘Kōgun ga jōriku shita Hijima.’ Kyōto hinode shinbun, ­December 11, 1941. Hinode Shinbun. 1941c. ‘Zama miro! Beiei, Nihon wa tsuyoinda zo.’ Kyōto hinode ­shinbun, December 20, 1941. Iguchi Kazuki, Kisaka Junichirō, Shimozato Masaki. 1989. Nankin jiken, Kyōto shidan kankei shiryō-shū. Aoki shoten. Ikeda, Ichirō. 2000. ‚”Iseki, ibutsu“ o tōjite Nihon kingendaishi o manabimasenka.‘ ­Zenkoku shinpojiumu hōkoku-shū. Ishiwara, Kanji. 1940. Sekai saishūsen-ron. Ritsumeikan shuppan-bu. Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. 2020. ‘Database of Nationally Designated ­Cultural Properties.’ Accessed June 17, 2020. https://kunishitei.bunka.go.jp/heritage /detail/101/00010984. Kasahara, Tokushi. 1997. Nankin jiken. Iwanami shoten. Kōei to hiun waga dai jūroku shidan tsūshintai-shi henshū iinkai. 1997. Waga dai jūroku shidan tsūshin-tai: kōei to hiun. Self-published. Kyōto shinbun-sha. 1976. Sakimori no uta (hijima-hen) – hiun no Kyōto heidan ­shōgen-roku. Kyōto: Kyōto shinbun-sha. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lutz, Catherine. 2001. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Meskell, Lynn. 2018. A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. New York: Oxford University Press. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.’ Representations, 26: 7–24. Ryūkoku Daigaku. 2000. Ryūkoku Daigaku sanbyaku gojū nenshi, Vol. 1. Ryūkoku Daigaku. 2000. Ryūkoku Daigaku sanbyaku gojū nenshi, Vol. 2. Seibo gakuin. 1974. Seibo Gakuin nijūgo nenshi. Seibo Jogakuin. 2013. ‘Seibo Jogakuin main building guide: formerly the imperial army 16th division headquarters building’, English pamphlet. Self-published. Shimomura Minoru. 2018. Saigo no nikki kūnō no naka de: dai jūroku shidan heishi Shimomura Minoru. Nishino Miyoshi. Shimozato, Masaki. 1987. Kakusareta rentai-shi – ‘20i’ kakyū heishi no mita nankin jiken . Heiwa no Tame no Kyōto no Sensō Tenji Jikkō Iinkai.

The Legacy of Shinto Shrines at the Borders of Imperial Japan Karli Shimizu Abstract At the start of the twentieth century, the Empire of Japan stretched from the snowy plains of Hokkaido in the North to the tropical island of Taiwan in the South. Both of these peripheral territories, however, had only been recently incorporated into the Japanese polity. The construction of Shinto shrines in these new territories was seen as essential to their colonisation and modernisation by the imperial government. Shrines, often established in a top-down manner by the national or local government, were given the role of fostering a sense of loyalty and patriotism among the unruly populations of indigenous peoples and settlers alike. Despite the shrines of these areas having a similar role during the prewar period, the interaction between dominant, counter, and local narratives has affected their complex legacy and relationship with local deities postwar. This chapter traces the legacy of overseas Shinto shrines to the present day and looks at how these shrines have come to function as repositories of heritage and memory.

Keywords borders – colonialism – Hokkaido – overseas Shinto shrines – pioneer narrative – Taiwan

The mid-nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change for Japan. In 1868, the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown, and the Meiji government took power. This new government based its legitimacy around the emperor and the classical Shinto myths of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (Hardacre 1989, 32). The first foundational document drawn up by the new government, the Charter Oath of 1868, was sworn before the kami of Heaven and Earth. Over

© Karli Shimizu, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_012

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the next decade, Shinto shrines were transformed into sites of ‘state ritual’1 and incorporated into the state. Shinto rites furthermore became the standard ritual used not only at shrines (jinja), but at a variety of sites from war memorials to unrecognised shrines (mugansha) to ceremonies honouring the imperial rescripts at schools. Shinto ritual at both shrines and non-shrine sites alike played an important role in communicating the legitimacy of the Meiji government to Japanese subjects. As the Meiji government began expanding its sovereignty into new territories, the construction of Shinto shrines was seen as an essential part of the process (Mason 1935, 14). These modern shrines were given the role of f­ ostering a sense of loyalty and patriotism in the unruly populations of i­ ndigenous people and settlers alike. The kami chosen to be venerated at these shrines exemplified the virtues the state wished to model for its subjects, while shrine gardens became a common location for a variety of smaller memorial sites, including commemorative trees, obelisks, and stone inscriptions. Despite the separation of shrines from the Japanese state after WWII, Shinto shrines continue to be salient symbols of Japan today. Shinto shrines have been and remain important sites of heritage and memory. But the values a particular heritage site represents are not necessarily shared by all members of a society (Matsuura 2019, 313). Shrines have been subject to local, national, and international narratives, with different interest groups having conflicting or overlapping ideas about what shrines do or should commemorate.2 As such, shrines have become ‘bordered spaces’, that is, ‘spaces within which collective memory is able to be affirmed and contested by various groups’ (Boyle 2019, 293). Shinto shrines have an ‘institutional flexibility and malleability’ that allows them to cater to a variety of narratives as dominant social narratives change (Nelson 2000, 11), and the differing historical and contemporary political circumstances have influenced the narratives which Shinto shrines emphasise, de-emphasise, or reject. This chapter traces the legacy of modern Shinto shrines to the present day in two of Imperial Japan’s peripheries—Hokkaido and Taiwan—and looks at the differing ways shrine sites have come to function as repositories of heritage and memory. Formally incorporated into Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, both Hokkaido (Ezo) and Taiwan can be seen as Japanese colonial spaces. The Meiji government pioneered a new system of general protector shrines (sōchinju Hokkaido which was adapted and utilised in Japan’s later colonies, including Daijōkan Proclamation #234 (14 May 1871). See the chapter by Mateoc in this volume for a similar case focused on sites associated with Christianity in Japan.

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Taiwan. Despite Shinto shrines having a similar role in Hokkaido and Taiwan during the prewar period, the perception of these shrines’ relationship with local and indigenous deities has developed significant differences postwar. The interaction between dominant, counter, and local narratives have affected their complex legacy. In Hokkaido, Shinto shrines have largely retained the dominant pioneer narrative of Hokkaido, while a counter narrative has positioned shrines as desecraters of the indigenous Ainu people’s deities. On the other hand, in Taiwan former Shinto shrines and other Japanese sites were suppressed as shameful symbols of Japanese oppression by the ROC government’s narrative of Taiwan as a Chinese nation, while a counter narrative of Taiwan as an independent nation has associated shrines with Taiwan’s multicultural heritage. Meanwhile, local memories have created alternative narratives associated with shrine sites in both these places. 1

Hokkaido, Shrines, and the Pioneer Narrative

After the Meiji Restoration, Hokkaido was the first new territory the Meiji ­Government moved to bring under its formal domain.3 In the Edo period, only the southern tip of Hokkaido was controlled by the Matsumae clan, which owed loyalty to the Tokugawa government. The rest of the island was considered the domain of the Ainu. Ainu engaged in trade relationships with the Matsumae clan, which in turn provided tribute and trade to the central Tokugawa ­government (Walker 2001). However, in the nineteenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunate, and then the Meiji government, worked to solidify the nation’s borders and strengthen the central government’s claim to sovereignty over its borderlands. In July 1869, the Meiji government set up the Colonisation Commission to oversee the development of Hokkaido into a productive national territory. This process included the migration of many Japanese from the Home Islands (naichi) to Hokkaido, where they settled on lands opened up to agriculture. These settler-migrants quickly outnumbered the indigenous Ainu people. The Meiji government considered Hokkaido undeveloped land, or terra nul (Mason 2012, 59). The Ainu were considered people of a separate language and culture by the Tokugawa and Matsumae officials (Howell 2005, 130). But as the Meiji government abolished traditional social class distinctions, the Ainu The chapter by Ivings in this volume provides further information on this process from the vantage point of the port of Hakodate where Japan was also subject to a semi-colonial arrangement with Western powers.

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were theoretically to be treated as commoners (heimin), no different from ­Japanese settlers. The Meiji government considered its assimilation of the Ainu a success, but Ainu people continued to suffer discrimination. In 1882, the Meiji government decided that the colonisation of Hokkaido had been successful, and the island was briefly divided up into three prefectures before being united into a single prefecture in 1886. In the early years of the Colonisation Commission, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples were utilised as ‘civilising’ agents. The Meiji government rejected the Buddhism-based forms of legitimacy utilised by the Tokugawa Shogunate, and instead drew on ideas from the National Learning movement. The National Learning movement, which began in the seventeenth century, rejected ‘foreign’ teachings like Buddhism and advocated a return to the literature and Shinto customs of ancient Japan. But the Meiji government’s Great Promulgation Campaign of the 1870s enlisted both Shinto ritualists and ­Buddhist priests, as well as popular entertainers, to promote its three vague ‘Great Teachings’ to the populace. This campaign aimed to explain the importance of ‘paying taxes and sending children to school and sons to the army’ to Japanese citizens (Hardacre 1989, 44). It linked Shinto mythology with these virtues of modern citizenship, and even after the campaign ended, shrines continued to act as both perpetrators of ancient tradition and advocates of ­modernity.4 While the campaign promoted the Shinto-based legitimacy of the Meiji ­government, Buddhist sects were central to the effort and, after the powerful Shinshū sect of Buddhism withdrew from the campaign, it quickly dissolved. The same ­Shinshū sect also had a particularly active role in the initial development (colonisation) of Hokkaido. In addition to serving as the headquarters for the Great Promulgation Campaign in Hakodate, Hokkaido, it also proselytised to settlers, devoted effort towards bringing salvation to the Ainu, and encouraged migration to Hokkaido (Keira 2013, 56–72). Shinto shrines were clearly essential to the Meiji government’s modernisation effort. This was reflected in the Colonisation Commission’s efforts to develop Hokkaido. One of the first orders of business for the Commission was the enshrinement of the Three Pioneer Kami at Sapporo, the new capital city of Hokkaido. This shrine, Sapporo Jinja, was originally referred to as ­Hokkaido’s ‘first shrine’ (ichinomiya), utilising a premodern ranking system of shrines (Enomoto 2011, 88). However, with the government’s establishment of the modern Shinto shrine ranking system in 1871, Sapporo Jinja was ranked as kankoku heisha) and Hokkaido’s general protector For more on how Shinto traditions were linked with modernity at shrines, see Shimizu 2017.

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shrine. Sapporo Jinja then became a model on which shrines in Japan’s future colonies were based (Suga 2014, 134). The protector model of shrines, which assigned a geographic administrative district to the protectorship of each shrine, was based on ideas drawn from the National Learning movement (Thal 2005, 116), and it supported the government’s attempt to craft imagined ­communities aligned with modern administrative districts. All of the new territories which the Japanese Empire subsequently acquired would be given a single general protector shrine. The Three Pioneer Kami refers to the three kami combined into one seat (za) and enshrined at Sapporo Jinja. Chosen specifically to aid the development of Hokkaido, they were Ōkunitama no Kami, Ōnamuchi no Kami, and Sukunahikona no Kami. The latter two kami of this trinity are most famously enshrined at Izumo Taisha shrine, but appear in the Japanese classics where they are involved with developing the land and creating medicine. Ōkunitama no Kami, on the other hand, is a term for the kami of a land, and by extension indicated the kami of the land of Hokkaido itself (Hokkaidō Jingū-shi Hensan Iinkai 1991, 19–20). These Three Pioneer Kami were understood as aiding the task of physically developing Hokkaido into imperial land. Thus, the pioneer narrative which has served as Hokkaido’s foundational myth could be said to start with the settling of these kami at Sapporo Jinja. This connection was further affirmed in 1938 when Kaitaku Jinja, a shrine venerating the heroes of Hokkaido’s development, was established as a subsidiary shrine of Sapporo Jinja. Sapporo Jinja as Hokkaido’s highest ranked shrine and general protector had an outsized influence on other shrines in Hokkaido. Many Japanese set tlers chose to enshrine the same Three Pioneer Kami in the local shrines they set up (Hokkaidō Jingū-shi Hensan Iinkai 1991, 280). Other shrines venerated heroes from the settlers’ home towns, such as Date Shigezane at Kotoni Jinja and Katō Kiyomasa at Ebetsu Jinja, or kami known for their effectiveness in bestowing worldly benefits. Especially in southern Hokkaido, there were shrines which traced their foundation back to before the Meiji period. This Hakodate Hachiman-gū, a shrine second in rank only to Sapporo Jinja, as well as Ubagami Daijingū in Esashi and Yoshitsune Jinja in Biratori, whose shrine legends traced their origins back to interactions with the Ainu (Ono 1981, 114–115, Sutō 1971, 34–35). Date Shigezane (1568–1646) was a samurai who became the first lord of Sendai Domain (modern Miyagi Prefecture). Katō Kiyomasa (1562–1611) was another famous samurai who became the first lord of Kumamoto Domain (modern Kumamoto Prefecture). Neither of them had any connection to Hokkaido.

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There were also Shinto sites that were refused or never sought status as a shrine. Shinonome-shi in Sapporo, for example, enshrined the spirits of those Sapporo residents who had rejected Buddhist funerals in favour of Shinto ones (Hokkaidō Jingū-shi Hensan Iinkai 1991, 165–168). Its community first sought permission to found the site as a shrine (jinja). However, the ­government rejected their request, only allowing the site permission to exist as a private Shinto site (hokora/shi). Thus, while prominent Shinto shrines in prewar ­Hokkaido were closely connected to the government’s development (colonisation) efforts, a wide variety of conceptions about Shinto shrines existed within the broader society of Hokkaido. The major narratives Japanese settlers told about shrines were ­characterised by shrines’ role as state institutions aiding Hokkaido’s development and their popular functions such as granting worldly benefits and connecting the migrants to their old home towns. But narratives connecting shrines to the Ainu as an independent indigenous ethnicity were largely absent. Shinto shrines are well-known for their use in fostering a patriotic and loyal attitude towards the emperor in Japanese subjects in the home islands and colonies alike. There were cases in Hokkaido in which shrines seem to have been used for this function at Ainu schools. In 1904, the Dai-ni Fushiko Jinjō Elementary School was founded in Fushiko, Obihiro to aid in educating Ainu children. Under the direction of Yoshida Iwao, a well-known scholar of Ainu customs who became the school’s headmaster in 1915, a shrine dedicated to the Meiji emperor was constructed on the grounds, and students and teachers per formed Shinto-style yōhai (‘veneration from afar’) towards the imperial palace everyday (Sasaki 2013, 218–219). However, this sort of Shinto ritual was not limited to Ainu schools, but became common at schools across the empire. In 1945, Japan accepted defeat in World War . Towards the end of the war, Shinto shrines were increasingly depicted as the source of Japan’s militaristic ‘Mikadoism’ (Thomas 2019, 145). During the American postwar occupation of Japan, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers ( ) issued the Shinto Directive, which abolished ‘State Shinto’. Shrines as sites of state ritual were no longer allowed, but shrines which ‘reverted’ to a religious character could continue to exist as private organisations. While the concrete shrine rituals changed little, the framework explaining the rituals shifted from one of public patriotism to one focused on promoting culture and social welfare. The Shinto Directive caused difficulties for shrines, but it also provided them with new freedoms. From the 1930s, Sapporo Jinja had been the focus of In 1931, the school was closed down as the government no longer considered a separate education for Ainu children necessary.

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a movement to enshrine the Meiji emperor in Hokkaido, but this request was repeatedly rejected by the central government (Miyamoto 2014, 58). However, as the Shinto Directive removed shrines from government control, Sapporo Jinja no longer needed government approval to enshrine a new kami. Thus in 1964, Sapporo Jinja used its postwar freedom to at last fulfil this desire. Since the shrine now venerated a direct imperial ancestor, it became a jingū shrine rather than a plain jinja. Along with this name change, the term Sapporo was changed to Hokkaidō, in order to better reflect the shrine’s position as the general protector (sōchinju) of all Hokkaido, not just the Sapporo area. The legal religionization of shrines postwar saw Sapporo Jinja—now Hokkaidō Jingū (see Figure 11.1)—affirming its prewar position as integral to the development (kaitaku) of Hokkaido. The pioneer (kaitaku) narrative of Hokkaido history also remained the dominant narrative in the early postwar. However, in the 1970s, a ‘critical counter narrative’ began to develop which saw the Japanese as invaders of Ainu land (Seaton 2016, 28). From this point of view, the pioneers venerated as kami at shrines like Kaitaku Jinja were not heroes of Hokkaido’s modernisation, but rather foreign invaders who destroyed Ainu culture. In this narrative,

Hokkaidō Jingū (former Sapporo Jinja): Although a private religious site, it remains a popular tourism spot for locals and overseas visitors alike Photograph by the author

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shrines associated with the pioneer narrative were seen as symbols of past injustices. In its earliest years, Sapporo Jinja had included Ainu customs in its ­festival celebrations. Around 1880, a newspaper reported that the shrine festival included ‘horse racing and Ainu dance’ (Noto 1994, 68), while in 1897 the ­procession of the shrine’s sacred palanquin was led by Ainu (Hokkaidō Jingū 1989, 12). The placement of Ainu people and customs as significant parts of the shrine’s annual festival indicates that Sapporo Jinja saw them as a ­distinctive social group. But it did not entirely reflect the oppressor-victim relationship sometimes attributed to the shrine by the critical counter narra tive postwar. After the turn of the twentieth century, I was unable to find any references to Ainu participation in shrine activities. This suggests that as the colonisation of Hokkaido and the assimilation of the Ainu was increasingly considered complete by the government, the shrine stopped distinguishing the Ainu as a separate group. Although there was a variety of conceptions of shrines in prewar Hokkaido, shrines became closely connected to the pioneer narrative that serves as Hokkaido’s foundation myth. Shrines, then, as a part of the Meiji government’s modernisation efforts, were a part of the suppression of traditional Ainu customs, but they seem to have largely ignored the Ainu as an independent ethnicity. That shrines became symbols of the imperial government’s oppression of the Ainu is dramatically illustrated by the Hokkaido Shrine arson incident. In 1974, an unknown perpetrator set fire to Hokkaidō Jingū’s main buildings, which had been given to the shrine by the Ise Jingū in 1889 (Hokkaidō Jingū-shi Hensan Iinkai 1995, 541). Although Hokkaidō Jingū’s official history makes no note of this, a person or group going by the name ‘Ainu Moshir’ claimed responsibility and accused the shrine of desecrating the Ainu deities. Shinto shrines, however, were not the only institution blamed for oppressing the Ainu. In a similar incident in 1977, the Shinshū Buddhist Daishi-dō hall in Nara was bombed for its perceived crimes of aiding the Japanese government in the ‘invasion of Ainu land’ (Keira 2013, 81). Ainu activist groups immediately condemned these terrorist activities, but some supporters of the counter narrative continued to see Shinto shrines as a part of the social institutions which had oppressed the Ainu. In 2007, for example, the Seinen Shinshoku Fumizuki-kai, a professional improvement society for young Shinto priests, invited an Ainu activist to speak about Ainu history and culture at their monthly meeting in Sapporo. A lengthy report of this meeting was written up on the blog of Nishino Jinja, a shrine located in western Sapporo. In the report, the author notes that the activist’s presentation emphasised how ‘your ancestors’ (i.e., the shrine priests’ ancestors) oppressed

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the Ainu. Despite this antagonist impression, the report’s author wrote that he was happy to have this rare chance to learn about Ainu people, and noted that the presenter also expressed a desire to coexist peacefully with shrines (Tagashira 2007). The 1990s saw increasing prominence of the critical counter narrative of Hokkaido’s pioneer history in international scholarship and a shift in local attitudes towards it. In 1997, the Former Aborigines Protection Law was repealed and replaced with the Ainu Culture Promotion Law, a goal long worked for by the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, an Ainu rights group which had formed postwar. In 2008 another ‘turning point’ in Ainu rights occurred when they were formally recognised by the Japanese government as an indigenous people of Japan (lewallen 2008, 16). Thus, the Ainu were increasingly treated as a separate ethnicity whose distinct culture deserved more visibility. While shrines can hardly be said to have become active promoters of Ainu culture, they have slowly begun treating the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group, as seen from the example of the Fumizuki-kai meeting discussed above. There are also a few cases of shrines incorporating Ainu people and culture into their ritual. The incorporation of non-Japanese traditions is common at shrines. Western pageantry can be seen in shrine processions, while hula dance from Hawaiʻi is a common dedicatory performance at shrines in Hokkaido today. The 220th anniversary festival of the previously mentioned Yoshitsune Jinja, for example, included the performance of traditional Ainu dances before the shrine’s kami by the Biratori Ainu Culture Preservation Society. It also ­published a wooden-covered seal book (goshūin-chō) featuring an image of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, framed by a rough torii gate and Ainu design elements (NHK 2019). This shrine’s history traces its origins back to a statue of Yoshitsune given to the Ainu in the Biratori area by Kondō Jūzō, a pioneer venerated at Kaitaku Jinja who identified Yoshitsune with the legendary Ainu hero Okikurumi.7 The statue was then given into the keeping of the shrine by the Ainu (Yoshitune Jinja 2019). The year 2018 marked the 150th anniversary of Hokkaido’s incorporation into the Meiji state. The prefectural government sponsored a wide variety of ceremonies and events to mark the occasion. In line with the shifting attitude towards promoting a distinctive Ainu ethnicity while still embracing the 7 Okikurumi is a hero or demigod of Ainu folklore. He appears within Ainu creation legends which attribute to him the knowledge of many foundational skills such as the growing of ­millet, the making of large boats, the use of poison arrows in hunting, and the carving of ritual tools. Ono, in his book Legends of Yoshitsune in Hokkaido Hokkaidō no Yoshitsune ), also describes Okikurumi as the ancestor of the Ainu people (Ono 1981, 114–115).

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pioneer narrative, these events included a focus on both Matsuura Takeshirō, the Japanese geographer who gave the island its new name of Hokkaido, and Ainu cultural events. This was reflected in the formal ceremony attended by the Emperor and Empress, which featured a lion dance by the Matsumae Kagura Hokkaidō Preservation Society and the traditional Ainu dance ‘Emusrimse’ by the Obihiro Kamui Upopo Preservation Society (Kyodo News 2018). Within the three public guidebooks to the 150th anniversary events issued by the government, only three events had any connection to Shinto shrines or customs in Hokkaido. The only shrine ritual was the sacred palanquin procession of Ubagami Daijingū. Sponsored by the Esashi Tourism Association, the description emphasised the shrine’s status as Hokkaido’s oldest registered heritage site, and the large number of floats (thirteen) that would take part. Although the guidebook did not mention this, Ubagami Daijingū is one of the shrines in Hokkaido whose shrine legend traces its kami back to the Ainu. According to its legend, the shrine was founded to venerate an Ainu woman and the three unnamed deities she had venerated in order to provide plentiful catches of fish for the community. Another celebratory event was a photograph exhibit of sacred palanquins in Hokkaido held in the underground walkway of Sapporo Station. It was sponsored by the Hokkai Mutsumi Association, whose stated mission includes promoting Japanese and local Hokkaido cultural traditions (Hokkai Mutsumi 2002). The other event was a lecture session of Ainu legends and pioneer tales which took place at Hokkaidō Jingū Tongū, a branch of Hokkaido Jingū in Sapporo (Hokkaido Government 2019). In this way anniversary events like Ubagami Daijingū’s procession and Tongū’s lecture included elements from both Ainu culture and Hokkaido’s pioneer past. Despite these examples, shrines did not play a large role in any of the yearlong official or partnership events for Hokkaido’s 150th anniversary. Hokkaidō Jingū held a special festival at Kaitaku Jinja, now popular as a power spot,8 on May 27 of that year, although it was not conducted in partnership with the government’s official celebrations. The shrine venerates pioneers such as Shima Yoshitake, the first Development Magistrate, and Kondō Jūzō, the Edo period geographer associated with Yoshitsune Jinja. It also enshrines the geographer Matsuura Takeshirō and takes August 15 as its main festival, the date on which Matsuura’s new name for Hokkaido was adopted. In addition to Shinto ritual, this special shrine festival included the performance of Matsumae kagura a dance local to the Matsumae area of southern Hokkaido. The shrine also issued a limited edition, commemorative shrine seal book, which featured an Cf. Carter (2018) for more on the development of shrines as power spots.

