Modern Ruins: The Contested Terrains of (Japanese) Heritage Sites

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Following the Second World War, wholesale destruction of cultural properties by firebombing and fast-paced urbanization spurred new movements dedicated to preserving Japan’s built heritage. An emerging (and recurring), quintessentially modern sense of a vanishing past led to a succession of “history booms” and a flowering of heritage tourism. As Paul Betts and Corey Ross have noted, this was part of a worldwide movement in which similar postwar conditions and new global institutions, most prominently UNESCO, raised awareness and created networks of professionals dedicated to preserving the world’s heritage. As evidenced by recent conflicts over industrial heritage sites in East Asia, these global developments were often entangled with local and regional struggles for the preservation of culture and identity. Much of the existing scholarship on heritage treats Japanese sites primarily on a national level. The dominant approach of interpreting these sites as part of a national culture has led us to “a tunnel vision of the past,” which marginalizes entanglements with the global as well as local histories and identities. Although the Japanese state was immensely important for the history of heritage sites in Japan, it was actually on the local level where the decisions to preserve these sites were initially made and where struggles over the meanings and means of preservation were contested. Thus, this panel privileges the local struggles that led to the birth of world and national heritage sites and examines the way such struggles were entangled with regional, national, and global processes of heritage development and conflict.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Nathan Hopson, Nagoya University

Individual Presentations

• A Temple for World Peace: The A-Bomb Dome and Hiroshima’s Imperial Past - Ran Zwigenberg, Pennsylvania State University

• Citadels of Modernity: Heritage, Authenticity, and Identity in Japan’s Postwar Castles - Oleg Benesch, University of York

• Hiraizumi: Outstanding Universal Value, Contested National Value, Controversial Local Value - Nathan Hopson, Nagoya University

Discussant

• Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Yale University