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image of the island of Hokkaido framed by Ezo-zakura, a variety of cherry blossom indigenous to Hokkaido. While many current visitors are attracted to sites like Hokkaidō Jingū and Kaitaku Jinja for reasons unrelated to history, festival dates and visual culture continue to link Hokkaido shrines with the pioneer narrative of Hokkaido’s foundation. Overshadowing Kaitaku Jinja’s festival, however, was the combined celebration of Hokkaidō Jingū’s 150th anniversary and the enthronement of the new emperor, which occurred a year later in 2019. Furthermore, the shrine had previously held major celebrations in 2014 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Meiji emperor’s enshrinement. These anniversary celebrations included a wide range of special events, including court music concerts, horseback archery demonstrations, and history book publications. In other words, Kaitaku Jinja’s festival for Hokkaido’s 150th anniversary was situated in the larger framework of the imperial family and the shrine’s centrality to Hokkaido’s development, rather than an inclusion of Ainu culture in the pioneer narrative.9 Shrines in Hokkaido largely continued to support the pioneer narrative, despite no longer being state institutions. Hokkaidō Jingū continued to emphasise its imperial connections and the pioneer legacy of its kami, without significantly including Ainu people or customs. However, the growing prominence of the counter narrative in the 1970s caused some to see shrines as ­symbols of the imperial state’s oppression of the Ainu. As the counter narrative gained more ground and the Ainu were officially recognised as an indigenous people, shrines such as Yoshitsune Jinja started to emphasise their Ainu-­related ­traditions. This has reflected the government’s slow inclusion of Ainu, but shrines have drawn on their own local traditions to do this, rather than utilising international concepts such as that of ‘indigenous people’. 2

Taiwan, Shrines, and Multicultural Traditions

For most of the nineteenth century, Taiwan was formally under the sovereignty of the Qing dynasty. But this was a graduated sovereignty, thin in the ‘civilised’ 9 An exception to this is a historical manga that Hokkaidō Jingū helped produce in commemo ration of the Meiji emperor’s enshrinement, the Legend of Shima Yoshitake (Shima Yoshitake Den) (AirDive 2014). The story is about Shima, the first Development Magistrate of Hokkaido, the founder of Hokkaidō Jingū, and a kami enshrined at Kaitaku Jinja. In the manga, the Ainu are presented as a distinct ethnic group, but Shima is framed as an ally motivated by a desire to free them from the oppression of greedy merchants while still respecting their traditions. This demonstrates a change from the older pioneer narrative that largely erased the Ainu from Hokkaido’s history to one treating the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group subsumed under the broader category of Japanese subjects.

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areas of Taiwan settled by migrants from southern China, and tenuous to non-existent over the indigenous Austronesian tribes residing within Taiwan’s mountainous areas (Barclay 2018, 17). When Japan took control of the island as a colony in 1895, the ethnic Chinese residents of Taiwan were given a grace period of two years to leave the island. After that, all residents—­Austronesian and ethnic Chinese alike—became Japanese subjects. Taiwan was, like ­Hokkaido, treated as terra nullius: an ungoverned land in need of development. As Japan’s first colonisation effort after the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution, the Japanese government was keen to impress Western countries with its imperial abilities. Government offices, schools, hospitals, trains, and roads were built on a grand scale to turn Taiwan not merely into a self-­sufficient colony, but into a ‘colonial triumph’ (Sugiyama 1922, front matter). In the early years of the colony, the Taiwan Governor-General was more concerned about economic issues than the assimilation of Taiwan’s residents. It was not until after the Manchurian Incident in the 1930s that the government began enacting enthusiastic assimilation measures on the ethnic Chinese populace. Furthermore, Taiwan’s indigenous tribes were treated differently from both ethnic Chinese residents and Japanese settlers. While the Governor-General’s policy towards them ranged from paternalistic benevolence to genocidal suppression, the indigenous tribes were fenced into a shrinking area of Taiwan’s inland mountains. Given their ‘primitive’ status, the efforts the Governor-General made to civilise them were conducted slowly. It focused on suppressing the most intolerable of indigenous customs such as head-­hunting, while allowing ‘harmless’ traditions to continue to exist for the time being (Kaneko 2018, 387). While founding Sapporo Jinja was one of the first things the Colonisation Commission in Hokkaido did, Taiwan’s general protector shrine, Taiwan Jinja, was not established until six years after Taiwan came under Japanese control. The aforementioned pioneer kami—Ōkunitama no Kami, Ōnamu chi no Kami, and Sukunahikona no Kami—were enshrined in the first seat of the shrine, with the aim of enlisting their help in Taiwan’s development. However, a second seat was added to enshrine Prince Kitashirakawa-no-miya Yoshihisa. Prince Yoshihisa was the head of a branch of the imperial family, but died in Tainan in 1895 of malaria, after leading a successful pacification campaign against the remaining Qing loyalists in Taiwan. The impetus for Taiwan Jinja originated from a movement in the Diet to honour the Prince’s glorious spirit (eirei). While shrines in Taiwan followed Sapporo Jinja’s example of focusing on the development (kaitaku) of the land, they were also closely associated with the veneration the patriotic dead like Yoshihisa. The association of shrines with the colonial state’s development efforts and the patriotic dead was encouraged by two main factors. First, the Taiwan

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Government-General kept tight control over which Shinto sites were recognised as official shrines (jinja). To be officially recognised as a shrine, a site was required to conduct itself with a dignity befitting a site of state ritual and maintain suitably majestic grounds. It also had to venerate a kami appropriate to the state. Of the sixty-eight official shrines in Taiwan, only four did not venerate the Three Pioneer Kami and/or Prince Yoshihisa. Furthermore, when Taiwan Gokoku Jinja was founded in 1942, it was located next to Taiwan Jinja, strengthening the link between Taiwan Jinja and the war dead (eirei) which all gokoku shrines venerate. Second, Taiwan lacked a history of Japanese settlement prior to its colonisation in 1895. Shinto shrines underwent major changes after the Meiji Restoration as they were transformed into modern sites of state ritual. Taiwan’s only experience with shrines occurred after those changes. Ethnic Chinese residents, then, had few chances to encounter Shinto shrines as anything other than public sites of state ritual. In comparison, Hokkaido not only had a significant presence of shrines with traditions extending back before the Meiji Restoration,10 but it also had far more settler- (as opposed to state-) founded shrines that gained official recognition. Shinto ritual, whether through distant veneration or on trips to the town’s local shrine, was a regular part of school-age children’s lives in Japan-ruled ­Taiwan, especially after imperialisation (kōminka) policies were enacted in the 1930s. The colonial government made no distinction between shrine ­festivals and other public holidays, with the annual holidays of Dominion Day and Tai wan Jinja Festival both being celebrated with Shinto ritual at shrines and public offices (Shimizu 2023, 102). Furthermore, the colonial government encouraged student and social groups to take an active part in beautifying their local shrine. Neighbourhoods and company employee groups pitched together to buy stone lanterns inscribed with their group’s name, while school children often spent one day a month volunteering their time cleaning the shrine grounds. Wealthy families also donated lanterns or koma inu as a show of patriotism and conspicuous wealth . These statues were often carved in a Chinese fashion or cast in bronze, rather than done in granite as was typical in the Home Islands.

This includes the previously discussed Ubagami Daijingū and Yoshitsune Jinja, as well as the intermediate national shrine (kokuhei chūsha) Hakodate Hachimangū. Literally ‘Korean dogs’, these are guardian statues of dogs or lions which are usually found flanking the approach of Shinto shrines. Cf. Kotera (2009, 20–21) about the relationship between koma inu merchant economy in Japan.

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The influence of Chinese customs at Taiwan Jinja was relatively mild, but it was significantly more pronounced at Kaizan Jinja in Tainan. Kaizan Jinja was Taiwan’s first official Shinto shrine, ranked as a prefectural shrine (kensha) in 1896. While most new shrines were founded on virgin land, Kaizan Jinja was established by renaming a seventeenth century site dedicated to the veneration of Koxinga, the Japan-born Ming loyalist and merchant-pirate who drove the Dutch from Taiwan and established his own short-lived kingdom. The Qing dynasty had included the site within its official state ritual and the site had gained considerable local popularity. By request of the new Japanese governor of Tainan, the Taiwan Governor-General swiftly recognised the site as an official Shinto shrine. While the economic structure of the site was modernised, the southern Chinese-style building was kept. Many of the old Chinese-style festivities were maintained, even as solemn Shinto-style ritual was added to the site. In the late 1930s, a new Japanese-style shrine was built at the site, but the old building was preserved within the shrine garden. Kaizan Jinja is an example of how prewar Shintoists in Taiwan saw Taiwanese sites like this as sharing the same character as Shinto shrines. This view was not limited to ­Kaizan Jinja’s case. For example, Yamaguchi Tōru, head ritualist of Taiwan Jinja, wrote that Japanese and Taiwanese shrines were based on the same ‘oriental morality’, while Kamura Masaharu, head of the Governor-General’s Shrines and Temples Section in the 1930s wrote that ‘Temple-mausoleums (shibyō) are the shrines of the ethnic Han who came to this island, and shrines are the ­temple-mausoleums of the ethnic Japanese’ (Sai 1994, 44, 250). The use of non-Shinto style architecture, although far from typical, also occurred at a few newly built shrines in Taiwan. Tsūshō Jinja, an unranked shrine established in 1937 in the ethnic Chinese village of Tungxiao (Jp. Tsūshō), for example, enshrined the imperial ancestress Amaterasu Ōmikami and Prince Yoshihisa. Its shrine office and sanctuary utilised Japanese-style architecture, but its large ritual hall was a building in the southern Chinese Fujian style. Kenkō Jinja was another unusual shrine founded by the Taiwan Governor-­General. Taiwan Jinja may have first been conceived as a memorial dedicated to the glorious spirit of Prince Yoshihisa, but he was enshrined as an individual kami. In contrast, Kenkō Jinja was a shrine dedicated to the glorious spirits of all those who had died for Japanese Taiwan. It was only the second official shrine after Yasukuni Jinja dedicated to glorious spirits (eirei collectively. Kenkō Jinja’s glorious spirits included not only the war dead and Japanese officials, but also ethnic Chinese members of the neighbourhood watch system. These multicultural spirits deserved a multicultural building, or so the architect Ide Kaoru felt, and the shrine was constructed from a mix of Asian and Western influences (Kenkō Jinja Shamusho 1940). This architecture

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was so unusual that the Japanologist Richard Posonby-Fane wrote that no one ‘would suppose it to be a shrine’ and that it ‘resembles somewhat a mosque’ (Allen 2012, 165). Thus, shrines like Kaizan Jinja, Tsūshō Jinja, and Kenkō Jinja demonstrate how Shintoists in Taiwan worked to broaden the concept of Shinto to include cultural elements beyond the narrow confines of Japanese customs. The shrines discussed above were mostly located in major cities like ­Taipei and Tainan, and focused their ‘civilising’ efforts on the ethnic Chinese and Japanese settler populations of Taiwan. Most of the indigenous tribes, confined by the government within the bounds of the high mountains, had only rare chances to visit them. Furthermore, some Japanese officials felt building shrines in the indigenous villages was a waste of resources. But other officials felt shrines could provide a positive influence. The Taiwan Governor-General was plagued with communication issues in their efforts to govern the tribes. A plethora of local dialects meant that messages originating in Japanese often passed through three or more translators before arriving at their target audience (Barclay 2018, 128). Shrines, one official argued, would help communicate civilised Japanese values through actions rather than words. By incorporating ‘harmless’ indigenous customs with shrine rites, the Takasago could be brought slowly but relatively painlessly into civilisation (Kaneko 2018, 387). Shrines, particularly if they were to meet the high standards laid down by the Taiwan Governor-General, were expensive. But scaled-down ‘pre-shrines’ called sha were often built in these villages. Shrines in Japanese-ruled Taiwan followed the same pioneer model established by Sapporo Jinja, and were closely linked to the idea of shrines as sites for patriotic state ritual. While Hokkaido shrines venerated the pioneer heroes of the state, Taiwan Jinja’s enshrinement of Prince Yoshihisa only six years after his death, the establishment of Kenkō Jinja to venerate the collective glorious spirits, the geographic nearness of Taiwan Gokoku Jinja to Taiwan Jinja, and the co-option of local resident’s veneration of Koxinga all positioned Taiwan shrines as sites for venerating the patriotic dead. In addition to this, the broadening of shrines to include select non-Japanese customs and the categorisation of Shinto and Taiwanese shrines as variations of the same type opened up Shinto shrines to a more multicultural interpretation. This more inclusive conception of shrines lacked popularity outside of the colonies, but it would have an important influence on the fate of shrine sites postwar. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Allied commanders gave Taiwan over to the military occupation of the Republic of China (ROC). The Japanese government successfully argued to SCAP that Shinto shrines in Taiwan were secular, and not religious, institutions. Accordingly, they were abolished by the Shinto Direc tive rather than transformed into private religious organisations, in contrast to

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shrines in Hokkaido. After their sacred objects were dis-enshrined, the shrine sites were handed over as public land to the newly governing ROC. At first, the cash-strapped ROC government often used the old shrine buildings with little to no modification as public buildings. However, from the 1970s the government made a policy of tearing down ­Japanese-style shrines and building patriotic memorials on the same site. Taiwan Jinja (Taiwan Jingū) was razed and replaced with the towering Taipei Grand Hotel (see Figure 11.2), completed in 1973. Built to showcase northern Chinese (as opposed to southern Chinese or Taiwanese) architecture, it was frequently used to host foreign dignitaries. The nearby Taiwan Gokoku Jinja, meanwhile was transformed into the National Revolutionary Martyr’s Shrine (see ­Figure 11.3), a war memorial dedicated to the ROC’s war dead. Transformation into a Martyr’s Shrine was a common fate of former Shinto shrines including Takao Jinja in Kaohsiung (Jp. Takao), Tsūshō Jinja (see Figure 11.4) in Miaoli, and Tōen Jinja (see Figure 11.5) in Taoyuan (Jp. Tōen) (Kam 2019). The war dead of the Martyr’s Shrines were soldiers who were born and had died in mainland China, often fighting the Japanese, and they lacked a connection to the island of Taiwan. The prewar ethnic Chinese residents of Taiwan, on

Taipei Grand Hotel (former Taiwan Jinja): The old shrine’s two Chinese-style koma inu still flank the hotel Photograph by the author

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National Revolutionary Martyr’s Shrine (former Taiwan Gokoku Jinja): The Shinto shrine’s buildings were utilised as the martyr’s shrine until 1966 Photograph by Josh Ellis

the other hand, had supported or fought on the Japanese side of this conflict as Japanese colonial subjects, and during the war were the enemy of those now venerated at the Martyr’s Shrines. Other shrines, such as Taichū Jinja in ­Taichung (Jp. Taichū), had their main buildings replaced with a statue of ­Confucius, from whose legacy the ROC drew its legitimacy. In many cases, the geographic layout and dedicatory accoutrements like torii gates, stone lanterns, staircases, and statues of the Shinto shrine were retained at the site, with only the main buildings being replaced by structures done in a northern Chinese style. In order to render these accoutrements acceptable, the ROC often chipped away, rubbed out, or plastered over the Japanese characters or shrine seal images, sometimes replacing them with the ROC seal or Chinese characters (as in Figures 11.4 and 11.6). Torii gates, likewise, were often modified by knocking off their upper bar (as with Figures 11.5 and 11.6). In some cases, Taiwanese residents themselves chiselled out their own names from shrine lanterns they had donated in fear of being labelled Japan sympathisers. In other cases, the shrines accoutrements were hauled off by Taiwanese temples to be used to decorate their own grounds. This was probably not out of a sense of reverence for the original shrine, but for the mundane reason that the items ‘were pretty and free’ (Ellis 2020). Many Taiwanese residents suffered under the ROC’s military rule from 1949 to 1987. The antagonism of that government against not only Japanese cultural elements, but also southern Chinese elements is demonstrated by the situation

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Figure 11.4 Tungxiao Martyr’s Shrine (former Tsūshō Jinja): The ROC’s white sun symbol was added to the roof of the Shinto shrine’s original Fujian style Photograph by Josh Ellis

Taoyuan Martyr’s Shrine (former Tōen Jinja): Although the top bar of the shrine’s gate has been removed, this is considered one of the best preserved Shinto shrine sites in Taiwan Photograph by Josh Ellis

of Kaizan Jinja. While the Japanese government had preserved the old southern Chinese-style building of the site, the ROC government tore down both the Japanese shrine and the old Chinese building. In its place, a new shrine

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called Koxinga Shrine (Ch. Yánpíngjùnwáng-cí, Jp. Enpeigun’ō-shi) was built in a northern Chinese-style of architecture (Kaneko 2018, 118). The koma inu statues and stone torii gate were kept, although the gate’s top bar was knocked off and the symbol of the ROC was added to it (see Figure 11.6). After military rule ended, movements advocating Taiwan’s independence grew in popularity. These movements often embraced a view of Taiwan as a multicultural state whose mixed heritage should be preserved. While the ROC’s symbol was not removed from the Koxinga Shrine’s torii, today a multilingual plaque has been added criticising the government’s past treatment of

Figure 11.6 Koxinga Ancestral Shrine (former Kaizan Jinja): The Shinto shrine’s torii gate has been modified and adorned with the symbol of the ROC koma inu Photograph by the author

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Koxinga Ancestral Shrine’s amulet (left) and Hayashi Department Store’s shrine amulet pouch (right): The former contains the shrine’s Taoist talisman, while the latter is left empty Photograph by the author

the site. Shinto-style ritual implements are displayed in a museum exhibit in the shrine’s corridors and the shrine’s shop sells its Taoist talisman wrapped in a Shinto-style amulet pouch (see Figure 11.7). While Kaizan Jinja was a bordered space where different narratives about what it means to be Japanese met prewar, the site’s visual culture today convey the current contested narratives around what it means to be Taiwanese.13 Other Shinto shrine sites have been preserved or restored as cultural sites as well. For example, the shrine office of Tainan Jinja was restored and now serves as an elementary school’s library (see Figure 11.8). The site of former Kagi Jinja hosts a monument to an indigenous legend while the shrine’s restored office serves as a local history museum. Martyr’s Shrines which preserve some of the original Shinto architecture have also become tourist or photo spots, and the subject of municipal restoration projects. For example, Taoyuan Martyr’s Shrine, often described as the best-preserved Shinto shrine in Taiwan, has become a popular spot for cosplay photo shoots and recently finished a major 13

For more on these contested narratives see the chapter by Gee in this volume which focuses on art in former military sites.

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Zhongyi Elementary School’s Library (former Tainan Jinja): In addition to the shrine’s restored office, the shrine’s bridge, well, and martial arts hall are preserved on the school’s grounds Photograph by the author

restoration project. Likewise, restoration work on the Japanese architecture of Tungxiao Martyr’s Shrine began in 2017 (Kaneko 2018, 94). In Kaohsiung, the Martyr’s Shrine itself has been neglected, but a viewing platform and romantic photo spot area in front of the shrine has made use of the site’s magnificent view overlooking the city and harbour. The majority of preserved Shinto shrine sites in Taiwan have become either Chinese war memorials, cultural sites like museums and libraries, or both (Inamiya and Nakajima 2019, 125). But a few shrine sites are being used as folk or Shinto shrines. In Taipei the ruins of an unrecognised Shinto site (shinshi) near the prefectural water works called Maruyama Mizu Jinja has been preserved. This shrine was originally built to pacify the spirits of those who died in an accident during the construction of Taipei’s modern water works (Kaneko 2018, 378). The shrine building no longer exists, but the main approach, purification basin, and koma inu statues still stand in the slightly overgrown shrine garden. A Chinese-style roof has been erected on the shrine’s former platform and underneath it a miniature model of a Shinto shrine has been placed. Before this miniature shrine, offerings of incense and fresh fruit are sometimes

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left, indicating the site is venerated in a folk tradition. In a similar manner, the ruins of a private shrine dedicated to Inari located on top of the restored Japanese period Hayashi Department Store in Tainan is covered with coins left by visitors. The nearby shop sold Shinto-style amulet pouches, but unlike at Koxinga Shrine, they contained no talisman (Fig. 11.7). The community of Kuskus Jinja, a rebuilt shrine in the indigenous area of Mudan, venerates its kami using Shinto ritual.14 The shrine was first built as an unrecognised Shinto site (hokora) in 1939 and enshrined Amaterasu Ōmikami. Indigenous villagers going off to war promised to meet again in spirit at this shrine, which aligns with the then common prewar association of shrines with the patriotic dead. The shrine’s building was destroyed in 1946 by a typhoon, but villagers continued to hold memorial ceremonies for their war dead, sometimes conducted by the local Christian minister. Despite this, local villagers wanted to rebuild the shrine, in 2015 this desire was realised with financial help from Japanese donors. The newly built shrine venerates the village’s war dead, rather than Amaterasu. It is not associated with any Shinto organisations in Japan, but the rites are conducted by a Shinto priest from Japan who is training a local man as his successor. Although the ritual is conducted in a S­ hinto-style, indigenous and Chinese customs are incorporated into the ceremony, evoking the mixed Japanese-Chinese ritual of Kaizan Jinja. Kuskus Jinja, then, is not a continuation of prewar Shinto, but an adaption of Shinto rites to meet the needs of the community to memorialise their war dead, a need for which the Martyr’s Shrines set up by the ROC did not provide. Kuskus Jinja’s Japanese-language blog emphasises that the shrine is concerned only with the wishes of the local people, not politics (Kuskusblog 2017). But the preservation of or veneration at Shinto shrines has become a 14

Kuskus Jinja is the only revived Shinto shrine in Taiwan using Shinto rites to venerate the kami. However, a new shrine called Taitō Hachiman Jinja, is currently being built in Taitung (Jp. Taitō). In 2015, the shrine building of Shikano Jinja (Shikano Sonsha, est. 1921) was rebuilt in Luye (Jp. Shikano), Taitung as a part of a tourism effort to preserve the area’s Japanese heritage (Kaneko 2018, 278). Some members of this project then started a project to build a functioning shrine in Donghe, Taitung. Currently, the new site includes a small shrine building and ceremonial courtyard covered by an open-air pavilion. Its landscaped garden has multiple coloured torii gates and a purification basin, along with an artificial stream, bridge, residence or shrine office, and memorial to the Taiwanese war dead of WWII. The new shrine is a branch of Moto-Iwashimizu Hachimangū in Nara, Japan, but started issuing its own shrine seal and amulets in 2021. Facebook posts on 28 June and 23 August 2021 about the new shrine write that it will provide a place for all of the ‘wandering kami of the 423 shrines’ of prewar Taiwan to settle. Thus, the shrine’s sup porters connect Taitō Hachiman Jinja to Taiwan’s Japanese prewar and wartime heritage.

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highly politicised issue in Taiwan. Since 2001, the political situation has been broadly divided between political parties supporting either the Pan-Green Coalition or the Pan-Blue Coalition. The Pan-Green Coalition, based around the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), promotes the narrative of an independent and multicultural Taiwan. The Pan-Blue Coalition, based around the Kuomintang (KMT) party, favours closer ties to the Chinese mainland. In 2005, the chairman of the Taiwan Solidarity Union, which is a part of the Pan-Green Coalition, led a group to venerate their ancestors at Yasukuni Jinja in Japan. This visit was in turn protested by Kao Chin Su-mei, a politician known for her advocacy of indigenous people’s rights, but associated with the Pan-Blue Coalition. From the viewpoint of Pan-Green supporters, Japanese shrines are an integral part of Taiwan’s unique multicultural history, while from the viewpoint of Pan-Blue supporters, Shinto shrines only represent Japanese imperialism. It is not surprising that, according to the shrine’s blog, Kuskus Jinja has been subject to accusations of imperialisation. This image has been encouraged by Japanese media outlets such as the conservative Sankei newspaper, who have described the shrine as ‘Taiwan’s little Yasukuni’ (Sankei West 2015). The author of Kuskus Jinja’s blog, however, denies accusations of imperialisation and is critical of the current shrine establishment in Japan, which he sees as a continuation of ‘State Shinto’ (Kuskusblog 2016). Instead, he describes the shrine as contributing to Taiwanisation (Taiwanka) (Kuskusblog 2018) and being a type of ‘Shinto-Christian-Taiwanese syncretism’, evoking the ­Shinto-Buddhist syncretism of Japan’s premodern period (Kuskusblog 2015). The heritage that Shinto shrines represent thus changes depending on the person’s view of ­Taiwan’s broader heritage. In Japan-ruled Taiwan, Shinto shrines were public sites closely connected to the veneration of the patriotic dead. After 1945 in ROC-ruled Taiwan, many of these sites continue to serve the same purpose. The geography, ­accoutrements, and sometimes the main buildings did not change: only the ritual and object of veneration did. The new government saw Shinto shrines as symbols of ­Japanese imperialism and worked to erase or disguise the Japanese origin of these elements. Once Taiwan’s government began to democratise in the 1990s, former shrine sites began to be seen as an important part of the island’s multicultural heritage by those advocating for an independent Taiwan. Prewar precedents of Shinto shrines as multicultural sites, along with shrines’ focus on ritual rather than verbal or written education, likely made this postwar interpretation easier. Finally in rare instances, shrines became a method for venerating Taiwanese ancestors that were denied recognition by the memori als built by the Republic of China.

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3 Conclusion Shinto shrine sites in Hokkaido and Taiwan are bordered spaces, where the collective memories of different groups are contested and affirmed. Although shrines on these two islands shared origins as colonial projects, the redrawing of national, ethnic, and political borders postwar has influenced the formation of conflicting narratives over what heritage these sites symbolise: progress, oppression, colonialism, multiculturalism. In Hokkaido, shrines have remained associated with the pioneer narrative but are seen by some groups as guilty of oppressing the Ainu. In contrast, former shrine sites in Taiwan have become cultural symbols of a multicultural heritage, despite the ROC government’s efforts to erase or overwrite the sites’ Japanese associations. These postwar responses to shrines have hinged on the redrawing of national borders after WWII that located Hokkaido as within Japan and Taiwan as without. Furthermore, the differing national narratives and counter-narratives that have developed separately in these countries has also influenced the perception of shrine sites. The critical counter-narrative which champions the Ainu as indigenous people supports the view of shrines as a leading representative of colonial oppression in Hokkaido. Meanwhile the vision of Taiwan as a multicultural state born out of opposition against the ROC’s view of Taiwan as Chinese led to former shrine sites being rehabilitated as an integral part of Taiwan’s multicultural past. These postwar responses have also been supported by the distinctive narratives that surrounded the shrines prewar. In Hokkaido, prewar views of the Ainu as a dying race whose remnants were largely assimilated meant shrines lacked a strong historical precedent for incorporating Ainu as a separate ethnic group. In Taiwan, the prewar inclusion of Taiwanese customs at some shrines lent support to the transformation of shrine sites into multicultural symbols. Also, the ready depiction of shrines as patriotic sites dedicated to the ‘glorious spirits’ influenced the ROC’s decision to turn many of the sites into war memorials. Finally, some shrines, such as Hokkaido’s Yoshitsune Jinja and Taiwan’s ­Kuskus Jinja, became sites where local memories have met and negotiated with the various national narratives, drawing on their communities’ local and indigenous traditions to create alternative narratives that reflect the lived experi ences of their communities. This chapter has only introduced the complex, layered narratives that continue to be negotiated at shrines and former shrine sites. But the Japanese imperial government, army, and settlers constructed shrines across the Asia-Pacific, from Manchuria and Singapore to Micronesia and Brazil. Many of these sites still exist today as contested heritage sites and deserve further analysis as places where borders of memory come together.

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Kotera Yoshiaki. 2009. ‘Komainu: The Birth and ‘Habitat Distribution’ of Shrine ­Guardian Lions.’ Translated by Detlef Köhn. In Japanese Religions, 34 (1): 7–23. Kuskusblog. 2015. ‘Shin-Ki-Tai Shūgō Jinja.’ Kuskus’s Blog. Posted 28 July 2015. https:// kuskusblog.hatenablog.com/entry/13459668. Kuskusblog. 2016. ‘Jinja no Shurui.’ Kuskus’s Blog. Posted 1 March 2016. https://kuskus blog.hatenablog.com/entry/13978097. Kuskusblog. 2017. ‘Jinja ha Sensō Shōchō deha Arimasen.’ Kuskus’s Blog. Posted 5 April 2017. https://kuskusblog.hatenablog.com/entry/14883486. Kuskusblog. 2018. ‘Hannichi Shisō-ha no Watashi no Koto wo Osorete Imasu ga (Warau).’ Kuskus’s Blog. Posted 31 August 2018. https://kuskusblog.hatenablog.com /entry/15648900. Kyodo News. 2018. ‘Hokkaidō Meimei 150-nen de Shikiten: Dentō Geinō Hiro, ­Ryō-heika Rinseki.’ Youtube. Posted 5 August 2018. https://youtu.be/IEYip1gKbQA. lewallen, ann-elise. 2008. ‘Indigenous at last! Ainu Grassroots Organizing and the Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir.’ The Asia-Pacific Journal, 6 (8). Mason, Joseph W. T. (1935) 2002. The Meaning of Shinto: The Primaeval Foundation of Creative Spirit in Modern Japan. Reprint, Trafford Publishing. Citations refer to the reprinted edition. Mason, Michele. 2012. Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State. New York: Palgrave ­Macmillan. Matsuura Yusuke. 2019. ‘World Heritage and the Local Politics of Memory: the Miike Coal Mine and Fu no isan.’ Japan Forum, 31 (3): 313–335. Miyamoto Takashi. 2014. ‘Sapporo Jinja kara Hokkaidō Jingū e: Meiji Tennō Gozōshi no Ikisatsu.’ In Hokkaidō Jingū Kenkyū Ronsō, edited by Hokkaidō Jingū and ­Kokugakuin Daigaku Kenkyū Kaihatsu Suishin Sentā, 53–102. Kōbundō. Nelson, John K. 2000. Enduring Identities: The Guise of Shinto in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. NHK. 2019. ‘Yoshitsune Jinja de Ainu Dentō no Mai #Ainu.’ Last Modified 15 October 2019. https://www.nhk.or.jp/hokkaido/articles/slug-n52d1c354eaaf. Noto Kunio. 1994. ‘Sapporo Matsuri no Ashiato: Meiji Jidai.’ In Sapporo Matsuri, edited by Sapporo-shi Kyōiku Iinkai, 6675. Sapporo: Sapporo-shi Kyōiku Iinkai. Ono Fumio. 1981. Hokkaidō no Yoshitsune Densetsu. Sapporo: Miyama Shobō. Sai Kindō (Tsai Chin Tong). 1994. Nippon Teikoku-ka Taiwan no Shūkyō Seisaku. ­Dōseisha. Sankei West. 2015. ‘Taiwan no Chiisana ‘Yasukuni’ Saiken Nihonjin Shinshoku, Juumin no Netsubou Oue ‘Koko de Aou’ Chikai Shuppei 11, 12-nichi ni Shinji.’ The Sankei Newspaper. Posted 10 August 2015. https://www.sankei.com/west/news/150810 /wst1508100053-n1.html

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Sasaki Kaoru. 2013. Michinoku to Hokkaidō no Shūkyō Sekai. Sapporo: Hokkaidō ­Shuppan Kikaku Sentā. Seaton, Philip A. 2016. ‘Grand Narratives of Empire and Development.’ In Local ­History and War Memories in Hokkaido, edited by Philip A. Seaton, 26–59. Abingdon: ­Routledge. Shimizu, Karli. 2017 ‘Shintō Shrines and Secularism in Modern Japan, 1890–1945: A Case Study on Kashihara Jingū.’ Journal of Japanese Religion, 6 (2): 126–156. Shimizu, Karli. 2023. Overseas Shinto Shrines: Religion, Secularity and the Japanese Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Suga Kōji. 2014. ‘Kaigai Jinja no Keifu ni Miru Hokkaidō Jingū: Sōchinju Saishin to Meiji Tennō Gochinza.’ In Hokkaidō Jingū Kenkyū Ronsō, edited by Hokkaidō Jingū and Kokugakuin Daigaku Kenkyū Kaihatsu Suishin Sentā, 131–162. Kōbundō. Sugiyama Yasunori. 1922. Taiwan Rekidai Sōtoku no Chiseki Okuzuke. Teikoku Chihō Gyōsei Gakkai. Sutō Takanori. 1971. Hokkaidō no Densetsu. Toyoura, Hokkaido: San’on Bungaku-kai. Tagashira. 2007. ‘“Ainu Minzoku no Rekishi/Bunka ni Tsuite” no Kōen-kai.’ Nishino Jinja Shamu Nisshi. Posted on 18 October 2007. https://nisinojinnjya.hatenablog. com/entry/20071018. Thal, Sarah. 2005. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573–1912. Chicago: University of Chicago. Thomas, Jolyon B. 2019. Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago. Walker, Brett L. 2001. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590 . Berkeley: University of California.

CHAPTER 12

Memorials to Korean Migrants in Kyushu: Overlapping Medieval and Modern Experiences in Local Communities Jason Mark Alexander Abstract At certain sites in Kyushu, residents have erected various memorials to define the roles of Korean migrants in local communities. Many of these memorials ­commemorate Koreans who moved from the peninsula to Japan in the twentieth century. This study widens the temporal scope of public histories to incorporate a prior migration wave to Japan at the turn of the sixteenth century. In actuality, the memories about these medieval Koreans overlap with those about the colonial migrants. How do local-level organizations create narratives of Korean cultural heritage in Japanese space, some claiming histories of intergroup harmony, and some of inequality? This chapter examines memorials in Miyama, Arita, and Chikuhō to reveal the borders between different organizations’ memories and heritage discourse. This horizontal inquiry has relevance in evaluating narratives of migrants’ free or forced movement, an issue now a ­flashpoint in the Korean-Japanese diplomatic discourse. In the observed localities, ancestors of both medieval and modern Korean migrants are active negotiaters, articulating how residents should remember their histories of trauma and violence, in the face of official and popular opposition. Besides the memories that support or deny the value of including Koreans in local communities, a third thread of memory has arisen. This new memorializing initiative links local grassroots organizations with interna tional heads of state, situating a vision of future-oriented coexistence between Korea and Japan atop their centuries of shared experiences.

Keywords Japan – Korea – Kyushu – memorials – migration – sociocultural history

Stories of migration across geopolitical borders form a controversial aspect of the intertwined histories of Japanese and Korean societies. In many areas of © Jason Mark Alexander, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_013

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Kyushu, local communities live among a growing number of stone memorials that indicate the heterogeneity in the experiences of current residents and their ancestors. Over the past four hundred years, many local organizations have erected such markers to express their memories of Korean-Japanese relationships as defined by harmony, injustice, or global inclusivity. Twenty-first century disputes about Koreans’ experiences as migrants, i.e. people articulating embodied mobility, in modern Japan sometimes overlook the length of migration’s history as a social phenomenon. From 1592 to 1598, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) directed military forces to invade the Korean peninsula, displacing tens of thousands of Koreans whom soldiers brought to Japanese domains. Historian Yoon Dal Se describes this sixteenth-century migration wave as a ‘medieval version of the modern forced labor issue’ (Yoon 2003, 264). Nevertheless, the modern wave overshadows the medieval in many memories, not least because of its scale. Following the Japanese annexation of the Korean peninsula in 1910, hundreds of thousands of Koreans moved to the Japanese metropole. This massive wave of migration grew under more explicitly coerced imperial policies from 1939 until the end of the Asia-Pacific War in 1945. Over the past few decades of Japanese-South Korean relations, spikes in geopolitical tensions involve different memories of wartime migrant experiences. These include the 2015 UNESCO World Heritage designations of industrial sites in Japan; the 2019 negotiations over Japanese whitelisting of South Korean corporations and South Korean suspension of the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA); and international judicial rulings over redress to Asian victims of sexual slavery (Park 2019, 4–5). While such debates proceed on the international level with global attention, in negotiation with North Korean relations and perspectives, negotiations of memory have also occurred at the local level.1 In Kyushu, a significant portion of both medieval and modern migrant communities moved into the same geographical spaces in rural areas. This overlap of Korean lineages is complicated by differing memories of anti-Korean violence or pro-Korean affection. Sociologist Mary Kaldor’s view of ‘contentious politics’ in society encompasses how modern non-governmen tal communities advocate for identities and values based on their memories and experiences, the variety of which creates horizontal and vertical conflict (Kaldor 2003, 82). This disharmony is visible in how memorials in Kyushu’s town spaces claim certain legitimacies of personhood in Japanese society, defining borders between insiders and outsiders. Yet memorials’ symbology For a discussion of wartime historical memory at local sites in Kyoto and in the South Pacific see Aukema’s and Iitaka’s contributions in this volume.

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and textual inscriptions can also function as interface points, where both ‘competing’ memories can also signify ‘connection’ between residents (Boyle 2019, 307–8). Cultural anthropologist Mariko Asano Tamanoi differentiates between two types of memory: ‘recollection’ by witnesses and survivors of a traumatic experience, and ‘remembrance’ by others who can learn, internalize, and reproduce information of such experiences (Tamanoi 2013, 87–88). This distinction is akin to the concept of primary and secondary sources in historiography, defined in one way by an account’s creator’s proximity to its subject. Tamanoi’s categorization is valuable in this study as it draws attention to diversity in the origins of memories, the ways they diffuse through groups of people, and representation of personal experiences in public space. Some scholars have written encyclopaedia-esque volumes on their travels throughout Japan searching for physical indicators of Korean presence in the archipelago—notably the work of Yoon Dal Se for medieval migrants and Takeuchi Yasuto for modern migrants. In this chapter, I aim to connect the two and contract the temporal distance, gleaning insights on the enduring links between memories in contemporary social space. Both waves of migration feature in the twenty-first century fabric of recollections and remembrances. Historians Jonathan Bull and Steven Ivings direct attention to grassroots movements and ‘memory activist groups’ as oft overlooked yet vital allies to Korean associations in Japan (Bull and Ivings 2020, 17). I thus compare grassroots and municipal community initiatives in Kyushu to represent certain memories and influence public conception of Korean’s lives in the region as a valued heritage sourced from the Korean peninsula.2 In this chapter’s first section, I focus on the memorials representing the displacement of Koreans during Hideyoshi’s military invasion, namely the village of Miyama in Kagoshima Prefecture and town of Arita in Saga Prefecture. For the second section, I move forward in time to investigate conflict over memorials about Korean migration under Japanese colonization, focusing on the coal fields of Fukuoka Prefecture’s Chikuhō region. These two sections reveal that memories of the two periods cannot be easily disambiguated in the twenty-first century. The chapter’s conclusion synthesizes how some organizations focus exclusively on the memory of one migrant wave or the other, while others recognize how some descendants of the medieval migrants did not disappear, but rather lived through the twentieth century’s colonial violence alongside the modern migrant labourers. Recent attempts by residents to mediate the polar izing conflict between memories in their local communities show the capacity The contributions of Boyle and Mateoc in this volume also examine grassroots memory and heritage initiatives in Kyushu.

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for memorials to negotiate between local, municipal, national, international, and global levels of discourse. 1

Memories of Medieval Migration

In Kyushu’s public space, diplomatic processions of Korean envoys have informed the prominent memory of Korean migrants to the Japanese archipelago in the early modern period. The hundreds of travellers who made up these processions were voluntary visitors who traversed the Korea Strait twelve times between 1607 and 1811. Viewed in a positive light, these Korean officials brought the Joseon Court closer to the Tokugawa Shogunate by travelling to the capital of Edo and facilitating cultural exchange along the way. Viewed more cynically, the processions were also a recurring state ritual that demonstrated Tokugawa authority over foreign parties, synergizing with the popular custom of parades that represented and beautified lordly power (Toby 2019, 144). In the twenty-first century, Japanese and Korean municipalities work with civil society organizations to stage annual re-enactments of these envoys’ visits in many of the coastal towns they passed through hundreds of years previous. Historian Yi Chin-hui views these historical re-enactments a way to commemorate a ‘new friendship between the two neighbors’ (Yi 1985, 35). As a more permanent representation, a memorial to the envoys, entitled The Korean Goodwill Trust Missions Memorial (Chōsen tsūshinshi jōriku enryū no chihi), stands in Shimonoseki near the Sino-Japanese War Treaty Museum (Nisshin Kōwa Kinenkan) and the Sister City Square (Shimai toshi hiroba) (see Figure 12.1). The memorial’s spatial placement associates early modern goodwill between Japanese and Korean diplomats with twenty-first century Japan’s peaceful links to other urban municipalities across the globe. Constructed in 2001, the memorial had a wide range of powerful sponsors, including the Shimonoseki City Hall and the Republic of Korea Residents Union in Japan, usually called Mindan (Zainihon Daikanminkoku Mindan) (Tongil-net 2019). It is more difficult to locate North Korea-affiliated sponsorship of memorial activities or sites via the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, as a counterpart to Mindan. Despite this cheery memory of the envoys, if we jump backwards over the temporal boundary that divides Japan’s early modern (1603–1868) period from its late medieval era (1467–1603), we find a less palatable explanation for why these Korean diplomats routinely traversed geographical and political ­borders. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who is most famous for uniting the feuding Jap anese domains, later invaded the Korean peninsula between 1592 and 1598.

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The Korean Goodwill Trust Missions Memorial in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture Photographs by the author unless otherwise indicated

Many scholarly publications have studied this invasion from a military history perspective, but some scholars have also emphasised the war’s terrible aftermath and civilian causalities (Naitō 1976, Chŏng and Yi 2008). After Hideyoshi died from illness in 1598, his Japanese forces departed the peninsula, leaving much of the land in devastation. Many Japanese lords and soldiers conveyed Korean civilians back with them to the archipelago, turning tens of thousands of men and women into migrants. This capture and relocation of Koreans for their labour was not without precedent. An informal custom of enslaving debtors existed in medieval Japanese domains (Nelson 2004, 489) and Japanese pirates (wakō) operating in the Korea Strait periodically kidnapped Korean artisans and brought them to Kyushu (Maske 2011, 14). This custom did not, however, negate Korean perceptions that Hideyoshi’s claim to humans as resources was unjust. Thus, the Korean envoys who officially visited Japan first in 1607 aimed to resolve the plight of their displaced subjects by negotiating with Tokugawa Ieyasu and local domain lords to facilitate their repatriation. Around six thousand Koreans returned in the following four decades through the help of subsequent diplomatic envoys or by their own resources, but the majority did not return to the peninsula. The spatial

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stasis, or settling, of these Koreans in the archipelago can be explained by: (1) Japanese lords’ constricting authority over movement within their domains, (2) warnings that they would be branded shameful wartime traitors if they returned to the Joseon Court’s sovereign space, and (3) personal preference to their new environment over the war-torn peninsula (Yonetani 2008). The ways in which these first-­generation migrants chose how to raise their descendants affected the degree that types of Korean heritage are now visible at the local level. In Kyushu, the most prominent group of medieval Korean migrants is ­composed of potters. Many of these artisans passed down their craft through multiple generations and are now identified across Japan by their high-quality wares. Small communes of Korean potters are scattered around the island, for example, in Miyama in Kagoshima Prefecture, Arita and Karatsu in Saga Prefecture, and Onta in Oita Prefecture. Saga Prefectural Kyushu Ceramic Museum (Saga Kenritsu Kyūshū Tōji Bunkakan) is one regional authority that traces the history of these potters’ artisanal lineages. In the museum’s permanent exhibition, visited in 2018, a large wall map shows the spread of Korean pottery styles throughout Kyushu from the seventeenth century. It directly shows the movement of crafting styles across Kyushu and the locations of Korean kilns. This is a materialistic memory that does not foreground the human creators, their social constructions, or their relationships with Japanese residents. Curators showcase the Koreans’ wares in an organized narrative of technological and aesthetic development, but the lives and values of their creators remain nondescript and amorphous. These Koreans are thus often defined by what they produced and contributed to Japanese society. As art historians and collectors privilege the value of goods over people, the nature of Korean heritage takes on an aspect of a ‘commodity’ for Japanese markets. Perhaps the most prominent commune in Kyushu lies in the village of Miyama in the city of Hioki. Miyama bears the name ‘Birthplace of Satsuma Ware’ (Satsumayaki no Sato), referencing Kagoshima Prefecture’s prior incarnation as Satsuma Domain. However, the city’s tourist authorities are not wholly consistent about the role Korean potters, who continue to create Satsuma Ware today, have in the official branding. Outside of Miyama’s village boundaries, Hioki prioritizes its heritage of militaristic ethos and warrior traditions. By car, one can travel directly to the Miyama kilns, but by public transportation, Ijūin Station near Hioki City centre is the closest one can get by train. Out side this station, arrivals are greeted by a flat plaza with a towering statue of Shimazu Yoshihiro (1535–1619) on horseback, sculpted and installed by famed artisan Nakamura Shinya in 1988 (see Figure 12.2). The memorial’s inscription describes how this seventeenth lord of Satsuma Domain fought in Hideyoshi’s war in Korea in the 1590s and the battle of Sekigahara in 1600. This grandiose

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Statue of Shimazu Yoshihiro on Horseback in front of Ijūin station, Kagoshima Prefecture

monument celebrates Yoshihiro as a valiant warrior and compassionate patron of the arts, who—according to the monument’s inscription—‘laid the foundation for Satsuma Ware’. It does not mention any movement of Koreans to the area. This memorial to the regional ruler thus centres the prosperous history of the area as a product instigated by Japanese people alone. The ­Shimazu statue inscription’s author, Ijūin’s then-mayor Minowa Sakuma, wielded local institutional authority in implying that Koreans did not matter enough to be recognized in the official city remembrance (Kagoshimaken Hiokishi Shōbō Honbu 2017, 3). Inside Miyama itself, the Hioki City Hall Community Promotion ­Section distributes promotional material to guide visitors through Miyama’s commercial and historical sites, including several kilns. The 2017 pamphlet entitled ‘The Town of Satsuma Ware: Miyama’ showcases five Satsuma Ware potters and their kilns, but does not mention their Korean heritage, or their connection to the local community (Hioki City Hall 2017). In memories that do acknowledge the Korean ancestry of contemporary potters, some officials have claimed they migrated willingly to Kyushu to produce spectacular goods that the Japanese host communities could appreciate. For example, in Arita, a memorial was constructed in 1917 on the official tricentennial of Arita Ware (see Figure 12.3). This stone structure stood high on a hill above the Arita streets to remember Yi Sam-Pyung (d. 1655) and purportedly

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Monument to Yi Sam-Pyung (Lee Sampei), Pioneer of Arita Porcelain, Saga Prefecture Photograph by Lachie Hill

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celebrated his leadership in pottery production from 1617 and contribution to Japanese cultural development. This memory likely had a certain utility for the municipal administrators who built the monument. Completed just seven years after the Japanese Empire officially annexed the Korean peninsula, this memorial portrayed an exemplar image of Yi’s subservience as a Korean in the face of destructive colonial conquest. Such monuments mark the image of a ‘good’ migrant who selflessly left their homeland to support their overlords in the metropole. Through this lens, Korean potters received boons from benevolent lords, who enabled their success and allowed them to stay to create pottery for the sake of the domain’s and state’s desires. Since the migrants were producing profitable goods for the sake of higher social echelons, their existence within the national borders was accepted and even lauded in the framework of a mutually beneficial arrangement. An oppositional narrative of the Korean migrants’ presence remembers that the potters were forcibly brought to Japanese domains under Hideyoshi’s direction. This position draws supporting evidence from people like Buddhist monk Kyō Nen (b. 1534), who wrote a chilling testimony in late 1596 as he accompanied Japanese soldiers on the Korean coastline: Of the myriad traders who came from Japan, there are even those who came to deal in humans… they bought up men, women, young, and old, tying rope around their necks and binding them together. The traders drove them ahead, and because they did not bind their ankles together, they prodded them from behind with rods… the scene was not wholly unlike hell’s demon guards and resentful, lamenting sinners. (Chōsen 2000, p. 49) Kyō’s account points to the existence of specialized slave-traders in Asia and shows the sympathy some Japanese residents had for captive Koreans at the time. In Saga Prefectural Nagoya Castle Museum (Saga Kenritsu Nagoyajō Hakubutsukan), curators mediate the history of the invasion’s launching point with accounts like Kyō’s, teaching the public to remember the grandeur of ­castle ruins alongside the military’s victims. In Miyama’s Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Tōgō Shigenori Museum (Moto Gaishō Tōgō Shigenori Kinenkan), information panels dedicated to the local history declare that the Korean potter community derived from prisoners (horyo) who were forced to come to Kyushu. This memory is motivated by Tōgō’s descent from these migrants, and his high stature at the nation-state level assists in legitimizing such descrip tions of his ancestors. The museum also explains that in Satsuma Domain, the Korean potters and their families were segregated from Japanese society. This

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isolation was meant to preserve their craft secrets and the quality of goods delivered to the Shimazu lords, but also limited communication between migrant and host communities. Although Koreans’ skills were valued, they did not necessarily receive a high status or leeway to express discontentment. ­Eighteenth-century records indicate that within the first several decades of Koreans’ arrival in Fukuoka Domain, the potters formally requested permission to ‘return to their own country’. Kuroda Tadayuki (1602–1654), with a ‘contrary temper,’ reacted such that these potters were ‘held in disfavor, their stipend was removed, and they were forbidden to leave the province’ (Maske 2011, 29). As such, for ruling families like the Shimazu and Kuroda, the ­Koreans’ production of wares was more important than their freedom of movement. Simultaneously, Koreans’ dedication to their craft through generations was one way to preserve whatever sustenance the extractive political economy afforded them. Since the 1990s, South Korean civil society organizations objected to the 1917 Arita memorial’s glorification of Hideyoshi’s violence and Korean subservience. In response, the Arita City government urged them to be satisfied with how the memorial’s creators praised Korean migrants’ value to Japanese ­society (Asahi Shinbun 2005). This conflict was resolved when, in 2005, the Yi ­Sam-Pyung H ­ onouring Committee (Ri Sanpei Kōkenshō Iinkai), composed of Arita’s p ­ ottery-affiliated residents, erected the currently-standing monument in commemoration of ‘Japan-Korea Friendship Year’ (Nikkan Yūjōnen no 05-nen). This grandiose stone pillar is called the ‘Monument of Yi Sam-Pyung (Lee Sampei), Pioneer of Arita Porcelain,’ and overshadows the 1917 version right beside it. The plaque explains in Korean, Japanese, and English, that Yi was a ‘pioneer’ who Nabeshima Naoshige (1538–1618) captured and forced to first cooperate as a guide in Hideyoshi’s war and then serve as a potter in Saga Domain. The explanation declares the deep gratitude the ceramics industry has for Yi’s artistic developments and stimulation of ‘beautiful bilateral exchange’. The smaller 1917 monument has been preserved to recognize the problems in the colonial ideologies that the twenty-first century historical awareness aims to correct (Asahi Shinbun 2005). The memories thus far have largely been in the category of Tamanoi’s ‘remembrances,’ but there are also recollections kept alive by descendants of the medieval migrant families. Among the various potters’ families who stayed in Miyama, the Chin Jukan family claims an unbroken lineage traceable to the peninsula. Since arriving in Satsuma domain on Shimazu Yoshihiro’s ships in 1598, the first Chin patriarch collaborated with other Korean families to orga nize resources and start producing what came to be called Satsuma Ware. Roughly three centuries later, in the Meiji-period, Chin Jukan the 12th earned accolades for various pieces presented at international exhibitions; his first

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was at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, and his last was at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The current Kiln of the 15th Chin Jukan, on its official website, explains how the Chin family came to be seen as a ‘native’ representative of the Japanese nation through these awards (Kiln of 15th Chin Jukan n.d.). Now, Chin Jukan the 15th’s works have been featured in the Cheongsong Folk Museum and Namwon City’s Kim Byungjong Art Museum, garnering recognition in South Korea and inspiring tourists to visit his main kiln in Miyama (Interview with Kiln Museum curator Aug. 9, 2020). Inside Miyama, road signs advertise its pottery heritage in Korean, Japanese, and English, hinting at a diverse mix of visitors or residents (see Figure 12.4).

 Trilingual signpost in the center of Miyama, Kagoshima Prefecture

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The Kiln of the 15th Chin Jukan is now a hybrid structure of museum, showcasing four centuries of the family’s history and creations, and kiln, showcasing current labour methods. According to a curator, many of the visitors who come from South Korea want to see the heritage of Koreans originally stranded in a foreign land. These visitors reportedly honour the potters as individuals who not only survived the invasion of their homeland and subsequent displacement, but moreover succeeded in creating marvellous works of high renown (Interview with Kiln Museum curator Aug. 9, 2020). Thus, this memory of the potters tries to primarily raise up the victims’ ancestors, rather than attacking the perpetrators of forced labour like Shimazu. In 1968, novelist Shiba Ryōtarō’s (1923–1996) published a popular historical novel (Kokyō wasurejigataku sōrō) that used interviews with Chin Jukan the 14th to popularize the Miyama community in post-war Japanese society, tying it to a memory of forced migration. Shiba expresses that through the centuries, the Chin and other neighbouring families have steadfastly desired to return to their homeland because they were separated from their roots against their will (Shiba 1968). This novel makes the physical location of Miyama accessible to anyone able to read the printed text, transmitting the ideas that discrimination existed in the early modern period, while admiring the capacity for Koreans to overcome adversity. As a form of media, the book continues to move throughout the nation-state, but also is a snapshot of the viewpoint of the Korean community in Miyama. Historian Yusuke Matsuura identifies three factors that affect how a m ­ emory is sustained or erased from public view: ‘the number of living people concerned, commemoration, and media coverage’ (Matsuura 2019, 325). If brought into conversation with Tamanoi, the memory Matsuura is describing is akin to ‘recollection’ wherein people share their lived experiences with the public, as he is focused on the public awareness of a victim’s perspectives. Regarding the first factor, the potters’ descendants themselves exist but seem to be somewhat detached from this clash between the two different memories described above. Chin Jukan the 15th, as current head of his family, routinely explains to visitors that no one can know for sure whether Lord Shimazu forced his ancestors to migrate or if they came willingly (Interview with Kiln Museum curator Aug. 9, 2020). His stance is likely informed by private h ­ istorical d­ ocumentation and familial oral histories. Accordingly, the explanatory panels in the exhibit area of the Kiln of the 15th Chin Jukan have vague explanations. The neutral rheto ric in Japanese and English simply says that Koreans ‘came’ to Kyushu. Reasons for why they moved, and why they stopped moving after reaching the Satsuma Domain, do not feature in the exhibit’s narrative. The exhibit hall’s curator informally disclosed that the Meiji Period was a time of harsh discrimination for resident Koreans, when many Koreans changed their names to appear

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more Japanese. Maintaining an exception to this trend, the Chin family’s refusal to allow their name and bloodline to be forgotten has lasted to the present day (Kiln of 15th Chin Jukan. n.d.). Now, Chin Jukan the 15th seems intent on maintaining pride in Korean identity while smoothing over international and personal relations between Korean and Japanese people. His avoidance of controversy might be pragmatic, since pursuit of justice for forced migration policies could alienate his clientele and polarize the local community dynamics. As a surviving vessel for the recollections of his ancestors, Chin kin have perhaps the closest proximity to the medieval period experiences, especially since many of the migrant family lines had assimilated by the colonial period to escape discrimination. Thus, Chin patriarchs hold sociocultural capital to help legitimize a memory that could be more constructive than one criticizing Korean-Japanese relations. The shrine of Tamayamagū in Miyama is an indicator of how memories of migrant Koreans may have changed due to Matsuura’s second factor, ‘commemoration’. The Tōgō Shigenori Museum houses an exhibit on the shrine’s history, explaining that Koreans first established a religious site around a boulder in 1605 to venerate legendary founder of the first Korean kingdom, Dangun. Koreans conducted ritual performances at the shrine including traditional Korean dances and music replete with drums (Watanabe 2019, 9). The ­Shimazu family built an additional shrine building on the site in 1766, and in 1917, local officials replaced the building featuring Korean architectural styles with a Shintō shrine hall (Watanabe 2019, 8). As such, Edo-period domain authorities co-opted, then Taishō-period town authorities rewrote the spatial dimensions where Koreans practiced their cultural heritage. Despite this, according to the Tōgō Shigenori Museum, even after the 1917 modification of the site’s architecture, Koreans’ ritual practices continued for several decades until the head shrine priest Matsuda Michiyasu passed away. Even after the religious site’s physical form was reshaped in conformity with national systems of worship, the migrants’ descendants continued to perform their own rituals, dances, and songs. This group behaviour claimed the space to maintain a ritualized cultural presence in the vicinity of their kilns as production sites. Rituals performed at Tamayamagū were not essential aspects to pottery production and are not publicly advertised but were a part of Koreans’ in-group recollections and an expression of their heritage linking identity to the peninsula. The embodiment of communal memories in physical space can be seen off the beaten path in Arita as well. Some distance away from the 2005 Monu ment of Yi Sam-Pyung, a detailed statue of Yi Sam-Pyung sits in the forest by the quarry where the migrant potters extracted kaolin clay (see Figure 12.5). A plaque placed by the town of Arita in 1998 accompanies the statue, explaining

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Statue of Yi Sam-Pyung near Arita kaolin quarry, Saga Prefecture Photograph by Lachie Hill

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that in 1809, the practice of one type of Korean dance (Kōrai odori in J­ apanese) had been prohibited, and production was not faring well. As a result, the descendants of Korean migrants wanted permission from the domain’s lord to revive the ritual practice of their ancestors in hope of restoring local prosperity. Nothing is written about if they succeeded, but the sign also explains how small stone shrines dedicated to Korean deities are scattered around the Arita environs, invoking the name of ancient Korea (Kōrai). These were probably built by Korean residents to claim the local space as markers of non-Japanese spirituality and provide anchoring points to which they could link their memories. As anthropologist Joy Sather-Wagstaff argues, we need to pay attention to how physical objects in space are ‘a means of viewing places and objects as triggers or precipitants for memory and heritage-making rather than of ­memory and heritage as objects themselves’ (Sather-Wagstaff 2015, 195). The erection of memorial stones and religious architecture shows Koreans’ resolution to remain in the local area, grounding themselves through physical objects that could teach later generations or outsiders that the current community valued a heritage from a place beyond state borders and discourse. The objects can also serve as fenceposts to tell others not just that recollections of Koreanness exist, but also that the people will try to protect the memories and even expand beyond the protected realm transmitting the information to others. In actuality, the scope of early modern Korean migrants should not be restricted to potters alone. Besides artisans, other specialists and aristocrats migrated at the turn of the sixteenth century, and were forced, coerced, or invited according to varying circumstances. These upper-class Koreans had their permanent residency legitimized by cultural contributions, such as calligrapher Kō Kōzen, or through marriage to Japanese lords, such as Julia Otaa, who was the subject of a recent stage musical put on by the Warabiza troupe in Akita Prefecture in 2014 (Korea Museum 2017, 12). These migrants seem to have been accepted into the upper ranks of Japanese society while maintaining their status as Koreans, sharing the same space as the diplomatic envoys, and presenting a media image of co-existence. If we reshape the scope again and look outside of this elite group, we catch sight of tens of thousands of Koreans who came to the archipelago as laborers by 1598 and have not been recorded as having returned officially with the Korean envoys or by their own means (Korea Museum 2017, 4). Dispersed as individuals and groups throughout the archipelago without specialized skills or social capital, these Koreans relegated to menial labour were in a less advan taged position to negotiate socio-political power or publicly assert a distinct Korean cultural identity over the decades post-invasion (Yoon 2003, 264;

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Watanabe Daimon 2014). Their presence as groups and individuals might be revealed through the private markers of Koreanness only visible on the local level. Ritual behaviour may not be visible today, but the Koreans’ markers themselves and the explanatory panels erected by local museums and education boards appreciate the non-labourer side of the residents’ lifestyles and values. As sociologists Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright point out, considering displaced persons’ perspectives, ‘not everyone counts as a worker, and, not everyone wants to count as a worker’ (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2011, 9). The sites that migrants themselves established seem to reveal more about a shared cultural identity than does the production of pottery wares, the popular remembrance of which excludes migrants who do not make ‘successful’ contributions to local or national space. In any case, the ­temporal distance of Hideyoshi’s invasions from the present makes personal recollections of victimhood or resilience more difficult to find than traces of the larger, more recent wave of the colonial period. 2

Memories of Modern Migration

The enormous wave of Korean migration in the twentieth century is much more contentious than that of the medieval period. In 1910, the Japanese Empire formally absorbed the Korean polity as a colony, and under colonial rule Korean migration to Japan expanded. Various socioeconomic pressures led Koreans to migrate, with many seeking to escape the harsh conditions they faced in the peninsula. Japanese companies also sought to encourage Korean migration as a source of cheap labour and accordingly many Koreans seeking to escape poverty increasingly migrated to Japan (Weiner 1994, 45–56). Between 1920 and 1930, the nation-wide percentage of Koreans in the Japanese metropole jumped from 0.05 to 0.46 percent, with almost 300,000 Koreans distributed throughout the archipelago (Tonomura 2012, 54–55). This was already many times the population size of the medieval migrant wave and dispersed across many of the same geographical locations of resource extraction or production. Subsequently, the Empire enacted its infamous ‘mobilization’ initia tives of Korean, Chinese, and other Asian labourers with increasing levels of severity: ‘recruitment’ ( ) from 1939, ‘official mediation’ (kan assen) from 1942, and ‘conscription’ (chōyō) from 1944 (Underwood 2006, 13–14). Recent estimates made by non-governmental organizations have concurred that the overall number of Korean migrants during the colonial period surpassed one million, with the majority arriving during the last six years of the Asia-Pacific War (Nozoe 2010, 169).

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Most colonized Koreans who moved to Kyushu entered wage labour contracts in the coal mining industry, echoes of which linger in the region long after production ceased. Like elsewhere in the world, coal mining in Japan has an infamous legacy of drawing in the destitute and marginalized residents of resource-rich regions to labour under the ground. When the Japanese resident population did not suffice, mining companies put Koreans, Chinese, and prisoners of war to work in the dangerous and violent underground facilities. Korean migrants resided in large numbers in the rural Chikuhō coal fields of northern Kyushu; in 1928, 8.8 percent of miners in the Chikuhō region had come from Korea, numbering just under 6,000 men and women (Arents 2015, 124– 136). Between 1939 and 1945, over 130,000 Koreans were relayed to the mines in Fukuoka Prefecture alone (Takeuchi 2013, 163). After the Chikuhō mines shut down in the 1970s, labourers left company housing to find e­ mployment ­elsewhere, but some industrial scars remain. Broken-down structures and abandoned facilities have been mapped in databases like the open-access website Haikyo.info (Haikyō kensaku chizu), which attracts enthusiasts of dark tourism along with those nostalgic for industrial technology. Large mounds of mined waste material, called spoil tips (bota yama), were once black and jagged, and are now smoothed over with green blankets of foliage. Barebones barracks for the migrant workers were sometimes aligned in rows and segregated by racial group. These are now largely rundown or have been erased from the landscape for the sake of modern high-rise apartments (Shiba 2000, 20–23; Takeuchi 2013, 131). Public history institutions dedicated to preserving the coal mining legacy include Iizuka City Historical Museum (Iizukashi Rekishi Shiryōkan), Miyawaka City Coal Memorial Museum (Miyawakashi Sekitan Kinenkan), and Tagawa City Coal History Museum (Tagawashi Sekitan Rekishi Hakubutsukan). These museums prioritize local histories of the mining process and technology, and do not uniformly pay attention to the experiences of miners in the Empire’s differentially unjust social hierarchy. Since the colonial period, many memorials have been constructed in Fukuoka Prefecture, erected by local organizations to teach others how to remember Korean migrants’ lives (see Takeuchi 2013, 120 for a comprehensive map). One type of organization that memorialized the workers was the mining companies themselves. At a Kaijima Mining Company (Kaijima Kōgyō Gōmei Kaisha) mining facility in Iizuka, laborers constructed a monument to Tawaraguchi Kazuichirо̄ in October 1929 (Hayashi 2010, 46). As an overseer, Tawaraguchi created and operated education initiatives to teach Japanese language and mining techniques to Korean miners. On the surface this seems wholly benev olent, but historian Kim Kwang-ryul explains how Japanese historians in the post-war period have excessively glorified Tawaraguchi’s actions. According to

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the writers of the official history of the town of Miyata, Tawaraguchi gave Koreans ‘proper harmonious guidance’ (yūwa zendō) to help them fit into society, avoiding blatant racist discrimination (Kim 2013, 81). Kim problematizes this memory, criticizing the classes as a tool from self-righteous administrators for ‘eliminating the Korean-ness from Koreans and remaking them into Japanese’ (Kim 2013, 78). Within the Kaijima employment systems that assumed Korean inferiority, Tawaraguchi’s programmes aimed for Koreans’ conformity while not challenging how overseers regularly perpetuated violence. In this light, the Tawaraguchi Monument’s presentation of harmony distorts Koreans’ everyday realities. The memorial stone’s inscription speaks from the perspective of the Korean miners, as ‘us Korean brethren’. It further claims that the essence of harmony in Tawaraguchi’s education initiative represented the atmosphere of the whole company. To plan this message, Kaijima executives had consulted with Fukuoka Prefecture officials and decided that they would only allow the construction on the condition that the inscription included the Koreans’ feelings of thanks and indebtedness to the company at large (Hayashi 2010, 46). In one section of the inscription, the phrasing of ‘pass down the voice of harmony between natives and Koreans’ (naisen yūwa no koe o sazuku) divides insiders and outsiders at the local level. Ultimately, the inscription co-opts the Koreans’ voices to accept colonial rule and the company’s benevolent gifts (Kim 2013, 82–83). The object’s memory thus does not represent Korean experiences, yet the pretence of their authorship memorializes the subjects’ happiness with colonial rule. In 1935, Kaijima Company constructed a second monument that has been dubbed the Gratitude Memorial (Shaonhi). According to former miner Choe Sundok, the creators were all Korean women whom the company had mobilized because they tended to be assigned aboveground roles, with men working below. Japanese miners did not participate, only offsetting costs with monetary donations after completion (Kim 2013, 21). Like the 1929 monument’s embellished recollection, the Gratitude Memorial’s inscription invokes company benevolence as well as the ideal of harmonious coexistence between Koreans and Japanese. As the text narrates, some of Kaijima’s Korean community were scheduled to be fired and scattered by the closure of part of the mine’s seventh shaft. However, news came of the opening of a new section for the Koreans to work in, which overjoyed the miners: ‘Us brethren were very pleasantly sur prised, brought to tears… the company, taking up harmonious coexistence a principle, enabled us to be at ease in our daily life and enjoy our work’ (Kim 2013, 91–92). The Koreans’ reactions, whether exaggerated or not, were memorialized to make an emotional appeal for readers to support Kaijima as a humane employer. Certainly, having work would be better than having none. However,

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barely any miners in the 1930s were safe or happy in their dangerous w ­ orking environment. Companies trapped Korean migrants in debt and segregated lodgings, enforcing stasis controls with police assistance such that miners exclaimed that ‘running away was gambling one’s life’ (Kim Chanjon 1980, 18). The inscription also claims that the ‘first of our brethren came in Taishō 6 [1917], obeying Kaijima Company’. (Kim 2013, 51). Again, appropriating the term for brethren, the Kaijima narrators acted as the authority on the K ­ oreans’ communal heritage. This phrase also portrays the Kaijima company as the total range of the world within which the Korean migrants existed, as if their identity and purpose were one and the same with the company’s capitalist mission. The memory that Koreans were content with their lot brushes aside real objections against imperial policies, with anger at racist discrimination manifesting in outbursts like the 1932 strike across multiple Iizuka mines (see Smith 1996). After the hundreds of strikers settled for promises of partial reform, ­Kaijima officials probably worried about future insurrections, and so produced the Gratitude Memorial three years later to assure society at large of Korean ­subservience. The top-down message markedly contrasts with the Koreans’ viewpoints and trauma that seldom surfaced in the popular discourse of ‘­harmony’ seen in local and national newspapers. As material objects, the hewn rock slabs of the Tawaraguchi Memorial and Gratitude Memorial are reservoirs containing hours of effort exerted by labourers’ bodies, some disproportionately female. According to Choe ­Sundok, instead of wholly rejecting the memorials, many Korean miners applied their own interpretations to the physical markers, rejected the Kaijima narratives, and viewed both stones as memorials to their fallen brethren (ireihi). The migrants and their descendants could honour and grieve their community’s dead by ascribing their own memories to the object (Hayashi 2010, 50). From this account, we can see that a single object can be claimed by different groups to represent different memories. With the memorial as a focal point, the ­Kaijima Company aimed to spread remembrance of state-sponsored happiness in the text, while Choe’s community aimed to recollect their experiences of violent coercion through word of mouth and routine vigils. Sometime in the early 1990s, both Kaijima monuments were relocated for undisclosed reasons to play a new role at the Miyawaka City Hall complex, less than a kilometer away from the demolished ruins of the Kaijima Company mining facilities (see Figure 12.6). There are no signs explaining what these stones are, and due to weathering of the rock and the height of the monu ments, it is very difficult to read the inscriptions on them. Nonetheless, staff members at the Miyawaka Lycoris (Miyawaka Rikorisu), a joint public library and lifelong learning centre in the complex, say they routinely provide a history of the two memorials to the city’s schoolteachers. The documentation used at

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Tawaraguchi Monument (right) and Gratitude Memorial (left) near Miyawaka City Hall, Fukuoka Prefecture

information sessions distinguishes between the pre- and post-1939 phases of Korean migration and emphasizes that students should learn how Japanese and Koreans were able to coexist in the region. This local pedagogy synergizes with a possibly concerted effort to integrate Korean heritage into the themes of Fukuoka Prefecture’s school curriculum. By design or coincidence, the placement of the two memorials pairs them thematically with a set of vertical signs erected by the Miyawaka City Education Committee (Miyawakashi Kyōiku Iinkai). These white signs, easily readable from the street, feature slogans such as ‘Protect human rights for a bright society’ and ‘Stop discrimination in the bright town of Miyawaka’ (see Figure 12.7). Further, the story of another monument in Miyakawa, the Restoration of Rights Pillar (Fukken no Tō) erected in 1982, is also referenced in middle-school lessons. Located in Sengoku Park (Sengoku Kōen) and maintained by the municipal Tourism Section, two stone figures of a male and female coal miner stand in representation of workers’ rights above the Japanese and English inscription: Workers of Every Nation Are Citizens of the World Their Past—Isolation and Oppression Their Future—Solidarity and Dignity

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Like the Education Committee’s signs, the Restoration of Rights Pillar issues a universalist statement supporting marginalized laborers, identifying a c­ ategory within which memories of specific groups, such as Koreans, can be represented in. In this case, the push against nationalist, class, and gender divisions comes from the municipality’s initiative within its jurisdiction, and links residents to a global community. In the inscription’s definition of time, the ‘Past’ is a

Sign saying ‘Protect human rights for a bright society’ near Miyawaka City Hall, Fukuoka Prefecture

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fixed negativity and the ‘Future’ is an imagined positivity. An assessment of the ‘Present’ is absent, but this absence might invite viewers to imagine how they might fit into a transition period between the two visions of society. In Tagawa, a city east of Miyawaka and Iizuka, two monuments face each other at the Tagawa Coal Memorial Park (Tagawashi Sekitan Kinen Kōen), demonstrating the current tension surrounding memories of the local Koreans’ presence. One is the Conscripted Korean Victim Memorial (Kankokujin Chōyō Giseisha Ireihi), built in 1988 by Mindan’s branch in Fukuoka Prefecture. This monument’s inscription writes that Koreans were forced to migrate to the metropole and work under inhumane policies. It combines this mourning of their pain with a future-oriented hope that such an occurrence will never be repeated (Takeuchi 2013, 127; also see Gerster and Fulco’s contribution in this volume). A coalition of civil organizations in Tagawa reacted to this by constructing an oppositional monument in 1989. Called the Tagawa Region Coal Mine Martyr Memorial Stone (Tagawachiku Tankō Jun’nansha Irei no Hi), it ­conveys gratitude to all 20,000 miners of the area for their dedication to, and sacrifices made for, coal production. Historian Takeuchi Yasuto points out that this Martyr Memorial Stone presumes all miners lived equally, with no criticism of national policy, militarism, or company motivations (Takeuchi 2013, 127–128). While these memorials reflect unresolved disputes between public organizations active in Tagawa, the juxtaposition of these two inscriptions in a public park creates a stimulating learning opportunity. The differences between these two memorials’ messages shows that there are multiple interpretations of local history. As the objects do not impose on passers-by, they allow the viewer to choose which memory to internalize and remember for oneself, and on which side of the border to stand. In addition, in 2002 a third memorial stone was installed next to the extant pair, mourning the souls of 38,935 Chinese laborers who also worked in the Tagawa mines. This Repose Memorial (Chinkon no Hi) helps expand the public consciousness beyond thinking simply in terms of a binary nationalist rivalry between Japanese and Koreans (2000nin nettowaaku. n.d.). The 1989 Martyr Memorial Stone’s sponsorship hints at the rise of the right-wing politicized memory movement, as larger-scale organizations have pushed back against claims of forced labour. The book The Truth and S­ plendor of Coal Mining (Tankō no Shinjitsu to Eikō) was published in 2005 by Fuka Junsuke as director of the Iizuka City Historical Museum. Fukumachi attests that justice-oriented research done by scholars such as Hayashi Eidai selectively manipulates the testimonies of laborers, and that Hayashi’s bias comes from not having experienced the mines himself. Further, Fukamachi

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declares that the forced labour narrative is disparaging not only to Japanese people because it ‘hurts their pride,’ but to Koreans as well because it implies the victims were too powerless and unskilled to stop themselves from being carried away from their homelands. This book demonstrates how revisionist narratives argue that historians and activists who remember histories of forced labour were too far from the mines to know the truth, and that only experiencing the environment gives memories legitimacy. At the same time, such narratives cherry-pick Korean recollections and downplay their trauma (Fukamachi 2005, 43, 89). Fukamachi wrote this text with assistance from Satani Masayuki, a member of the local Fukuoka branches of the right-wing Nippon Kaigi and the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho o Tsukuru Kai), which have been operational since 1996 and 1997, respectively. In 2017, over forty percent of the council members in Fukuoka Prefecture’s municipal government assembly aligned with Nippon Kaigi, making it a significant force to influence public history initiatives locally (Yoshifumi 2017, 8). In many areas of Japan, ‘grassroots nationalism’ has arisen along with a need to increase revenue through tourism. This protects the concept of the idyllic rural hometown (furusato/kokyō), selectively represents positive aspects of town histories, and links the municipal governance with local community consciousness (Shin 2010, 59). Opponents of such political authorities and local discrimination have striven to prioritize the demands of individual Korean families and descendants with hopes for their future welfare and inclusion within such rural communities. In Iizuka Cemetery (Iizuka Reien), a memorial building called the Hibiscus Hall (Mukugedō) has stood since 2000 at a small section called the International Exchange Plaza (Kokusai Kōryū Hiroba), where it inters the remains of Korean miners that have not been sent back to their families in the peninsula (see Figure 12.8). The Hibiscus Hall was erected by a non-profit organization called the International Exchange Plaza Hibiscus Hall Good Relations Organization (NPO Hōjin Kokusai Kōryū Hiroba Mukugedō Yūkō Shinzen no Kai), with support from Mindan (Sankei News 2016). As this name shows, many Japanese grassroots organizations coalesce for specific purposes to act in a bounded geographical space. This NPO explicitly advocates for the build ing to foster ‘good relations’ in respect to international communication. The Japanese and Korean text of the Hall’s stone plaque explains how over 150,000 Koreans and other foreigners were forced to migrate and labour in Chikuhō during the Asia-Pacific War. The development of modern Japan cannot justly be remembered without mentioning the ‘blood, sweat, and tears of Korean and other foreign labourers’ (see Figure 12.9).

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Figure 12.8 International Exchange Plaza and Hibiscus Hall at Iizuka Cemetery, Fukuoka Prefecture

 Memorial stone inscription for Hibiscus Hall, Fukuoka Prefecture

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In objection to this text, Iizuka City’s construction Chief Suga Seichō was quoted in the Sankei News in December 2015: Historical consciousness should conform to the movements of the national government, not those of the cities, towns, and villages. I want the organizations to correct the inscription [about forced labour] so that anyone can conduct international exchange in the plaza. (Sankei News 2015) In the purported interest of creating an inclusive global space, this municipal official expresses a need to silence the Koreans’ disruptive voices in order to create a harmonious memory in accordance with the Japanese government’s tendency at the top level to refute its responsibility for war crimes. As the Sankei News further reported in 2016, Nippon Kaigi’s Satani Masayuki spoke on behalf of his revisionist organizations to protest how the NPO had made the Plaza an ‘anti-Japan space’ in a public area (Sankei News 2016). As of August 2020, the memorial’s text has not yet been altered according to such demands. The plaque’s closing paragraph continues to express the organization’s wishes for the war’s suffering to never happen again, and for the Hibiscus Hall to serve as a transmission point for eternal peace between the peoples of the Earth. The Hibiscus Hall stands in front of a series of panels called the History Hallway (Rekishi Kairō), which facilitate a broader temporal frame of memory, but in a mediating way. The Hallway’s panels start in the ancient period and mention the important cultural legacy of the diplomatic envoys that came after Hideyoshi’s invasion. However, it does not tell the story of any migrants who then stayed in Japan, whether captives or not. The next panels trace the casualties of colonial rule and the post-war efforts for reconciliation, explaining how many of the 150,000 Koreans, Chinese, and prisoners of war were buried anonymously with coal scrap stones instead of gravestones that would identify their personal information. This may reveal the difficulties for early modern as well as modern laborers in finding the resources to create durable objects to honour their kin. The hallway ends with an image of the globe populated by peoples of various nations, pledging for national, ethnic, and individ ual exchange for the sake of peace. The grand scope of this conclusion points to the future and implicates the viewer in a global community with a duty to avoid the mistakes of the past. These panels were installed in November 2002 when a ceremony welcomed two hundred guests, including representatives of Fukuoka’s prefectural offices and of the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Japan. Through commemorative speeches and performances that represented Korean cultural heritage, the attendants advocated good relations

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between South Korea and Japan, as well as future unification of the peninsula (Takeuchi 2013, 159). It is therefore surprising that only in 2011 did the Hibiscus Hall Organization resolve to add Korean and English translations (Asahi 2011), with only the Korean translation in 2020. The ceremony does indicate the importance of vertical organization, as the local, prefecture, national, and international representatives condoned the Hibiscus Hall’s presence and message. In the city of Ōmuta, Woo Pan-Keun (1938–) used what Matsuura calls ‘grassroots diplomacy’ to construct the ­Conscription Victim Memorial (Chо̄ yо̄ Giseisha Ireihi) in 1995 to commemorate Korean labour in Mitsui company mines. As a representative of Mindan, Woo negotiated with the Mitsui corporation and municipal authorities to construct a memorialization site in public space. His promotion of the memorial coincided with his dissuasion towards efforts by Korean residents in Japan and the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs to secure reparations from the Japanese government and UNESCO (Matsuura 328–9). Woo’s personal investment in communal and international harmony has built on how the Japanese nation-state granted the memorial, and thus the dissemination of its memory, an official recognition of the Korean labour issue as part of Ōmuta’s heritage. In Miyama, Chin Jukan the 14th seems to have occupied a similar role of grassroots diplomat, seen in how he supported the elected officials of Korean and Japanese nation-states by ferrying a torch in 1998 from Namwon to Miyama to install as the town’s Japanese-Korean Goodwill Flame (Nikkan Yūkō no Honō). The celebration that November included Prime Ministers Kim Jong-Pil (1926– 2018) and Obuchi Keizō (1937–2000), a grand occasion for such a small village (Mindan 1998). It is more difficult to imagine this kind of diplomatic cooperation and sponsorship of memories occurring if they were more antagonistic than conciliatory. In the current form, such memorials promote constructive progress, while not directly interceding in the memories of conflict between the communities. Even so, this stance does not grant immunity from aggression or hate speech. Ōmuta Conscription Victim Memorial endured an act of defacement in 2015 by unknown hands, which wrote ‘Lies!!’ (J. Uso!!) in black paint on the descriptive plaque and obscured the text. In reaction, Woo described, ‘This memorial is more precious to me than children or grandchildren. This hurts more than if they injured my own body’ (Nishi Nippon Shimbun 2015). 3

Overlapping Memories in Public and Private

The following chart (see Table 12.1) rearranges the above-mentioned develop ment of memorials chronologically to visualize the overlap of efforts to situate

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memories visibly in physical space. It also tags the occurrences by the period of migration they refer to and location in Japan. As this chart reveals, memories of medieval and modern migration should not be treated as unrelated facets of Kyushu’s social landscape. The History Hallway, while not directly mentioning non-diplomatic migrants, contextualizes the Korean-Japanese history as one that spans multiple periods and changes in the shapes of the nation-states. Since the 1980s, multiple governmental and non-governmental organizations, including Mindan, have been active in creating memorials that reference the first wave, the second, or both. Miyama is emblematic of how the two migration waves intersect in resi dents’ lived experiences in the contemporary period. As mentioned above, Table 12.1

Date 1766 1917 1917 1929 1935 1982 1988 1988 1988 1989 1990s 1998

2002 2002

Chronology of the construction of selected Kyushu Memorials and the Korean migrant groups they memorialize

Constructed Memorial

Migrant Group

Tamayamagū Dangun shrine Tamayamagū shrine addition by Shimazu Monument to Yi Sam-Pyung Tamayamagū Shinto shrine hall Tawaraguchi Memorial Gratitude Memorial Restoration of Rights Pillar Memorial to Shimazu Yoshihiro Arita Town plaque about Korean shrines Conscripted Korean Victim Memorial Tagawa Region Coal Mine Martyr Memorial Stone Relocation of Tawaraguchi Memorial & Gratitude Memorial Japanese-Korean Goodwill Flame Hibiscus Hall and International Exchange

Medieval Medieval Medieval Medieval

The Korean Goodwill Trust Missions

Medieval

Medieval Medieval

Miyama Miyama Miyama

Tagawa

Tagawa Tagawa Miyawaka Miyama

Repose Memorial History Hallway at Hibiscus Hall Monument of Yi Sam-Pyung (Lee Sampei), Medieval Pioneer of Arita Porcelain

Tagawa

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the Tōgō Shigenori Museum memorializes the medieval Korean migrants as victims of forced labour who overcame their struggles. Tōgō Shigenori (1882– 1950) himself was born in Miyama and publicly claimed Korean ancestry. He was also imprisoned as a Class-A War Criminal due to his role as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Asia-Pacific War. In 1998, as politicians planned to commemorate the fourth centennial of Satsuma Ware by meetings with Japanese and Korean ambassadors in Kagoshima Prefecture, Miyama officials proposed inviting diplomats to the Tōgō Shigenori Museum as a symbol of good relations. The Korean representatives rejected the idea, probably cautious of what the visit would imply for geopolitics (Asahi Shinbun 1998). Civilians, though, are not as beholden to the international diplomatic codes of reputation and objective neutrality. As Chin Jukan the 14th told a reporter, ‘In the midst of Japan’s militarism and revulsion towards Koreans, Tōgō worked hard to prevent war’. A local woman spoke similarly, saying, ‘Everyone has experienced discrimination as a Korean from the old land. Despite that, Tōgō did his best for his ­country’ (Asahi Shinbun 1998). This local pride values Tōgō as part of the displaced Korean community’s heritage. It also balances a sense of migrants’ shared victimhood with a spirit of perseverance throughout the centuries. Ultimately, Chin endorsed the international event’s harmonious outlook by installing the Japanese-Korean Goodwill Flame. As historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot warns, ‘the production of traces is always also the creation of silences’ (Trouillot 2015, 26–29). While memorials like the Goodwill Flame become conspicuous traces in public view, it is important to recognize that humans categorized as migrants, as humans, have the right to exist outside of the public view. Academic inquiries like this one can emphasize residents’ migration backgrounds, criticize the resulting discrimination, and advocate for justice on behalf of the survivors and their descendants. However, many communities have made choices to proceed with life inside Japan, trying to disassociate from the status of ‘migrant’. Descendants of first-gener ation migrants can maintain their ancestral memories in private and are not obligated to use their recollections to teach others, especially when reliving the memories in public affects trauma. At a panel at Kyushu University in 2019, activist Yu Fuajun described how Korean descendants in Northern Kyushu now tend not to teach their children about peninsular lineages. This decreases the relevance of a migratory past in their current personal identity and reduces the chance of them being a target for discrimination. Many residents seem to want to phase out the concept of Koreans being ‘outsiders,’ and public displays of Korean clothing and customs are reportedly becoming rarer (Yu 2019). Yu further stated that Japanese media outlets, and East Asian reportage at large, exaggerate the poor quality of the Korean-Japanese relationship because

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of international-level politics. To overcome this barrier, residents in diverse spaces in Japan need to connect intentionally on the individual level to dispel prejudices about migrants’ lives, heritage, and value as humans (Yu 2019). Grassroots organizations seize this potential in local-level interactions. As residents cooperate with municipal authorities to shape a constructive path towards inclusive equity, they do not necessarily lose the power to teach neighbours and visitors about past trauma. While memorials can project memories as political platforms of community members, or mediate between contentious politics with respect to municipal education policies, they also offer a valuable affirming space with reference points for individuals to recall their ancestry and commemorate experiences as private heritage. References 2000nin Nettowaaku 2000. n.d. ‘Tabi no kiroku’. Accessed September 7, 2020. http:// www.halmoni-haraboji.net/exhibit/report/201001fieldwk/page18.html. Anderson, Bridget, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright. 2011. ‘Editorial: Why No ­Borders?’ Refuge, 26 (2): 5–18. Arents, Tom, and Norihiko Tsuneishi. 2015. ‘The Uneven Recruitment of Korean Miners in Japan in the 1910s and 1920s: Employment Strategies of the Miike and Chikuho Coalmining Companies.’ International Review of Social History, 60: 121–43. Asahi Shinbun. 1998. ‘Tо̄ gо̄ Shigenori Moto Gaishо̄ no Kinenkan han’nin no sai hyо̄ ka, dо̄ jо̄ to hinan to (rettо̄ 98)›. Asahi Shinbun. August 4, 1998. Asahi Shinbun. 2005. ‘Nikkan yūjōnen ni Arita yakkōgumi no hi kamamotora aratani setsuritsu’. Asahi Shinbun. July 26, 2005. Asahi Shinbun. 2011. ‘Kusakari hōyō ya paneru zousetsu he’. Asahi Shinbun. May 15, 2011, Fukuoka Edition. Asahi Shinbun. 2020. ‘“Chikuhō Ichidai” Songen komoru kamishibai’. Asahi Shinbun. Sept. 03, 2020, Fukuoka Edition. Bull, Jonathan and Steven Ivings. 2020. ‘Korean Repatriation and Historical Memory in Postwar Japan: Remembering the Ukishima-maru Incident at Maizuru and Shimokita.’ The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 18 (21/5): 1–21. Chŏng Tu-hŭi and Yi Kyŏng-sun. 2008. Jinshin sensō: 16 seiki nicchōchū no kokusai sensō Translated by Obata Michihiro. Akashi Shoten. Chōsen hinamiki kenkyūkai. 2000. Chōsen hinamiki wo yomu. Hōzōkan. Fukamachi Junsuke and Satani Masayuki. 2005. Tankō no shinjitsu to eikō: Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kyokō. Nōgata: Nippon Kaigi Fukuoka Chikuhō Shibu. Hayashi Eidai. 2010. Chikuhō, Gunkanjima: Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō, sono ato: Shashin kiroku. Fukuoka: Genshobō.

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Hioki City Hall, Higashi-Ichiki Branch (Community Promotion Section). 2017. ‘The Town of Satsuma Ware: Miyama.’ Kagoshima: Hioki City Hall. Kagoshimaken Hiokishi Shōbō Honbu. 2017. ‘Heisei 28nenban shōbō nenpō’. Kaldor, Mary. 2003. Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Polity Press. Kawase Toshiharu. 2009. ‘Intabyū: Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō o genjitsu de tsutaetudukete – Tanba mangan kinenkan no 20nen’. Buraku kaihō, 615: 73–81. Kiln of 15th Chin Jukan. n.d. ‘History.’ http://www.chin-jukan.co.jp/history.html. Accessed September 7, 2020. Kim Chanjon/Kin Santei. 1980. Hi no dōkoku: Zainichi chōsenjin kōfu no seikatsushi. Tōkyō: Tabata Shoten. Kim Kwang-ryul. 2013. ‘Naisen yūwa’ bidan no shinjitsu: Senjiki Chikuhō, Kaijima tankō chōsenjin kyōsei rōdō no jitai. Tōkyō: Ryokoin Shobō. Korea Museum. 2017. Bōkyō to dōka no hazama de: Chōsen hiryonin no seikatsu to bunka. Korea Museum. Maske, Andrew L. 2011. Potters and Patrons in Edo Period Japan: Takatori Ware and the Kuroda Domain. London: Ashgate. Matsuura, Yusuke. 2019. World Heritage and the Local Politics of Memory: The Miike Coal Mine and Fu no isan. Japan Forum, 31 (3): 313–335. Mindan Shinbun. 1998. ‘Kannichi yūkō no sekitō ga jomaku’. Mindan Shinbun, Dec. 02, 1998. Miyachi Hidetoshi. 2016. ‘Senjiki no Nihon ni okeru Chōsenjin rōdōsha nitsuite no saikentō.’ Nichishakai Keizaishi Gakkai Kyūshū Bukai Rejume: 1–12. Naitō Shunpo. 1976. Bunroku keichō eki ni okeru hiryonin no kenkyū. Tokyo University Press. Nelson, Thomas. 2004. ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan.’ Monumenta Nipponica, 59 (4): 463–492. Nishi Nihon Shinbun. 2015. ‘Chо̄ yо̄ Ireihi ni rakugaki Ōmuta Kuroi toryо̄ de ‘Uso!!’›. Nishi Nihon Shinbun, Oct. 24, 2015. Nozoe Kenji. 2010. Ikotsu wa sakebu. Tokyo: Shakai Hyōronsha. Park, Cheol Hee. 2019. Strategic Estrangement Between South Korea and Japan as a ­Barrier to Trilateral Cooperation. Washington, D.C.: Atlantic Council. Sankei News. 2015. ‘“Kyōsei renkō” nado kijutsu, Chōsenjin tsuitōhi mondai’. Sankei Nyūsu Sankei News. 2016. ‘Fukuoka, Iizuka no Chōsenjin Tsuitō shisetsu meguri sanpi’. Sankei , Feb. 6, 2016. Sather-Wagstaff, Joy. 2015. ‘Heritage and Memory.’ In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research; edited by Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, 191–204. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shiba Ryōtarō. 1968. Kokyō wasurejigataku sōrō. Tōkyō: Bungeishunjū. Shiba Takeo. 2000. Tankō to kyōsei renkō: Fuiirudo gaido. Soeda: ‘Chikuhō’ juku.

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Shin Chang’u. 2010. ‘Tenjihyō: Tanba mangan kinenkan’. Rekishigaku kenkyū, 868: 56–59. Smith, William Donald. 1996. ‘The 1932 Asō Coal Strike: Korean–Japanese Solidarity and Conflict.’ Korean Studies, 20: 94–122. Takeuchi Yasuto. 2013. Chōsa, Chōsenjin kyōsei rōdō 1: Tankōhen. Tōkyō: Shakai ­Hyōronsha. Tamanoi, Mariko Asano. 2013. ‘Kioku, Omoide/Memory.’ Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 25: 87–98. Toby, Ronald P. 2019. Engaging the Other: ‘Japan’ and Its Alter Egos, 1550–1850. Leiden: Brill. Tongil-net. 2019. ‘Nijū isseiki no Chōsen tsūshinshi kairo o yuku Tsushima kara Ōsaka’ (4) Akamagaseki (Shimonoseki)’ Accessed on 10 March 2021. https://www.tongil -net.org/-6/. Tonomura Masaru. 2012. Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Underwood, William. 2006. ‘Names, Bones, and Unpaid Wages (1): Reparations for Korean Forced Labor in Japan.’ The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 4 (9/0): 1–25. Watanabe Daimon. 2014. Jinshin baibai, dorei, rachi no nihonshi. Tōkyō: Kashiwa Shobō. Watanabe Yoshirō. 2019. ‘Hioki-shi Miyama Tamayama jinja denrai shiryō.’ Kagoshimaken bunkazai chōsa hōkōsho, 65: 7–28. Weiner, Michael. 1994. Race and Migration in Imperial Japan. London: Routledge. Yi Chin-hūi. 1985. ‘Korean Envoys and Japan: Korean-Japanese Relations in the 17th to 19th Centuries.’ Korea Journal, 25 (12): 24–35. Yonetani Hitoshi. 2008. ‘Chōsen shinryakugo ni okeru hiryonin no honkoku sōkan nitsuite’. In Jinshin sensō: 16 seiki nicchōchū no kokusai sensō. Edited by Chŏng Tu-hŭi and Yi Kyŏng-sun. Translated by Obata Michihiro. Tōkyō: Akashi Shoten. Yoon Dal Se. 2003. Yonhyakunen no nagai michi: Chōsen shuppei no konseki o tazunete. Kōchi: Riiburu Shuppan. Yoshifumi, Tawara. 2017. ‘What is the Aim of Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-Right Organi zation that Supports Japan’s Abe Administration?’ The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 15 (21/1): 1–23. Yu Fuajun. 2019. ‘Kyūshū kara kangaeru Nikkan no kore made to kore kara’. Lecture for the Kyushu University Future Asia Program.

CHAPTER 13

Okinoshima, Universal Heritage and Borders of Memory Edward Boyle Abstract This chapter will examine the inscription of the Sacred Island of Okinoshima as a ­U NESCO World Heritage Site in 2017 in order to demonstrate the importance of borders of memory for understanding the contested politics of heritage. Although relatively uncontroversial, the Okinoshima inscription process still gave rise to instances of contestation. The chapter uses one particular instance, an objection by South Korea’s UNESCO representative, to analyse contests over the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Okinoahima heritage site, contests which reflect disputes between different scales of heritage governance. A comparison with two other recent heritage nominations reveals how these contests reflect the variety of actors involved in the nomination process. Japan’s ultimate insistence on the integrity of the site demonstrates how efforts to fix the meanings associated with particular sites results in the institutionalization of various borders of memory at and through them. Studying the production of heritage necessitates attention to borders of memory operating at heritage sites and the ways in which they channel the meanings granted these sites in the present. Examining the UNESCO recognition process is a particularly effective means of highlighting these borders as the discrepancies visible in the narratives about sites produced for distinct audiences—local, national, and ­international— bring the borders of memory that enable heritage site’s to operate at various, distinct, scales into focus. The chapter emphasizes the political significance of b­ orders of mem ory for understanding contestation over heritage today.

Keywords – World Heritage Committee – Munakata – sacred heritage – boundaries – shrine – Shinto – East Asia

© Edward Boyle, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_014

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On the morning 9 July 2017, the 41st Session of the World Heritage Committee held in Krakow, Poland approved the inscription of the ‘Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region’ as a cultural heritage site of Outstanding Universal Value. Nominated by Japan the previous year, recognition of the site provided Japan with its 21st Property on the World Heritage list. Following extensive reports of the politicization of the World Heritage nomination process in the preceding years, which had culminated in Japan temporarily suspending its financial support for UNESCO in 2016, a great deal of attention was lavished on the Committee’s discussions. In the event, proceedings that year contrasted with the highly contentious nomination of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining two years earlier. Japan’s original nomination, a total of eight component parts forming the serial site of Okinoshima, was unanimously accepted by the members of the Committee, including by South Korea. Following an official statement from the Japanese delegation regarding the taboo surrounding the presence of women on the ‘Sacred Island’ itself, the Committee appeared to have concluded its business. At that moment, however, Lee Byong-hyun, South Korea’s UNESCO Ambassador, took to the microphone to express his concern regarding images of the nomination being displayed in the hall. These clearly showed the ‘Japanese national flag together with two Rising Sun flags on the ship, adopted by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War’ (UNESCO 2017). This chapter will take the Ambassador’s interjection as its starting point in order to examine how the process of ascribing heritage brings connections and contestation over the borders of memory present at sites of heritage into focus. This is because the creation of heritage sites necessitates the production of material and symbolic spaces which must be memorialized through narration. The necessity of narrating the memorial significance of these sites mobilizes actors operating at a variety of scales, who seek to define and shape what it is these sites signify. Borders of memory often emerge in the course of this creative process, as different interpretations regarding both the values being asserted through heritage, and the temporal and spatial boundaries associated with particular heritage sites, come to be contested by these different actors. The borders of memory between them come to be demarcated through the entangled scales at which sites of heritage are produced, ranging from the material sites themselves to World Heritage Committee rooms in places like Krakow. In tracing out the production of heritage, we are able to survey the borders of memory operating at specific sites, which channel the meanings made at and of them. These borders of memory are particularly stark when the actors involved include state parties contesting heritage and its meanings. South Korea’s ques tioning of Japan’s nomination reflects a broader contestation taking place over

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the borders of states in Northeast Asia, as outlined in the introduction to this volume (and see Boyle and Iwashita 2021; Iwashita, Ha and Boyle 2022). In this instance, Ambassador Lee’s remarks point to the existence of just such a border of memory present at Okinoshima, one located between recognition of ritual practices occurring safely in the past and assertions of the site’s ritual significance in the present. As the other chapters in this volume also demonstrate, however, negotiations over sites of heritage are not limited to the international sphere, and frequently reflect the complexity of the heritage process in domestic settings, where contestation occurring within and between scales of governance plays out at specific sites (see also Huang, Lee, and ­Vickers 2022). This chapter will detail the contestation which took place over recognition of Oknoshima as world heritage by undertaking two analytical moves. First, the chapter will detail the contestation which occurred over Okinoshima’s spatial and temporal boundaries, and demonstrate how these are brought into focus through Ambassador Lee’s intervention. The borders of memory cutting through this heritage site exist because of the connections the nomination draws between objects and sites located safely in Okinoshima’s past, and its ritual significance in the present. The core of the ‘Sacred Island’ of Okinoshima’s nomination focusses on ritual objects and practices from between the 4th and 9th centuries, but as this chapter will show, actors involved in producing Okinoshima as world heritage expended considerable effort on incorporating the site’s current ritual significance into the definition of the site inscribed by UNESCO. It is the representation of rituals taking place at the site today were responsible for the contestation in Krakow. Second, it will argue that Ambassador Lee’s intervention reveals that borders of memory are central, and politically crucial, to the heritage process. Japan’s determination to have the site be recognized as a living tradition was controversial and contested, rejected by UNESCO’s own advisory body. It was only intensive lobbying by the Japanese delegation in advance of the World Heritage Committee session in Krakow which enabled the heritage celebrated at this site to extend into the present, in accordance with Japan’s original intentions. While Ambassador Lee would ultimately accept the display of flags constituted ‘a technical error’, this chap ter argues that his statement reveals that the extended temporal scope adopted for the Okinoshima heritage nomination straddled, rather than erased, the borders of memory cutting through the nomination. The chapter is structured as follows. The first section outlines the world heritage site of Okinoshima, demonstrates the importance of borders in the narration and institutionalization of heritage, and briefly highlights the applicability of borders of memory as a tool for analysing contestation at such sites. The second section examines the emergence of Okinoshima as a

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heritage site within Japan and highlight how this emergence was connected to the site’s cosmopolitan and regional significance. Global recognition would be sought for not only sacred rituals occurring in the island’s past, but for the sacrality of the island as a focus of worship in the present. The ways in which the significance of the island’s artefacts were highlighted and contested as the application developed is the subject of the subsequent section, which highlights the growing influence of Munakata Taisha on the nomination process. The fourth section contextualizes the Okinoshima nomination by examining two other recent world heritage nominations which invoke Kyushu’s historical role as a space of cosmopolitan exchange, those of the Christian Sites of Nagasaki and the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution.1 The contrasting fate of these nominations demonstrates the state’s interest in facilitating recognition for particular Japanese narratives as being of universal significance. It also illustrates the multiscalar agency and negotiations involved in the process of inscribing heritage. The final section details how efforts to demarcate a temporal border of memory through the nomination were successfully resisted by Japan. The Korean Ambassador’s intervention in Krakow resulted from Japan’s insistence on the integrity of the application—the connection it draws between rituals today, and those taking place safely in the past. The conclusion recapitulates the significance of borders of memory for understanding contes tation over Okinoshima as universal heritage. Okinoshima as Bordered Heritage The ‘Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region’ is a serial site of heritage located at and off the coast of north-western Kyushu. The centrepiece of the site’s claim to universal value is the small island of Okinoshima, 4km square and located 60km from the coast of Kyushu, in the seas between Kyushu, the Korean peninsula, and the island of Tsushima. Okinoshima’s location means that it has long served as a navigation aid for vessels travelling in these waters (Ito 2021, 389). However, for an approximately 500-year period from the fourth century onwards, the island was also the site of a series of rituals that utilized ceremonial objects circulating between Japan and the continent. Although the form of these rituals and the nature of the artefacts deposited altered over time, they are assumed to have been for safe travels and success in these exchanges, and relate to contemporary patterns of On the former, see Raluca’s chapter in this volume. On the latter, see Boyle 2019; Nakano 2021; Boyle 2022.

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state formation both in the Japanese archipelago and on the Korean peninsula. These objects and artefacts are central to the site’s claim for universal significance, deposited on an island which historically served to demarcate a border between the coalescing states of Japan and Korea (see Map 13.1). Today, the island is almost entirely the property of Munakata Taisha (grand shrine), and since 2017 has been effectively off-limits to the general public. The Munakata Taisha shrine complex is headquartered in the municipality of Munakata, on Kyushu, and enshrines the three Munakata goddesses. The abode of the eldest of these is the Okitsu-miya shrine on Okinoshima, and the Shinto priest attending to this shrine is generally the island’s only ­inhabitant. The sacrality accorded to the island today is presented as an unchanging ­practice, evidenced not only in the deposits of ancient ceremonial objects, but also the material record relating to the island down to the present. In the medieval period, this is understood through records of shrine rituals conducted there. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the island’s sacrality is noted in documents which record the emergence of a series of local customs and taboos concerning the island and its objects. These taboos are likely both consequence and cause of the preservation of the island’s ritual sites and artefacts into the twentieth century. While Okinoshima subsequently saw periods of greater activity, such as during the Second World War, when gun batteries

Map by Sasaya Megumi, in conjunction with the author

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were constructed and troops stationed there, the material impact of this on the island has been located away from both Okitsu-miya shrine and the sites at which these artefacts were deposited (Oka 2016). The ritual objects themselves were systematically investigated from the late-nineteenth century onwards, and around 80,000 of them were removed from Okinoshima in the middle years of the twentieth century. When the movement to seek UNESCO inscription coalesced in the early 2000s, it was initially driven by the residents and city of Munakata, who sought broader international recognition for this treasure trove of ritual material. The artefacts deposited on Okinoshima justified the bid for world heritage status, but they could not, in themselves, constitute a site of heritage able to be inscribed onto UNESCO’s register. Heritage sites require spatial and temporal demarcation in order to be able to narrate the universal value of the heritage being celebrated. Borders of memory reflect how different understandings regarding the narratives and values represented by heritage come together at the site itself, and in some cases clash or rub up against one another. Borders of memory frequently emerge during heritage nominations, due to the distinct associations and narrative possessed regarding the site by different heritage communities (Boyle 2019). This heritage process incorporates a variety of actors, whose understandings of a particular site may not overlap. The clarification of differences between different groups during the heritage process constitutes the demarcation of borders of memory. Ambassador Lee’s interjection in Krakow is an example of just such a ­border; the Rising Sun flag, which the Ambassador specifically noted as associated with Japan’s military during the Second World War, has become an object of intense suspicion in South Korea over the past decade (Kimura 2019a; 2019b, McCurry 2019). In drawing attention to the flags, Ambassador Lee wondered whether these rituals are ‘just for worshipping for safety and security for nav igational purposes, or for some kind of other politically motivated purposes?’ However, for the Okinoshima nomination, these same flags represented the connection between shrine and community, and specifically the latter’s role in rituals conducted by the former. The incident demonstrates how aspects of the universal heritage being claimed for the Sacred Island of Okinoshima’s, the ritual practices associated with the island today, are unable to cross the border between Japan and Korea intact. The contestation which has frequently emerged over the inscription of heritage sites in Northeast Asia and elsewhere demonstrates that heritage, despite ’s protestations, is always political (Meskell 2018). The borders of memory which emerge through the process of heritage-making provides us with an important tool for analysing the contested politics that frequently

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attends to the production of heritage sites. This is clear from earlier work on the ‘Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region’, which highlights the emergence and operation of borders of memory at the site. In a series of publications, Lindsey DeWitt has examined the prohibition of women from the ‘sacred island’ (DeWitt 2020; 2018a; 2018b), and contests general understandings of this taboo by arguing that it appears to be a modern innovation with questionable support among the local fishermen with whom it is associated. DeWitt’s account reveals how it is the operation of distinct scales of the heritage process which bring borders of memory present at the site into focus. Comparative local indifference to the taboo on women is overlain by its institutionalization, through Munakata Taisha’s legitimation of the ban as local custom (DeWitt 2017). This formal policy of discrimination, justified as tradition, is then (tacitly) supported by the national government and its cultural agency, before being ultimately sanctioned by UNESCO itself. At the same time, it was the UNESCO inscription process which brought widespread attention to the ban, which was then picked up by media overseas (Andrews 2017; Pasha-Robinson 2017; McCurry 2017). Thus, the incorporation of Okinoshima in heritage processes occurring at a global scale has simultaneously reified and challenged this ban, in ways which have impacted access to the heritage site today.2 The ban on women’s access to Okinoshima highlights the multiscalar operation of the heritage process noted by this volume’s introduction (Lähdesmäki, Zhu, and Thomas 2019), and serves to bring the borders of memory cutting through the site itself into focus. This chapter is concerned with the temporal and spatial boundaries of the heritage site itself, rather than who is and is not permitted to cross them, but like DeWitt’s work engages with the question of how borders of memory come to be demarcated, defined and contested in the course of the heritage process. In shining a spotlight on the borders that run between distinct narratives and memories attending to heritage, the aim is not merely to capture the ‘dissonance’ which inevitably attends to sites of heritage, but to understand how the heritage process itself, in seeking to fix the meanings associated with particular sites, results in the institutionalization of various borders of memory at and through them. Examining the UNESCO recognition process is a partic ularly effective means of doing so, as discrepancies that are made present in the stories narrated around sites for distinct audiences—local, national, and international—bring into focus the borders of memory necessary to inscribe such sites as heritage able to operate at various, distinct, scales. Following Okinoshima’s inscription in 2017, the site was declared off-limits to men as well, partially in response to criticism over the ban on women.

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Excavating Significance

The previous section indicates the centrality of Munakata Taisha to the world heritage nomination of Okinoshima, with UNESCO recognition the outcome of a long-term effort to ‘raise the shrine’s status within the shrine world’ (Rots 2019, 167). The Munakata Shrine Revival Association was founded in 1942, and originally aimed to revive the shrine (Munakata Jinja at the time) as a chokusaisha, a shrine to which imperial envoys are despatched. The early 1950’s saw the compilation of the Munakata-Jinjashi, a three volume history of Munakata Taisha that provides much of the documentary basis for the crafting of a narrative regarding the significance of the worship of the Three Munkata Goddesses. The transformation of Munekata Taisha into the heritage site of Okinoshima was a product of the archaeological expeditions which took place as a result of this compilation project. Three rounds of archaeological surveys conducted intermittently on the island between May 1954 to May 1971 revealed a rich and varied horde of 80,000 objects associated with rituals performed on Okinoshima, deposited on the island between the 4th and 9th centuries and left there undisturbed until comparatively recently. The island’s finds began to be displayed in exhibitions from 1968 onwards (Japan 2016, 239), which came to emphasize the status of Okinoshima as the ‘Treasure House of the Sea’ (Umi no Shōsōin), after the 8th century treasure house of Tōdaiji Temple in Nara (Kamei 2011, 138). The exotic nature of the objects recovered from Okinoshima, as with those preserved in the Shōsōin, was held to reflect the power and prestige of the early Japanese state, and thus to form part of a national historical ­narrative. ­Consequently, the archaeological expeditions and subsequent exhibitions of material from the island raised Okinoshima’s profile within Japan. The objects were declared Important Cultural Properties in 1959 and National Treasures in 1962, with further Important Cultural Properties subsequently added after later expeditions. In 1983, the new National Museum of Japanese History opened in Sakura, Chiba with a section of its permanent exhibition devoted to Okinoshima (Ono and Okadera 2018, 5), which features a large-scale model of the ritual sites and replicas of artefacts recovered from the island. This mainstreamed Okinoshima within Japan’s national narrative, as the rituals performed there were thought to have been legitimated and sanctioned by the emerging imperial court at Yamato (Kyushu National Museum 2017). Okinoshima’s artefacts therefore became part of the nation’s history, and the application for UNESCO recognition was developed on top of the site’s recog nition within domestic heritage frameworks. However, recognition of the island’s importance to Japan and its history does not offer sufficient grounds for deeming it of universal significance,

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which requires greater attention to its value for humanity as a whole. This is in line with UNESCO’s emphasis on the importance of shared fundamental human values. The World Heritage programme, since its launch in 1972, has been ­presented as a means of cosmopolitan commemoration, in which national narratives would be “systematically replaced by transnational forms and forums of memory and dialogue” (Beck 2005, 43). The Outstanding Universal Value of heritage sites recognized as being of universal significance would overcome the antagonism that inevitably exists between competing national narratives by emphasizing the ‘shared’ nature of this heritage. This more universal perspective was asserted in the case of Okinoshima through the objects themselves, which were held to celebrate cosmopolitan links between different parts of the world in earlier eras. The island’s artefacts connect the sacred but insular environment of Okinoshima with broader transnational and global narratives, and thus allows for the assertion of its value as being universal, rather than merely local or national. The National Museum of Japanese History exhibit, for instance, placed Okinoshima in a broader regional context by incorporating the display of items from another ancient maritime ritual site from south-western Korea, Chungmak-dong (Jukmak-dong), a framing which would also be adopted for the world heritage nomination (see Woo 2011). The premodern ritual site of Okinoshima thus materialized cosmopolitan values within a broader history of state-formation in East Asia. The artefacts themselves tie together various scales of significance granted to the island, and their cosmopolitan nature does not preclude their narration in national ­frameworks.3 Indeed, the cosmopolitan character of the ritual objects recovered on the island was asserted by the state’s institutions which incorporated these objects. As is frequently noted, UNESCO’s operations rely on separate national institutional arrangements for heritage management to function, and that rather like cosmopolitanism itself, the universal significance according to sites of heritage inscribed upon UNESCO’s register ‘does not only negate nationalism but also presupposes it’ (Beck and Sznaider 2010, 400). The ritual objects recovered from Okinoshima therefore provide a resilient ­material record documenting the richness of connections between Japan and the continent in the past, and that are central for the island’s claims to universal cultural significance in the present. It was this broader regional and global significance accorded to the artefacts which allowed the UNESCO bid to take shape. A key initial figure in ‘spark ing the bid for nomination’ (Murakami 2015), speaking at multiple events, was Or, as Ivings chapter in the volume also reminds us, the presence of borders of memory.

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the Egyptologist and Waseda University Professor (now emeritus) Yoshimura Sakuji, who urged that Okinoshima was worthy of world heritage recognition for what it could tell us about world history, rather than just the nation.4 Conferences and seminars with expansive titles like ‘From Munakata’s Okinoshima to the world’s Okinoshima’ (2007) were organized in Munakata and sought to promote the idea of nominating Okinoshima as World Heritage. This emphasis on the site’s global significance carried into the studies commissioned for the nomination, which collectively highlighted the importance of Okinoshima as a ritual and archaeological site of significance not only to Japanese history, but the world’s (Kaner 2011; Ko 2011; Woo 2011). Through the nomination process Okinoshima, as a Treasure House of the Sea, was accorded a significance beyond the borders of Japanese history, as part of our shared past. 3

Demarcating Heritage for UNESCO

The excavation, examination and display of ritual artefacts from the island of Okinoshima established them as objects with a significance broader than Japan’s national history. However, achieving recognition for Okinoshima as a Japanese object within international processes of heritage management necessitated that the cosmopolitan objects of premodern ritual and exchange recovered from the island come to be recognized as a site of heritage, one granted recognition as part of mankind’s Universal Heritage. This universal heritage site of the ‘world’s Okinoshima’ would emerge through the UNESCO heritage process, shaped by the institutional arrangements through which the bid was made. This was initially associated, formally at least, with the municipal and prefectural administrations of the state, but over time the celebration of ­cosmopolitan rituals which took place on the island in the past would increasingly involve Munakata Taisha in the bid to achieve recognition for Okinoshima as heritage. The initial bid for UNESCO recognition for the island was submitted to Japan’s Agency of Cultural Affairs in 2006 by the two municipalities of Munakata and Fukutsu in conjunction with Fukuoka Prefecture. The World Heritage nomination bid was broader than either Okinoshima Island or Munakata Taisha, and incorporated kofun (burial mounds) spread throughout the coastal area around the main shrine complex at Munakata. These initially included the 4 Yoshimura retains an idiosyncratic interest in the site, judging from his 2017 TV special ­comparing the Pyramids with Peru and Okinoshima (Egypt’s Great Pyramids: Hidden tombs and treasure

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Sakurakyo and Tōgō Takatsuka tombs in Munakata municipality, and the large number of tombs (around 60) making up the Tsuyazaki Tumulus cluster in neighbouring Fukutsu.5 Within the nomination documents, kofun provided material evidence of the linkages between the ritual objects on the sacred island of Okinoshima, and Japanese state-building. In particular, Miyajidake kofun, part of the Tsuyazaki tumulus cluster, was noted as being of particular significance for not only the richness of its artefacts, but its association with Munakata no Kimi Tokuzen, who through the marriage of his daughter Amako no Iratsume to the Emperor Tenmu supposedly connects the region’s rulers directly to the seventh-century Yamato Court (Fukuoka Prefecture, Munakata City, and Fukutsu City 2009, 3). While the nomination document emphasized the cosmopolitan and regional significance of the artefacts on Okinoshima to the world, the bid for world heritage status also recognized the island’s current status as part of the Munakata Taisha complex. The nomination also included the two other shrines at which the Munakata goddesses reside: at Nakatsu-miya on Ōshima, a much larger island located close to the Kyushu coast, and the Hetsu-miya shrine at Munakata Taisha’s central shrine complex in Munakata City on the mainland. It also encompassed an additional shrine on Ōshima, the Okitsu-miya Yōhaisho (from which Okinoshima and its shrine of Okitsu-miya are worshipped from afar) was included. However, the shrine’s role goes beyond its contemporary institutuionalization in the Munakata region, for in that same year, 2006, the entire collection of 80,000 objects recovered from Okinoshima was listed as a National Treasure, under the designation ‘Artifacts from the Okitsumiya ritual site of Munakata Grand Shrine’. Munakata Taisha is therefore both the island’s owner and the conserver of the artefacts taken from it; the Munakata Taisha Shinpōkan museum was established in 1980 to house the objects and artefacts excavated from Okinoshima on its grounds (see Figure 13.1), and demonstrates the centrality of the shrine to the materialization of these ancient rituals of Okinoshima and any claims for their significance in the present. The valorisation of Okinoshima’s past significance and present-day sacrality overlaps with Munakata Taisha’s role as a site of worship in the present, and the nomination saw cosmopolitan exchange, state authority and religious ritual all came together in the development of a nomination highlighting Okinoshima’s place within a global story, as well as a national one. In 2009 the application was placed on the Tentative List for recognition as a World C ­ ultural Heritage Site. Subsequently, the documentary basis for asserting the site’s Outstanding 5 See https://www.okinoshima-heritage.jp/topics/detail/1

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The Shinpōkan museum of Munakata Taisha Photograph by the author

Universal Value was developed, through the collation of reports from both ­Japanese and overseas researchers, and a series of conferences and exhibitions aided in crafting a narrative detailing the Outstanding Universal Value of the site. Nevertheless, the site’s composition was not yet fixed, for in July 2012, the majority of the kofun were removed from the nomination document, with only the tombs of the Shinbaru-Nuyama cluster retained for the nomination’s official submission for inscription to UNESCO. The reason for this is not entirely clear, but probably reflects Munakata Taisha’s increasing control of the nomination process, following the arrival of the current Chief Priest, Ashizu Takayuki, from the Association of Shinto Shrines in April of that year. The Miyajidake kofun identified in earlier documents is associated with the Miyajidake shrine, whose priests conduct rituals in the tomb. Its removal signaled the disappearance of a potential institutional rival from the Okinoshima nomination.6 6 Additionally, while Munakata Taisha hews closely to an orthodoxy associated with the ­Association for Shino Shrines, as indicated by the movement of personal between the two institutions, Miyajidake is a more eclectic site of worship, accentuating the rivalry between the two shrines. I am grateful to Ellen Van Goethem for these insights.

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The account offered in the two sections above traces out the institutional forces involved in shaping the narration of Okinoshima as a site of universal significance, rather than merely a site of Japanese heritage. The eventual nomination document represents an effort to bring various strands of Okinoshima’s heritage—sacred, national, cosmopolitan—into a narrative asserting the site’s value. Elements of this story found reflection in negotiations over the spatial demarcation of the heritage site, which shifted during the nomination process. The increasing centrality of Munakata Taisha was also indicated by the last-minute addition, in January 2016, of three reefs forming a natural torii (Shinto shrine gateway) through which boats navigate on the approach to Okinoshima. Their addition brought the total number of component parts of the serial site to eight (as shown on Map 13.1).7 This reflects a nomination whose narrative shifted away from a cosmopolitan assertion of Okinoshima’s value as a site of ritual archaeology to one which emphasized its ongoing sacrality in the present. The connections that would be drawn in the nomination documents between the ‘Okinoshima Faith’ and ‘Overseas exchange’ (Japan 2016, 58) are materialized through the ritual objects taken from Okinoshima, which are key to the interpretation of Okinoshima as world heritage. Munakata Taisha’s increasingly influential role in defining the universal value of the site resulted in the assertion of its significance as residing in not only a distant, cosmopolitan past, but also in a contested national present. However, the shrine’s emphasis on the ongoing sacrality of the site were to be contested through the rest of the UNESCO nomination process, and ultimately resulted in the border of memory highlighted at the UNESCO meeting in Krakow. 4

Universal Significance and Disputed Borders

The UNESCO nomination ‘Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region’ represents one incidence of a recent trio of ­Japanese serial heritage properties located in the southwest of the country. The island of Kyushu styles itself today, more or less justifiably, as Japan’s gateway to Asia, forming a key site at which contact between the island nation and its neighbours on the continent, as well as with those from further afield, was mediated.8 This 7 The lateness of this move is perhaps reflected in the fact that the official English-language site for the Okinoshima nomination still (in December 2022) lists only the five components, see https://www.okinoshima-heritage.jp/en/know/ On this history, see also the chapters by Mateoc, Satari, and Alexander in this volume.

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history is reflected in the recent spate of UNESCO nominations, all of which invoke the legacy of foreign interaction as a process of cosmopolitan cultural exchange working to justify the universal significance of these heritage sites. Consequently, each of these heritage nominations have come to be bound up with the historical legacy of the Japanese nation, and how it is made manifest in particular places. However, the resemblance does not end there, for all three nominations have struggled with the issue of ­bringing the temporal and spatial boundaries of the collectivised heritage sites into line. The controversial inscription of the ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and steel, coal, and shipbuilding’ in 2015 recognized the serial nomination of 23 locations of industrial experimentation and production located around Kyushu, in the neighbouring Yamaguchi Prefecture on Honshu, and further afield. The dominance of south-western Japan in the nomination reflected its status as a site of innovative nineteenth-century responses to Western ­incursions being made by a number of local rulers, who would subsequently overthrow the Shogunate and establish a modern national polity under the Meiji Emperor. It also celebrated the later industrial development that occurred on (and off) Kyushu, powered by the extensive coalfields that came to be worked there, including at the nomination’s most controversial site, the coal-mining island of Hashima (more popularly known as Gunkanjima, or battleship island, for its distinctive silhouette). This nomination was contested by South Korea prior to and at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Bonn for failing to acknowledge the history of forced labour by Japan’s colonial Korean subjects, as well as other foreign workers, at seven of these sites. Japan argued that the key point of dispute between Japan and South Korea within UNESCO was over the temporal demarcation of these sites as heritage. Korea’s objections that the history of forced labour at these sites was being ignored were countered by Japan’s argument that such a history fell outside the scope of the heritage nomination, which strictly related to the years 1850–1910. In Japan’s presentation, the universal value accorded these sites did not merely adhere to the material sites, but to particular temporalities as well (Underwood 2015). As a number of commentators noted, this claim was problematic in the case of Hashima, in particular, as virtually nothing of the material site preserved today predates the 1910 cut-off date (­Takazane 2015). The ‘repackaging’ of these sites for international consumption also ­significantly altered the meaning of many of the sites, with more local, and frequently more f­ractious, memories attached to individual com ponents being overwritten by their national and international significance (Matsuura 2019; on repackaging heritage for the international arena see also Bull and Ivings 2019).

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In the event, the UNESCO Committee sought to appease both sides, and did not adjudicate on the issue. It accepted Japan’s claims that the sites’ possessed universal value as a uniquely ‘Asian cultural response’ to an industrial revolution originating in Western countries, while responding to Korean objections by recommending that the ‘full history’ of each particular site be made available to visitors. The dispute remains ongoing today, although its topography has shifted significantly with the opening of the Industrial Heritage Information Center in June 2020 (Boyle 2022). At the time of the World Heritage Committee in Bonn, however, Japan’s efforts to demarcate its borders of memory around claims for the universal significance of the heritage site was successful, in that the nomination was accepted by UNESCO, with its component parts held to represent the property’s Outstanding Universal Value. While the inscription of the Meiji Industrial Sites as World Heritage saw UNESCO’s acceptance of Japan’s efforts to enforce a border of memory around its nomination, another application, developed concurrently, was resolved in the opposite direction. While the universal significance of the ‘Hidden ­Christian Sites of Nagasaki’, the subject of Mateoc’s chapter in this volume, would ultimately be recognized in 2018, this necessitated a major reworking of the component parts that collectively made up the serial heritage application. A 2015 nomination for ‘Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki’ was withdrawn in February 2016, on the advice of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the advisory body to the World Heritage Committee that reviews applications for World Cultural Heritage. The reason was the perceived mismatch between the narrative used to justify the universal value of the ­heritage application, and the material sites that constituted the applica tion’s component parts. While found the universal significance of the former was in the story of Christian persecution and adaptation during Japan’s early modern Tokugawa era (1603–1868), the component parts constituting the 2015 nomination were predominantly Catholic churches constructed by communities after the ending of the ban on Christianity (in 1873). Japan was advised to resubmit its application with a greater focus on the period during which the ban on Christianity was in force, as that was when this heritage was adjudged to be of universal significance (Otsuki 2018). In contrast to the careful policing of the site’s temporal extent visible in the example of the Meiji Industrial Sites nomination, here Japan was unable to bring the material sites of the initial submission into line with the temporal borders ascribed to the site’s universal significance. The components of the nomination were required to conform with the border of memory ICOMOS drew through the application by insisting that the universal significance of the application lay in the ‘distinctive religious tradition nurtured by Hidden

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Christians who secretly transmitted their faith in Christianity during the time of prohibition’ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre 2018). Consequently, the revised application re-sited the nomination by replacing the post-Meiji churches as component parts of the site with villages inhabited by Hidden Christians during the Tokugawa period. As Mateoc’s chapter shows, the landscape within which these villages were situated was then interpreted as a form of tangible heritage able to represent the period of Christian persecution and adaptation that constituted the centrepiece of the property’s universal value (Kawashima 2021), which allowed UNESCO to accept the revised nomination in 2018. These nominations reveal the difficulty of bringing the ‘Outstanding ­Universal Value’ of a heritage site and its material components into line (for more on how universal value is justified at Japanese sites, see for instance ­Matsuura 2019, 318–19; Lincicome 2020, 9–10). These two UNESCO inscriptions suggest that for a site of heritage to be inscribed, its borders of memory, narrated through both the Statement of Universal Value and at its component material sites, need to be made coherent.9 For the Meiji Industrial Sites, Japan’s claim for the sites’ universal significance was dependent on the maintenance of a border of memory through the sites’ component parts, one which excluded the later history of forced Korean, Chinese, and other foreign labour at some of these same sites (Boyle 2019). In the case of the Christian Churches of Nagasaki, ICOMOS’s assertion that the universal significance of that heritage lay in the period of Christian persecution, rather than in the post-1873 period of open Christian worship, rendered the choice of post-Meiji churches to represent its universal significance invalid. Although in one instance the temporal border was demarcated by the state party and in the other by ICOMOS, in both cases the border of memory running through the site in the heritage application impacted upon its narrative and geography. This would also be clear from the Okinoshima nomination, where Japan would resist external efforts to demarcate a border of memory through the heritage site. 5

Negotiating the Limits of Value

On 28 July 2016, four months after the withdrawal of the original applica tion of ‘Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki, Japan’s Agency of Cultural This issue is particularly acute in the case of ‘serial nominations’, as the narrative justifying a site’s universal significance must be broader than the individual components making up the heritage site.

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Affairs put forward the ‘Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region’ for consideration by UNESCO. The nomination dossier focuses on the ‘unique archaeological sites’ of Okinoshima as an ‘exceptional example of the tradition of worshipping a sacred island, as it has evolved amidst a process of dynamic overseas exchange in East Asia and as it has been passed down to the present day’ (Japan 2016, E-3). In their evaluation of the site, successive reports by ICOMOS focused their attention on this cosmopolitan aspect of the heritage nomination, seeking: further information on the historical, cultural and political context and exchanges in which the early rituals on Okinoshima arose; details on the early rituals, their change and the performers of these rituals; details on the maritime routes, stopovers, vessels, destinations; and an additional comparative analysis focusing on similar ritual sites and sacred islands in the eastern Asian region. (ICOMOS 2017, 136) These requests were satisfied through additional documentation submitted by Japan in November 2016 and February 2017, and ICOMOS recommended the inscription of Okinoshima as ‘a repository of exceptionally important information on early ritual practices and on the commercial, political and cultural exchanges during the centuries before the 1st millennium AD, between polities in East Asia and the Japanese Archipelago’ (ICOMOS 2017, 148). However, while the nomination successfully demonstrated the universal value of these early rituals conducted on Okinoshima, this was not true of the site as a whole. In their reports, ICOMOS emphasized that while ‘the first strand of the nomination, concerning the early rituals carried out on Okinoshima’ had potential, the ‘second thread [focussing] on the worship of the Three Goddesses of Munakata Taisha’ was adjudged ‘very important to Japan but does not suggest supranational significance’ (Bourdin 2016). Rather, ‘what is being celebrated … is the important role and rank of the Munakata Clan and, subsequently, of their shrine, at the time when the Yamato court was making efforts to establish an early centralised state in the Japanese Archipelago, which expresses national values’ (ICOMOS 2017, 141). Rather than values of cosmopolitan exchange associated with Okinoshima, the emphasis on Munakata shrine was adjudged part of Japan’s national story, rather than a universal one. In effect, ICOMOS separated the rituals occurring on Okinoshima from those related to what would become the Munakata Taisha complex, draw ing a border of memory through the nomination between the primary site of Okinoshima and the other component parts associated with the Munakata Taisha and clan. However, they also advised a temporal separation between

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the ‘early ritual practices’ on Okinoshima and ‘various festivals, rituals and events … the result of recent revivals and reinterpretation [which] cannot be considered attributes supporting a long-standing tradition’. As with the earlier Nagasaki application, the borders of memory ascribed to the heritage site by Japan were held not to accord with Okinoshima’s Outstanding Universal Value as understood by UNESCO’s advisory body. ICOMOS concluded that ‘only the Island of Okinoshima with its attendant reefs – Koyajima, Mikadobashira and Tenguiwa – are found to meet criteria (ii) and (iii) and conditions of integrity and authenticity’ (ICOMOS 2017, 143). Following ICOMOS’s guidance would have led to the nomination being temporally and spatially squeezed to focus solely on the rituals which took place on the island of Okinoshima between the 4th and 9th centuries. Their intervention sought to materialize a border of memory running through Japan’s original nomination, dividing the early rituals performed on Okinoshima from the variety of later practices of worship associated with the Munakata Taisha complex. In response Japan sought to emphasize the integrity of the site as a whole, arguing for the ‘continuity of the ancient rituals and worship of the three female kami of Munakata’, and emphasizing that the ‘worship of Okinoshima and the worship of the three deities are interchangeable, and separating them represents a misunderstanding of how the object of worship is conceived’ (Japan 2017). Japan also repeatedly emphasized to the UNESCO Committee that the worship at the three sites formed ‘a living tradition’ (Japan 2016, 102), in which ‘the three locales of Okinoshima, Ōshima and Kyushu are sites of uninterrupted faith’ (Japan 2017, 2). Japan’s intensive lobbying of the UNESCO Committee members to overrule ICOMOS’s advice shows that from a Japanese perspective, the connections across this border of memory remained fundamental to the application as a whole. Of course, the roles of Munakata Taisha and Fukutsu City in the nomination process would create institutional imperatives for the application to be broader than just the island of Okinoshima. Nevertheless, the reaction of state agencies in this case offers a contrast with that to the original ‘Churches and Christian Sites of Nagasaki’ application. Rather than accepting ICOMOS’s critique, as that application had done, Japan continued to emphasize the historical connections between the sites’ component parts—the presence of similar ritual sites on Ōshima and at the shrine complex on the mainland, the links between the three goddesses and their places of worship visible in ancient J­ apanese texts, the role of the Munakata ‘clan’ (as per the application document) as mediating between the Japanese state and the continent—and deployed these as claims justify the integrity of the heritage site. The mainte nance of connections across the border of memory sketched out by

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indicates the importance of Okinoshima’s universal value being ‘uninterrupted’, and consequently the universal significance of the site inhering to not merely its past, but its present too. Japan’s entreaties to its fellow Committee Members in Krakow ultimately secured unanimous agreement from the World Heritage Committee members to inscribe all eight component parts of the Okinoshima nomination. The Committee, here following ICOMOS’s advice, ruled that Okinoshima fulfilled two criteria necessary for being of ‘universal value’: criteria (ii) ‘to exhibit an important interchange of human values’, and criteria (iii) ‘to bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition, either living or disappeared’ (UNESCO World Heritage Centre n.d.). However, the Committee also upheld ICOMOS’s original judgement that the site did not fulfil criteria (iv) ‘to be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions’. Despite this, though, ultimately the Committee overruled the advice of its own advi sory body to inscribe all eight component parts of the site on the World Heritage list. The border of memory that highlighted as cutting through the site remains present, but is elided by the connections narrated in the nomination between Okinoshima’s past and present rituals. It is these which were ultimately celebrated through the successful inscription of all eight of the site’s components. Announcing the success of Japan’s nomination, Japan’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs Fumio Kishida noted that: The island of Okinoshima has continued to be the sacred places (sic.) for worship since the ancient time, where remain archaeological items indicating the history of frequent overseas exchanges during the ancient time which have been preserved intact to the present. Given these reasons, I believe that the island of Okinoshima is globally unique and precious. As the Minister for Foreign Affairs, with wishes for the peace of the World through international exchange, I heartily welcome the inscription of this property. (Kishida 2017) This emphasis on the ritual and material significance of Okinoshima in a globalized context was crucial to the nomination’s success. Okinoshima’s artefacts become objects able to represent a history of cosmopolitan exchange in Northeast Asia. The international tranquillity that this invokes seems very distant from our own era of tension, to the obvious satisfaction of the committee members. Kishida went on to note that ‘I sincerely respect all the people concerned who have sustained the tradition of the sacred Island since the ancient time’.

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Ironically, however, it was images of people ‘sustaining tradition’ which resulted in the disturbance at the UNESCO Meeting in Krakow. During Japan’s presentation, it was images of the Miare festival, the premier event in Munakata­ Taisha’s ritual calendar and a key component of the claim for the ongoing legacy of the sacred island, which were projected into the hall displaying the Japanese and Rising Sun flags. It was their appearance in the Committee Room in Krakow that caused South Korea’s UNESCO Ambassador to become ‘very doubtful all of a sudden if this is just for worshipping for safety and security for navigational purposes, or for some kind of other politically motivated purposes?’ (UNESCO 2017). The significance of the Korean Ambassador’s intervention in the Committee room in Krakow was that it once again highlighted the presence of this border, as he questioned the connection between the Japanese national and rising sun flags and the ‘traditional rituals’ whose universal significance justified the heritage nomination. The dissonance highlighted by the Ambassador’s remarks is precisely between that earlier period of cosmopolitan exchange between the Japanese archipelago and the continent ritualized at Okinoshima, and a later era of fraught relations between Japan and its former colony of Korea represented by the Rising Sun flags. This chapter has argued that the basis on which this distinction is made, the difference between the relics recovered from Okinoshima and the rituals of contemporary worship associated with the island in the present, constitutes a border of memory brought into focus through the process of heritage inscription. Tracing out this process makes clear that Japan has insisted on the universal significance of the site as incorporating its present, as well as its past. 6

Conclusion: Sites of Heritage and Borders of Memory

On 1 March 2020, Japanese newspapers announced that X-ray imaging conducted on the fragment of a glass bowl discovered on Okinoshima confirmed the bowl had been manufactured under the Sassanian dynasty, which ruled the Iranian plateau between the years 226 and 661 (Imai and Ueda 2020). Although long assumed to be of Persian origin (Sugiyama 2011), scientific confirmation of the artefact’s provenance through this research project offered further evi dence for the exceptional richness of the trove of objects recovered from the island. It is these artefacts which connect the sacred but insular environment of Okinoshima with broader transnational and global narratives, and thus allows for the assertion of its value as being universal, rather than merely local or national. These objects provide a resilient material record documenting

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the richness of connections between Japan and the continent in the past, which are central for the island’s claims to ‘universal cultural significance’ in the ­present. To be recognized as such, however, these artefacts must be sited as heritage. It is the heritage process which reveals the temporal and spatial ­borders of memory attending to the Okinoshima site. The chapter has emphasized the importance of analysing the borders of memory that define and cut through heritage in order to understand the contested politics to which heritage gives rise. The focus was on the Japanese heritage site of Okinoshima, by recent standards a comparatively uncontroversial UNESCO inscription. Japan’s nomination emphasized that Okinoshima was of ‘outstanding archaeological value’ in demonstrating the ‘great importance of the rituals’ and ‘their evolution over a period of 500 years, in the midst of a process of dynamic overseas exchange in East Asia’ (Japan 2016, 98). While accepting Japan’s claims for the universal value of these ritual sites on Okinoshima, ICOMOS contested the nomination’s inclusion of the other shrines of Munakata Taisha, as well as the kofun associated with the Munakata clan, by stating they were of national, not universal, significance. This contestation had potential implications for the spatial and temporal extent of the nomination, but the border of memory it highlighted was ultimately not materialized due to Japan’s success in appealing to the member states of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. However, the interjection of Korea’s UNESCO Ambassador in Krakow again highlighted the disjunction between the ancient cosmopolitan rituals being celebrated in Okinoshima’s nomination, and the island’s contemporary significance. However, the Committee would ultimately agree with Japan to not overlook, as the Korean Ambassador was to note, the people who have actively contributed to the creation of the site’s value. While crossed, the border of memory highlighted by the Ambassador, between Okinoshima’s past and current ritual significance, was central to contestation over the boundaries of the heritage site, and remains vital to understanding it today. Acknowledgements Support for research and writing this chapter was provided by KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP 16K17071, 20H01460, and 23H00781, and by the ‘Resilient Material: The role of built structures in post-disaster r­ ecovery’ QR Program (Qdai-jump Research Program) 02101. The chapter has benefitted greatly from the com ments and suggestions of Ellen Van Goethem, and from the feedback provided by Caleb Carter, Ran Zwigenberg, and Steven Ivings, as well as from the two

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UNESCO World Heritage Centre. 2018. ‘Decision : Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region (Japan)’. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. July 2018. https://whc.unesco .org/en/decisions/7135/. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. n.d. ‘The Criteria for Selection’. UNESCO World ­Heritage Centre. Accessed 28 May 2021. https://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/ Woo, Jae Pyong. 2011. ‘Chungmakdong Ritual Site and Okinoshima Ritual Site’. In ‘Okinoshima Island and Related Sites in the Munakata Region’ Study Report, English Translation, 363–83. World Heritage Promotion Committee of Okinoshima Island and Related Sites in the Munakata Region.

CHAPTER 14

Conclusion: Borders, Heritage and What Next? Philip Seaton Abstract The conclusion brings together the themes of the volume, and emphasizes the ­heuristic value of using borders to think through how heritage comes into being, and the s­ignificance of a multiplicity of borders to its creation, contested nature, and ­maintenance. The cases presented across the volume demonstrate the varied ­geographical, physical, political, generational, temporal, psychological and cultural borders that come to shape the meanings accorded to sites of heritage being preserved into the future. The conclusion then moves on to discuss the heritage-related ­imaginaries which may be necessary for sustaining interest in specific heritages, and which should therefore be analysed when reflecting on what the future holds for the sites featured in this book. The borders of memory approach offers a powerful framework through which to chart the potential trajectories of heritage status and survival into the future. By identifying where borders of memory lie and how contestations at those meeting points run through processes of heritage creation, preservation and disappearance, a more nuanced picture emerges of what the past means in our p ­ resent-day lives.

Keywords anti-area studies – border multiplicity – heritage futures – heritage tourism imaginaries – politics of heritage

This book has brought together twelve case studies that illuminate the dynamics of heritage creation in Asia and the Pacific with a particular focus on the idea of ‘borders of memory’. Although all the authors have worked discussion of this concept into their chapters, it is worth recapitulating here at the beginning of the conclusions the main premise. Remembrance of the past and the ways in which events or places are ­memorialized and turned into heritage are always processes of (often intense) contestation. What this book (and the broader ‘borders of memory’ project  see Boyle 2019) has offered is a useful framework within which to think about © Philip Seaton, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004512986_015

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those contestations. Rather than contestation taking place at an elusive ‘centre’, instead these contestations all indicate the presence of borders. ‘Borders of memory refers to where different understandings or ideas regarding sites of heritage come together, and in some cases clash and rub up against one another’ (Boyle 2022, 21). Furthermore, ‘Borders of Memory conceptualizes both the demarcation of heritage sites and disputes over the meaning and interpretation of heritage that runs around and through such sites’ (Ibid.). As such, the editors argue in their opening chapter to this volume, ‘Thinking in terms of borders of memory allows for us to understand how the aims and activities of these actors become entangled in the production and maintenance of particular heritage sites.’ The value of thinking about issues from ‘borders’ was brought home to me during fourteen years living and working in Hokkaido, Japan’s northern borderland (and a place with which the two editors of this volume also have deep connections). Living in the nation’s periphery for an extended period helps one see how so much news reportage, and indeed academic scholarship, is funnelled through ‘the centre’. This is particularly noticeable in Japan, which has featured in ten of the twelve chapters in this book. Japan is notoriously Tokyo-centric. While living in Hokkaido, it was rarely possible to ignore what was happening in Tokyo because it looms so large in the political and media life of the nation. Furthermore, the vast majority of trips outside of ­Hokkaido— whether domestic or international, professional or private—began with a flight to Tokyo. Conversely, since moving back to Tokyo in 2018 after fourteen years away, it has seemed quite easy to forget Hokkaido and Japan’s regions, unless they are hit with extreme weather or political scandal. Travel from Tokyo to another part of Japan is only ever direct to my destination and not via any other regional hub. From my own lived experience, there is a clear psychological difference between being based in the centre and the periphery. These issues are well recognized within border studies and also within regional studies at the sub-national level, for example Okinawan studies. An alternative approach is Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s (2004, 101) concept of ‘anti-area studies’: ‘Anti-Area Studies’ seeks to examine a specific social, political or ­historical problem from widely differing geographical vantage points. In this way, it aims to promote cross-border exchanges of ideas about com problems faced by many countries and regions in our complex and globalized world. This approach can be seen as pushback against hegemonic forms of research and teaching in the social sciences, in which the focus is on the nation/state

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(still the dominant unit of analysis) and discussion so often starts in the political/cultural capital before radiating out to the extremities of the nation’s borders. By implication, the further away from the metropole the ‘less representative’ or ‘more particularized’ the people, their regional cultures, and their heritage become. And when a national border is crossed the discussion switches to international relations or intercultural communication as the politics and cultures of two national metropoles engage largely over the heads of people in the interim borderlands. This framework is so prevalent (particularly in news media – ‘Tokyo announced that …, Beijing responded with …’) that we almost forget that it is happening. All of which discussion indicates the value of the approach taken in this book. On first reading some people might be wondering why such diverse studies are gathered within one volume. Or perhaps readers wondered if the chapters might have been organized geographically, perhaps in concentric rings: China, Taiwan, Korea and Micronesia beyond Japan’s present borders (Chapters 3, 6, 11, 12), Japan’s colonial peripheries (Chapters 8, 11), the extremities of Yamato Japan (Chapters 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 13), and ending up in the old centre of Kyoto (Chapter 10). However, eschewing such geographically-bound categories is precisely the point. In this book there has been no cultural or political ‘centre’ around which the discussion circulates, and whose traction pulls all discussion into the orbit of a specific cultural milieu. The heritage described here are not examples that somehow radiate out from Tokyo. Instead, the ­multipolar case studies with their themes crisscrossing over any number of natural, cultural, and political borders allow us to see in far sharper relief what actually connects the case studies: the ways that people and communities ‘do’ (particularly local) heritage, the causes/consequences of contestations regard ing heritage, and the challenges of preserving heritage. The result is a set of arguments and theoretical concepts not only applicable to a single nation but also more generally about the Asian region as a whole and beyond. This book has not simply been border studies or heritage studies in action – it has also been ‘anti-area studies’ in action. I am slightly wary, therefore, as I write these concluding words while sitting in that most magnetic and over-bearing of political/cultural metropoles: Tokyo. But by offering a way to think about centres as if they were borders, this book allows a reassessment of a place whose omission from this book (until these brief comments in the conclusions) offers a most important insight in itself. Tokyo may be an example par excellence of a centre of gravity that pulls everything within Japan inexorably towards it (a recent example is the opening of the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo, despite none of the 23 component parts listed as World Heritage in 2015 being in Tokyo— see Boyle 2021; Industrial Heritage Information Center 2020). Yet the borders

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framework is a pertinent reminder that another view of the centre is possible. After all, it is easy to forget that there are actually three Tokyos: the central 23 wards, which is the metropole within the metropole; the Tama region to the west, whose rapid urbanization is largely a postwar phenomenon and whose historical connections to the capital lie in the significance of the Tama River as a water supply to Edo/Tokyo; and the small islands extending over a thousand kilometres south into the Pacific Ocean down to the Ogasawara Islands and beyond to Iwojima, the site of a famous World War II battle and now a Japan Self-Defense Force Base. Within and between the three Tokyos there are borders. The mental leap just has to be made that border studies and bordered memories are not just about national borders. Instead, throughout the book (and also the 2019 special edition of Japan Forum) there has been a multiplicity of borders. Some borders are geographical. These are where nature has placed a boundary or obstacle to interaction, such as a mountain range or ocean (Chapter 11; Bull and Ivings 2019). They have also been cultural, where people from different backgrounds (whether regional or national) have vastly different reasons for wanting to preserve a site or event as heritage (Chapters 3, 4, 12; Nakamura 2019). Some have been political, where divergent ideologies and world views clash (Chapters 10; ­Matsuura 2019; Hashimoto and Telfer 2019). Some have been physical, where some people are or have been barred entry to a particular place to which access is made possible for others (Chapters 5, 6, 13; Bull and Ivings 2019). Some have been generational or temporal, where people of different ages and eras assess the relevance of events and heritage sites on their lives in quite different ways (Chapters 2, 8, 9; Matsuura 2019; Hashimoto and Telfer 2019). Some have been psychological/emotional, where the sheer proximity of some people to events makes it difficult for them to think in terms of ‘heritage’ as they are still in the midst of a process of mourning, recovery, and perhaps even resolving anger, resentment, and blame (Chapter 7; Nakamura 2019). And, of course, there are national borders, too. But the borders of memory approach explicitly offers a framework for understanding how and why heritage and memories can be contested within those national borders—and why commonalities can tran scend national borders, too. Becoming Heritage: What Next? The subject of this book has been heritage—its creation, contested nature, and maintenance. All the chapters have demonstrated how heritage comes into being through the active efforts of people who believe that part of our past and

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culture cannot just be allowed to slip into the oblivion of history, but deserves to be preserved for future generations. UNESCO (n.d.) defines heritage as follows: ‘Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations. Our cultural and natural heritage are both irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration’. However, what becomes heritage is not preordained. It requires choices. Not all events, sites, artefacts or life stories are deemed worthy of preservation and transmission to future generations as heritage. Sometimes it requires the tireless lifework of a few individuals to achieve, as in the Japanese veterans who kept alive war ­memories in Palau (Chapter 4). Sometimes it is the work of a family or company, as with the ­Takatori-tei residence of Takatori Koreyoshi (Chapter 9). Sometimes it is the work of a community, as in Singapore’s Chinatown (Chapter 3) or Korean migrants in Kyushu (Chapter 12). In many cases, local or national governments become involved, and eventually even international organizations, as in the World Heritage designation given to Nagasaki’s hidden Christian sites (Chapter 5). This book has shone a light on the multitude of actors in the active process of heritage creation. These actors bring different priorities, purposes, and approaches to their work of creating heritage. However, a question which naturally arises from the creation of heritage is ‘What next?’ If the definition of heritage encompasses ‘what we pass on to future generations’, then it only remains heritage as long as the means and will to ‘pass it on’ exist. Just as it is not preordained that something will be singled out for heritage status in the first place, it is by no means certain that heritage will remain as h ­ eritage indefinitely. Apathy, lack of interest, and lack of perceived relevance in the present day are the greatest dangers to heritage. The problem of keeping open the Chinese Memorial Hall in Hakodate amid dwindling visitor numbers is emblematic of this point (Chapter 8). The maintenance of heritage raises ­several questions, therefore: How long will it continue to be considered as her itage? Will the meanings of the heritage transition over time into something completely different? Who will ensure the ongoing preservation of heritage, often at great financial cost? The answers to these questions frequently revolve around tourism, which has featured as a key word in many of the chapters. ‘Becoming heritage’ – whether a primary school devastated by a tsunami (Chapter 7) or a hidden Christian site (Chapter 5) – can effectively mean touristification, namely a decision to involve tourists in the preservation and ‘passing on’ processes, and to run sites on a (quasi-)commercial basis as tourist sites. Such decisions always involve an element of risk because tourists might not turn out to be saviours. Recent discourses of overtourism in places like Venice, Machu Pichu and Kyoto demonstrate how tourism can even damage or destroy the very thing they are

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supposed to be sustaining. Conversely, another risk has been demonstrated in dramatic fashion by the Covid-19 pandemic, namely the dangers of relying on tourist flows that may be decimated overnight when a natural (such as 3/11), medical (Covid-19, SARS etc.) or economic (Lehman shock) disaster strikes. Furthermore, heritage is not always tangible, it may be stories or traditions (Chapter 2), and it may not always be accessible, like the off-limits island of Okinoshima (Chapter 13). Here the mantle of maintaining the heritage’s relevance is taken up by media, whether the non-fictional news media or (semi-) fictional works of entertainment. Ultimately, without tourism and/or media interest to sustain public attention, the heritage will quickly revert to being something old and disposable that ends up in the dustbin or land-fill site of history. Without public interest, there will be little stomach among people as either consumers or taxpayers to continue funding the existence of the heritage. There is no crystal ball available for the long-term trajectories of the heritage described in the chapters of this book. However, our recent work into war-related contents tourism suggests three particular factors are at play as narratives, sites, life histories and other aspects of our collective past slip generation by generation into the historical distance. Our research identified three main tourism imaginaries at war-related sites (Seaton and Yamamura 2022, 5). The first is the imaginary of (subjective) war experience. This is highly politi cized in nature and signifies that visitation to war-related sites is undertaken as a commemorative pilgrimage, an act of a conscientious national citizen, or for some other form of validation of personal identity (perhaps standing in the very place where a relative fell in warfare). The second is the imaginary of (objective) war heritage. This is when visitors want an educational experience at a site for reasons of personal interest and growth. In this situation, the level of historical accuracy and authenticity in the site is of high importance. The third is the imaginary of war-related entertainment. The tourism is motivated by a desire for leisure, entertainment and fun, often induced by the depiction of the war in works of popular culture entertainment. While developed specifically in discussion regarding war-related contents tourism, these categories work equally well for heritage tourism as a whole. Put simply, heritage tourism imaginaries relate to identity formation, education, or just having fun. Of course, an individual tourist can have a combination of two or even all three of these imaginaries during any given visit. Furthermore, within the context of cultural tourism studies, motivation exhibits different levels of strength. McKercher and du Cros (2009, 39) identify purposeful, sightseeing, serendipitous, casual and incidental cultural tourists according to the relative strength of purpose behind the decision to visit a cultural site.

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Our consumption of heritage exists, therefore, on a sliding scale of purposefulness from the quasi-religious pilgrimage undertaken to satisfy a perceived obligation to have visited during one’s lifetime, all the way through to stumbling across ‘something old’ that registers in the mind for only the briefest of moments before being forgotten. The practical implication for heritage of any nature—whether site, p ­ ractice or artefact—is that the guardians of the heritage have to generate around the heritage one or more of these key imaginaries to maintain the relevance of the heritage and thereby ongoing heritage status. These guardians must also sustain consumption at a level that is economically viable (in the case of ­commercial management) or politically justifiable (in the case of heritage supported by taxpayers’ money), while all the time ensuring that the heritage is not physically degraded or politically/morally ‘cheapened’ via over-­consumption. Incompatibility with the contemporary political milieu can even lead to deliberate destruction, as happened when Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan were blown up by the Taliban in 2001 (and as this conclusion was edited in the summer of 2022, the deliberate targeting of heritage sites appears to be a tactic in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine). Failure to meet acceptable educational standards can also threaten a site, as happened to Peace Osaka, a museum about Asia-Pacific War history and Osaka’s air raids, which faced having its funding cut as local nationalistic politicians deemed its exhibits to be inappropriate for one of its main target audiences, namely school children (Seaton 2016). Or, a heritage site can be shut down simply because it fails to attract enough visitors and there is no funder willing to underwrite the losses. Many heritage sites, particularly museums, are unsustainable as commercial ventures and go out of business if public money is withdrawn. In short, to borrow the terminology of Kate Raworth (2017) from her concept of doughnut economics, heritage needs to find the ‘sweet spot’ in which it can ‘thrive’ without overshooting into site/artefact degradation or undershooting to the point that it fails to meet the basic requirements of survival, stewardship, and sustainability. As such, beyond the process of establishing heritage, continuity in the management and protection of that heritage is necessary. This means primarily political, security, environmental, and financial protection. The leading players are governments, whether local or national, because they are in the best position to provide all four. Governments’ abilities to protect, however, will be limited by their own power. For example, the Great Barrier Reef is in grave danger from global heating, which renders even the Australian government largely impotent to save this national/global won der in the face of planetary-level forces. The climate crisis will undoubtedly endanger much more of human heritage in the coming decades and centuries,

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but fundamentally the danger to heritage tends to be more a result of a loss of interest and willpower (although given the scientific evidence, a failure to tackle climate issues now is essentially due to a lack of interest and willpower, too). Governments might lose interest in preserving heritage and move limited financial or labour resources elsewhere. At this point, the role of heritage preservation falls increasingly on the private sector and the ability of heritage to entertain. This is when the roles of popular culture consumers and the sightseeing public come to the fore. If they can be attracted in large enough numbers, then heritage survives through the market forces of private enterprise. This is the point at which the transition from ‘heritage’ to ‘entertainment resource’ takes place. History gives ‘narrative quality’ to a location and can be utilized to (re)vitalize local economies via the entertainment, leisure and tourism they generate (see Seaton and Yamamura 2022). As a general principle, the further that events and related heritage slip into the past, the more diverse their uses can become. At close temporal proximity, the politics and emotions are too raw to allow any kind of entertainmentization. The events requiring school memorials in areas affected by the 2011 tsunami (Chapter 7) are far too close to the present for anything other than sombre reflection. Events dating back to the Pacific War or Japanese empire, as in the chapters on Kyoto (Chapter 10), Palau (Chapter 4) and Shinto shrines (Chapter 11), also remain in painful and contested living memory. Well beyond living memory, however, heritage can metamorphose into something less fraught and more leisure-like. In Hakodate (Chapter 8), Bakumatsu period history (1853–1868) is one of the key tourism resources in the city. There is a festival in May each year marking the anniversary of the Battle of Hakodate (1869) that combines sombre commemoration of the dead with a light-hearted tourism spectacle. This festival demonstrates that the passage of time can give playfulness to events in the distant past for which equivalent events in the more recent past are unthinkable. And even further back into history, stories of cruel persecution and execution have sufficient emotional distancing through ‘chronological distance’ (Lennon and Foley 2010, 11–12) for the extreme suffering depicted to barely weigh on the minds of sightseers, or even to be marketed as gruesome fun. Clear discussion of these temporal issues in heritage were in Jason Alexander’s chapter, where he discusses the creator’s proximity to an event in the context of Korean memories of (forced) relocations in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. All of the examples from the chapter case studies mentioned in the pre vious paragraph are connected by the presence of human suffering, whether inflicted by fellow humans or acts of nature. These forms of heritage are often highly politicized, or in the terminology of this book there are more borders of memory at the intersections of which contestation may emerge. But by being

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highly politicized and engaging people’s emotions, their potentials as tourism resources and as sources of inspiration for popular culture are enhanced. This, in turn, makes their preservation as heritage much easier. They tap more into people’s identities, particularly national identity; they leave bigger lessons for us to learn from today; and in the case of war and disaster they lend themselves well to entertainment narratives in novels, films and drama. All these factors help keep the heritage relevant in the present. They have also spawned a sub-literature within tourism studies, namely dark tourism, that has generated considerable interest in the past two decades. Meanwhile, the relative ‘peacefulness’ of the examples of heritage in the other chapters—regional storytelling (Chapter 2), culture in C ­ hinatown (­Chapter 3), art (Chapter 6), commercial sites (Chapter 8), architecture (­Chapter 9) and religious sites (Chapters 12 and 13)—means that in some ways they face a relative disadvantage in their survival as heritage. They are less likely to register in the attention as national heritage, and thereby gain the support of national policy makers. Instead, they are more likely to remain as local heritage, with a smaller taxpayer base to provide public financial support and a lower level of prominence in national discourse. This can place the heritage in danger of disappearance, although the often-passionate support of local heritage by communities is typically what keeps such heritage alive and cements it firmly in local culture. Ultimately, there is no way of knowing for sure what comes next for all the examples of heritage given in this book, although I have identified some general principles of heritage creation and survival that all of them face. Perhaps what the question ‘What next?’ really forces us to focus on is that heritage ­status is only ever one step on the life-cycle of a site, practice or arte fact. The longevity and sustainability of heritage is due entirely to conscious human effort. But the borders of memory approach developed in this book offers a powerful framework within which to chart the potential trajectories of heritage status and survival into the future. By identifying where borders of memory lie and how the contestations at those meeting points revolve around and run through the processes of heritage creation, preservation and even disappearance, a more nuanced picture emerges of what the past means in our present-day lives. References Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage’. Japan Forum, 31 (3): 293–312.

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Boyle, Edward. 2022 ‘Shifting Borders of Memory: Japan’s Industrial Heritage ­Information Centre’. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, 12 (1): 19–31. Bull, Jonathan and Steven Ivings. 2019. ‘Return on Display: Memories of Postcolonial Migration at Maizuru’. Japan Forum, 31 (3): 336–357. Hashimoto, Atsuko and David J. Telfer. 2019 ‘Contested Geopolitical Messages for ­Tourists at the Okinawa Peace Park and Memorials’. Japan Forum, 31 (3): 378–407. Industrial Heritage Information Center. 2020. Introduction of the 23 component parts. https://www.ihic.jp/l/en-US/industrial. Lennon, John. and Malcolm Foley. 2010. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. Andover: Cengage Learning. Matsuura, Yusuke. 2019. ‘World Heritage and the Local Politics of Memory: the Miike Coal Mine and Fu no isan’. Japan Forum, 31 (3): 313–335. McKercher, Bob and Hilary du Cros. 2009. Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management. New York: Routledge. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2004. ‘Australia, Japan and the Pacific region: From the Perspective of Frontier Studies’. Otemon Journal of Australian Studies, 30: 99–117. https:// www.otemon.ac.jp/library/research/labo/cas/publication/pdf/30/7.pdf. Nakamura, Naohiro. 2019. ‘Redressing Injustice of the Past: The Repatriation of Ainu Human Remains’. Japan Forum, 31 (3): 358–377. Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century ­Economist. London: Random House. Seaton, Philip. 2016. ‘The Nationalist Assault on Japan’s Local Peace Museums: The Conversion of Peace Osaka’. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 13 (30/3). Seaton, Philip and Takayoshi Yamamura. 2022. ‘Theorizing War-related Contents ­Tourism’. In War as Entertainment and Contents Tourism in Japan, edited by Takayoshi Yamamura and Philip Seaton, 1–18. London: Routledge. UNESCO. n.d. World Heritage. https://whc.unesco.org/en/about/

Index 16th Division (Japanese Imperial Army) 20, 246–267 Agency for Cultural Affairs 111, 114, 123, 218, 235, 265 Ainu 21, 197, 272–280, 293 Ainu Culture Promotion Law 278 Amaterasu Ōmikami 283, 291 Angaur 14–15, 82, 84, 86, 88–102 Angaur Memorial Park 91, 98, 102 Angaur State Nature Park Project 82, 96, 98–100 Anti-area studies 354–355 Aomori Prefecture 12, 31–32, 42–43 Arahama Elementary School 172–179, 184–187 Arita 22, 299, 302–306, 309–311, 323 Asia-Pacific War, see World War II Aso Taro 38 Association of Shinto Shrines 339 Atomic Bomb Museum (Nagasaki) 126 Authorship 37, 48 Azuma Shirō 251, 262–264 Babeldaob Island 85, 90–91, 99 Battle of Angaur 14, 82, 86, 88–89, 91, 94 Battle of Hakodate 192, 360 Battle of Leyte 20, 246, 263 Battle of Peleliu 14, 86, 89, 91, 94, 103 Bereaved families 20, 81–82, 86–89, 93, 99, 172, 180–183, 186–187, 246, 252, 256–259, 261, 266–267 Biratori Ainu Culture Preservation Society 278 Blakiston, Thomas 197 Bonin Islands 86n3, 94 Borders 9–12, 17, 32, 42, 73, 83, 102, 125, 149, 156, 161–162, 218, 263, 271, 293, 297, 300, 305, 311, 342, 354–356 Borders of memory 2, 5–6, 9–15, 18–25, 32, 58, 73–74, 83, 101–103, 110–111, 115, 120–122, 131, 149, 166–167, 185, 187, 208, 211–212, 217–218, 226, 234, 246–247, 259, 293, 329–334, 340, 342–348, 353–356, 360–361

Border studies 2, 5, 10, 355–356 China-Taiwan border 17, 151–153 Japan’s borders 3, 272, 332–333, 354–355 Soviet-Manchukuo border 88 Bosai 17, 171–172, 175, 187 Catholic Archdiocese of Nagasaki 118, 121, 123–124 Catholic Church 15, 108, 110, 114, 121–125, 130–131 Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore 17, 140–145 Centre for Heritage, Art, and Textiles, Hong Kong 140, 142 Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (Tokyo) 86 Chikuhо̄ 299, 313, 319 Chinatown (Singapore) 6, 13–14, 56–75, 357 Chinese Memorial Hall (Hakodate) 208–211, 357 Chinese New Year celebrations 13, 57–58, 64–75 Chineseness 58, 61, 67–70, 75, 147 Chin Jukan the 15th 306–309, 322 Chin Su-mei 292 Chingay 13–16, 70–75 Choe Sundok 314–315 Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki 112, 120–121, 125, 342–343, 345 Climate crisis 359–360 Cold War 5, 143–144, 150, 152, 155, 162, 198, 200 Collective memory 9, 58, 73, 83, 160–161, 166–167, 170, 183, 217, 219, 238, 271, 293, 358 Colonial / colonialism 8, 10, 16–18, 21–22, 57–63, 68–74, 81, 100, 102, 144, 146–147, 149, 153, 161–162, 166, 192, 194–197, 204– 206, 208, 211, 271–275, 277, 281–284, 293, 299, 305–306, 309, 312–314, 321, Conder, Josiah 222, 230

364 Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Japan 321 Cosmopolitan / cosmopolitanism 8, 13, 15, 18–19, 23, 32, 39, 46–47, 53, 70–75, 191, 195, 197, 202, 204–209, 211, 235, 247, 331, 336–340, 344, 346–348 Cultural property 7–8, 108, 110–111, 115, 120, 122, 130–131, 202, 204, 209, 234–235, 257, 259 Important Cultural Property (Juyō bunkazai) 19, 205, 217, 219, 226, 232–236, 238, 265, 325 Dazai Osamu 42 Democratic Progressive Party 292 Disaster education 171, 184–185 Disaster preparedness 171, 175, 184–185 Discrimination 273, 308–309, 315–316, 319, 324, 334 Doughnut economics (or Kate Raworth) 359 Egami Church 118, 123, 130, 132 Endō Shūsaku Literary Museum 125, 129 Former British Consulate Building 204–205 Former Hakodate Public Hall 202 Former Minister of Foreign Affairs Tōgō Shigenori Museum 305, 309, 324 Francis Xavier 108, 121, 126 Fraser and Neave 66 Fukakusa 247–249, 254–256, 265 Fukamachi Junsuke 318–319 Fukuchiyama 251, 256–257, 263 Fukuoka Prefecture 299, 313–320, 337–338 Fukushi Kōjirō 38–41, 46–47, 49, 52–53 Fukushima 166, 172 Fukutsu 337–338, 345 Funasaka Hiroshi 14–15, 82–83, 88–94, 101–103 Furusato (home) 13, 32, 42, 44–53, 319 Genbun itchi (unification of spoken and written language) 38 Gillman Barracks 143–144, 148, 156, 160, 162 Giyōfu (pseudo-Western architecture) 222, 229–230, 235 Glover Garden 126, 128–129 Goto Islands 123, 127–128, 130–132

index Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster (3.11) 17, 165, 168, 170–171, 179, 183, 186–187 Guam 84, 86n3, 89–91, 101, 155 Hakodate 8, 18, 190–212, 360 Hakodate Chamber of Commerce 201, 203 Hakodate Chinese Association 210–211 Hakodate City Museum 205 Hakodate Dock 200 Hakodate Hachiman-gū 274 Hakodate Local History Museum 205 Hakodate (Mt.) 191–192, 196–198, 201, 203, 211 Hashima Coal Mine 130, 225, 341 Hayashi Eidai 318 Heard, Lafcadio (Koizumi Yakumo) 49 Heritage 1–12, 23–25, 31–32, 41, 47–53, 57, 59–61, 63, 67, 72, 75, 81, 93–94, 99–101, 107–132, 140–156, 165–172, 183–187, 193, 195–197, 203–205, 211–212, 217–218, 223, 231–238, 265–267, 271–272, 279, 288, 292–293, 299, 303, 309–311, 325, 329–348, 353–361 Entertainment (heritage as entertainment) 358–361 Heritage boom 1–7, 203 Local heritage 6–9, 13, 24, 31–32, 35, 41, 47–49, 51, 197, 226, 231–237, 262, 324, National heritage 5–9, 24, 59–60, 74–75, 165–172, 183, 223, 232, 234–235, 292 Negative (dark) heritage 140, 156–172, 183–187 Transnational heritage 10, 15, 57, 75, 120–131, 147, 205, 292, 337–343 Hidden Christian Sites of Nagasaki 107, 109, 111, 122, 131, 342, 357 Hidden Christians (kakure kirishitan)  15–16, 107–124, 126, 128–132, 343, 357 Hioki 302–303, 323 Hirado 111, 114, 121–122, 126, 130 Hirosaki 32–33, 39, 42 Hiroshima 17, 166, 169–170, 186 Hokkaido 18, 21, 190–212, 270–281, 293, 354 Hokkaido Shrine arson incident 277 Hong Kong 60, 140, 142, 153, 193

365

index Huashan 1914 Creative Park 142 Ichinohe Kenzō 39–40, 43–44 Ide Kaoru 283 Identity 1, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16–19, 24, 32, 43–44, 47, 49, 52–53, 56–58, 60, 63, 66, 68, 71–74, 146–147, 160, 166–170, 186, 204, 217, 220, 223, 225–226, 238, 246, 266, 309, 311–312, 315, 324, 358, 361 Iizuka Cemetery 319–320 Iizuka City Historical Museum 313, 318 Ikeda Ichirō 262–265 Imperial nostalgia 112 Indigenous people (Ainu, Takasago) 80, 83, 103, 271–272, 275, 278, 280–281, 284, 289, 291–292, 293 Industrial Heritage Information Center  342, 355 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) 8, 112–114, 342–348 Invasion of Korea (1592–1598) 299, 301, 308, 311, 321 Ireidan (memorial tour group) 91–93, 96 Ishiwara Kanji 251, 263–264 Ishikawa Sayuri 42 Iwaki (Mt.) 43–44 Iwakura Tomomi 227 Japan War-Bereaved Families Association 86–87 Japanese Cemetery (in Koror, Palau)  90–91, 94 Japanese immigrants 84, 87, 91 Japanese Network to Preserve War-Related Sites (JNPWS) 265 Jitsugyōka ideal 223, 225–226, 238 John Low 16, 144–148, 160, 162 Kagoshima Prefecture 299, 302, 324 Kaijima Mining Company 313–315 Kaitaku Jinja 274, 276, 278–280 Kaizan Jinja (now, Koxinga Ancestral Shrine) 283–284, 287–289, 291 Kamchatka 192, 196, 205 Kamiiso 200–201 Kamura Masaharu 283 Kanemori Shōsen 206–207 Kanemori Warehouses 206–207, 210

Kaohsiung 11, 156–158, 162, 285, 290 Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts 142 Karafuto (Sakhalin) 192, 205–206 Karatsu 19, 216–219, 225, 232–234, 236–238, 302 Kashiragashima 115, 130 Kasuga 116, 120, 126 Kataribe (storytellers) 32, 40–41, 50–51, 173–174, 178–185 Kenkō Jinja 283–284 Kijima Coal Mine 225 Kim Jong-Pil 322 Kinmen Islands 140, 149–152, 156, 162 Kishida Fumio 346 Kobe 170–171, 177, 194–196, 209 Koh Nguang-ho 147 Koizumi Junichirō 210 Kon Kan’ichi 39 Kondō Jūzō 278–279 Koxinga 283–284, 288–291 Kuomintang (KMT) 21, 149, 153, 156, 159, 292 Kurata Yōji 14–15, 82–83, 93–104 Kuskus Jinja 291–293 Kutsuma Yasuji 260–261 Kyoto 20, 51, 245–267, 357 Kyoto Hinode Shinbun (KHS) 248–251 Kyoto Peace Exhibit (KPE) 261–263, 267 Kyoto University of Education 255 Kyushu 2, 22–23, 107–132, 217, 225, 229–230, 298–325, 331–348, 357 Law for Protection of Cultural Properties 7–8, 120, 234 Lee Kuan Yew 64 Leyte 20, 246, 252, 263 Lieux de mémoire 168, 187, 246 Little India (Singapore) 6, 59–60 Malaysia 59–61, 147–148, 155 Manchuria (Manchukuo) 41, 88, 210, 246n2, 248, 249, 293 Mansfield, Stephen 4, 6 Maruyama Mizu Jinja 290 Meiji entrepreneur 220, 226 Meiji Industrial Sites 114, 166, 329, 331, 341–343 Memorial services (ireisai) 82, 86, 88,

366 Micronesia: Nan’yō Guntō (South Sea Islands) 14, 81–84, 87–88, 93, 95, 293, 355 Midway Atoll 95–96 Migration 22, 115, 120, 143, 159, 162, 225, 272–273, 297–301, 308–309, 312, 316, 323–324 Minamoto no Yoshitsune 278 Mindan 300, 318–319, 322–323 Ministry of Finance (Japan) 197, 253 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan) 89, 346 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (South Korea) 322 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan) 15, 86–87 Ministry of Public Works 225 Mishima Yukio 89 Mitsui company 224n11, 322 Miyama 22, 299, 302–303, 306–309, 322–324 Miyawaka Lycoris 315–316 Monument to the Kyoto Artillery Regiment 257–258 Mori Kanetsugu 220, 229 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 354 Mukashi-ko (folktales, folk stories) 34–36, 46–53 Munakata 329, 331–334, 337–338, 340, 344 Munakata Clan 344, 348 Munakata Taisha 23, 331–332, 335, 337–340, 344–345, 348 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 141 Nagai Takashi 124, 129 Nagasaki 15, 107–115, 120–132, 170, 194–195, 206, 209, 225, 331, 342–343, 345, 357 Nagasaki Pilgrimage Centre 124–125 Nakaenoshima 117, 126 Nakajima Kesago 250, 264 Nakamura, Kuniwo 90n10 Nanbu 43 Nanking (Massacre) (Battle of) 246–247, 250–251, 262–264 Nanyang School 147 Narujima 120, 123 National Museum of Japanese History  335–336 Nippon Kaigi 319, 321 Obuchi Keizо̄  322

index Oceanic Wildlife Society (OWS) 95 Oita Prefecture 206, 302 Okawa Elementary School 17, 165, 168, 172–174, 179–187 Okawa Densho no Kai 173, 181 Okinawa 50, 87, 155, 260 Okinoshima 23, 111, 328–349, 358 Ōkuma Shigenobu 231 Ōmuta 322 Osaka 194, 359 Ōshima (island) 338 Oura Cathedral 108, 114, 117–118, 120, 126, 129–130 Outstanding Universal Value 8, 112, 131, 329, 336, 339, 342–343, 345 Palau 14, 80–84, 86–91, 93–96, 98–103, 357 Palau Sakura Kai (Palau Cherry Blossom Association) 83, 89–91, 93–94, 96, 102–103 Palauans of Japanese ancestry 82–84, 89–90, 93, 102 Peleliu 14, 84, 86, 89–91, 93, 98–103 Peleliu Peace Memorial Park 91 People’s Action Party (PAP) 64 Perry, (Commodore) Matthew 193, 208 Phosphate mining 84, 93, 95, 97, 100–101 Pioneer narrative 272–280, 293 Postcolonial / postcolonialism 5, 21, 57–58, 70–73 Pratt, Mary Louise 10–11, 73, 161 Prince Kitashirakawa-no-miya Yoshihisa 281–284 Qijin Island 17, 156–162 Raffles, (Sir) Thomas Stamford 149 Regionalism 46–49 Russo-Japanese War 87, 192, 196, 198, 248 Ryukoku University 255–256 Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region 23, 328, 330–331, 333–334, 340, 344 Saga Prefecture 216, 224, 236, 299, 302, 304–305, 310 Said, Edward 46

367

index Sakitsu 115–118, 126 Sang Nila Utama 72 Sapporo 202, 273, 275–277, 279 Sapporo Jinja (now, Hokkaidō Jingū) 21, 273–277, 281, 284 Satani Masayuki 319, 321 Satō Tsuri 33–37, 46, 48–52 Secondary orality 37, 53 Seibo Jogakuin 246, 253–255, 264–266 Seikan tunnel 203, 207 Seinen Shinshoku Fumizuki-kai 277 Shiba Ryо̄ tarо̄  308 Shibutani Hakuryū (Shibutani Ryūichi) 33, 35–37, 40, 48, 51–52 Shimabara 121, 126, 130 Shimazu Yoshihiro 302–303, 306, 323 Shimoda 193–194 Shimomura Minoru 251–252 Shimonoseki 300–301 Shinonome-shi 275 Shitsu 117–118, 121, 125 Shoin architecture 220, 230 Singapore 5–7, 13–16, 56–75, 140, 142–149, 155–156, 160, 162 Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce 70 Singapore National Gallery 142 Singapore Tourism Board 61 Sino-Japanese Treaty of Friendship 210 Sister Shimoda 255 Site of memory 17–18, 186, 246–247, 255, 259, 264, 266–267 Sotome 111, 116, 121, 129 South Seas Government (Nan’yō-chō) 14, 84–85, 87, 94–95 Soviet Union 88, 198, 200 Stewardship 6, 24, 49–52, 359 Sukiya architecture 220, 230 Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) 275, 284 Tachikawa Family Residence 202, 205–206 Tagawa 313, 318, 323 Taichū Jinja 286 Tainan Jinja (now, Zhongyi Elementary School) 289–291 Taipei 141–142, 161, 284–285, 290 Taipei Biennal 161

Taipei Museum of Fine Arts 141, 161 Taiwan Gokoku Jinja (now, National Revolutionary Martyr’s Shrine) 282, 284–286 Taiwan Jinja (now, Taipei Grand Hotel)  281–285 Taiwan Solidarity Union 292 Takagi Kyōzō 39–41 Takagi Shigetarō 256 Takakura Ken 207 Takashima Coal Mine 225 Takatori Koreyoshi 216–218, 224–227, 231, 233, 236–237 Takatori Kuro 233 Tamayamagū 309 Tatsuno Kingo 222, 232 Tawaraguchi Kazuichirо̄  313–315 Terra nullius 272, 282 Three Pioneer Kami (Ōkunitama no Kami, Ōnamuchi no Kami, and Sukunahikona no Kami) 21, 273–274, 280–282 Tōen Jinja (now, Taoyuan Martyr’s Shrine) 285, 287 Tо̄ gо̄ Shigenori 305, 309, 324 Tohoku 17–18, 43, 45, 166, 168, 171–172, 179, 181, 186–187 Tokugawa Ieyasu 301 Tokyo 13, 19, 46, 86, 88, 94, 110, 123, 216–218, 224–226, 229–231, 238, 264, 354–356 Tourism 6, 8, 15, 42, 45, 47, 59–66, 75, 81, 83, 96–100, 103, 110–111, 115, 120–125, 130–132, 171, 191, 197, 199–203, 206, 211–212, 217, 219, 233–234, 236, 291, 313, 316, 319, 357–361 Battlefield tourism 81, 83, 94–95, 99–100, 102 Contents tourism 358 Dark tourism 246n2, 313, 361 Heritage tourism 358 Overtourism 357 Tourism imaginaries 358 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 298, 300 Trauma 181–182, 185–186, 299, 315, 319, Treaty of Kanghwa 195 Treaty of Nanking 193 Treaty of Portsmouth 196

368 Treaty of Shimonoseki 195 Treaty of St. Petersburg 196 Treaty ports 18, 192–198, 205–211 Tsugaru 12–13, 31–33, 35–36, 38–45, 47–53 Tsūshō Jinja (now, Tungxiao Martyr’s Shrine) 283–287 Tsuyazaki 338 Ubagami Daijingū 274, 279 Ueki, Minoru 90n10 Ueki Yōsuke 39, 41 Ukraine War 359 UNESCO 5, 8, 15–16, 23, 111, 166, 298, 322, 328–348, 355, 357 UNESCO World Heritage 166, 298, 330, 346, 355 UNESCO World Heritage Committee 341, 348 United States 81–84, 86–87, 90–91, 94–95, 97, 99–103, 167, 193–196, 198, 203 Urakami Cathedral 126, 129 Utsumi Tatsuo 252 Vernacular language / dialect 12–13, 33, 35–36, 38–49, 51–52 Wa no Mukashiko 31–33, 35–41, 43–44, 46–51, 53 Wang Gungwu 57 War dead (eirei) 81–82, 86–88, 93–94, 102, 256–257, 261, 282–283, 285, 291

index War memory (war memories) 14, 81–83, 101, 103, 260, 357, War memorial (ireihi) 82, 89, 91–92, 95, 98, 271, 285, 290, 293 War monument 81–82, 87–89, 91, 93, 98, 101–102 War relics / war remnants 81–82, 88, 96–97, 99–100, 246, 265, 267 Watanabe Kumashirō 206 Watsuji Tetsurō Wayō setchū jūka 223, 264 White Cube 16–17, 141–143, 147, 149, 162 Woo Pan-Keun 322 World War (Asia-Pacific War) 85, 169, 196–197, 234, 246, 251, 260, 263, 275, 293, 298, 312, 319, 324, 329, 332, 356 Wu Mali 156–161 Yafurai Plan 200–201 Yamaguchi Tōru 283 Yamato kotoba 51, 52 Yano Yasushi 200–201 Yao Jui-Chung 142 2, 152–156, 163 Yasukuni Jinja 166, 210, 283, 292 Yi Sam-Pyung 303–304, 306, 309–310, 323 Yokohama 61, 194–196, 209 Yoshitsune Jinja 274, 278–280, 282 10, 293 Yu Fuajun 324 Zwigenberg, Ran 169–170

EWCD

This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce. Edward Boyle, Ph.D. (2018), Hokkaido University, is Associate Professor at Nichibunken, and editor of Japan Review. He has published widely on the borders of Japan and the region, Northeastern India, and Palau, including Geo-politics of Northeast Asia(Routledge 2022). Steven , Ph.D. (2014), London School of Economics and Political Science, is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Economics Kyoto University. His research examines socio-economic change in Northeast Asia, particularly in port cities and Japan’s former-colonial empire.

EAST AND WEST Culture, Diplomacy and Interactions 16 2467-9704 brill.com/ewcd

Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Paci��c Edward Boyle and Steven(Eds.)

Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and re��ect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory.

EAST AND WEST

CULTURE, DIPLOMACY AND INTERACTIONS

Heritage, Contested Sites, and Borders of Memory in the Asia Paci��c

Edited by

Edward Boyle

Steven