Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism 9888754149, 9789888754144

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Memory Politics, Colonialism, and Confl ict
1. Lapped by the Tide
2. Whose Difficult Heritage?
3. Taipei’s National Martyrs’ Shrine
Part II. Making Heritage out of Memories of Incarceration
4. Unsettling the Familiar
5. Beyond a Racialized Representation of Colonial Quarantine
6. The Prison Gate as Leftist Heritage?
7. Organic Heritage Diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific Region
Part III. Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Difficult Heritage Making
8. Staking Claims to Difficult Memories
9. From Offshore Heritage to Shared Heritage
10. Mapping Kyushu’s War-Related Heritage
Contributors
Index

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Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism ‘Bringing together an excellent range of cases from diverse locations across the Asia Pacific, this book is an important contribution not only to this part of the world but to understandings of heritage struggles, especially in relation to colonial histories, more widely.’ —Sharon Macdonald, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin ‘This collection is an important contribution to our understanding of the place of Asia within global memory culture. Going beyond the “tunnel vision” of national memories, it provides us with a sophisticated examination of the ways the “difficult heritage” of colonialism, revolution, and war intersects with contemporary politics to produce an Asia-Pacific memory sphere.’ —Ran Zwigenberg, Pennsylvania State University

FRONTIERS OF MEMORY IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

Taken together, the studies presented here suggest new directions for comparative research into difficult heritage across Asia and beyond, applying an interdisciplinary and critical perspective that spans history, heritage studies, memory studies, urban studies, architecture, and international relations.

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Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritagemaking process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten.

FRONTIERS OF MEMORY IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

FRONTIERS OF MEMORY IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC

Shu-Mei Huang is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University.

On the front cover: Large Shinto shrine dominating the top of Bloody Nose Ridge on Peleliu, with the US Marine Corps memorial in the distance, to the right of the photograph. Photograph by Edward Boyle, 2018.

History / Asian Studies

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

Edited by

Edward Vickers is professor of comparative education and holds the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice, and Global Citizenship at Kyushu University, Japan.

Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers

Hyun Kyung Lee is a research professor in the Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea.

Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism

Edited by

Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers

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Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific

Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific

Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism

Edited by Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Edward Vickers

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong https://hkupress.hku.hk © 2022 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8754-14-4 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Hang Tai Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee

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Part I: Memory Politics, Colonialism, and Conflict 1. Lapped by the Tide: Borders of Memory on the Island of Peleliu, Palau Edward Boyle

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2. Whose Difficult Heritage? Contesting Indigenous Ainu Representations Roslynn Ang

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3. Taipei’s National Martyrs’ Shrine: The Past and Present Lives of a Difficult Monument 64 Lu Pan Part II: Making Heritage out of Memories of Incarceration 4. Unsettling the Familiar: Hong Kong’s Colonial Policing Heritage Lachlan B. Barber

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5. Beyond a Racialized Representation of Colonial Quarantine: Recollecting the Many Pasts of St John’s Island, Singapore Desmond Hok-Man Sham

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6. The Prison Gate as Leftist Heritage? Political Indifference and the Pursuit of ‘Healthy Nationalism’ in Japan Tomoko Ako

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7. Organic Heritage Diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific Region: Reconciliatory Landscapes 143 Anoma Pieris

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Part III: Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Difficult Heritage Making 8. Staking Claims to Difficult Memories: Diplomacy and Jewish Heritage in Shanghai and Beyond Shu-Mei Huang

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9. From Offshore Heritage to Shared Heritage: Transnational Difficult Heritage Making and the Shanghai Provisional Government of Korea Hyun Kyung Lee

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10. Mapping Kyushu’s War-Related Heritage: Hard and Soft Frontiers of Memory in Japan’s ‘Asian’ Gateway Edward Vickers

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List of Contributors

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Index 237

Figures

On the cover: Large Shinto shrine dominating the top of Bloody Nose Ridge on Peleliu, with the US Marine Corps memorial in the distance, to the right of the photograph. Figure 0.1: The constellation of cases discussed in this volume.

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Figure 1.1: Memorial sites and borders of memory on the island of Peleliu.

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Figure 1.2: Makeshift wooden joists propping up the second storey of an old Japanese power plant.

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Figure 3.1: Territorial map of the Imperial Shrine Taiwan Shrine, 1906.

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Figure 3.2: A painting of Taiwan Grand Shrine during Japanese colonial rule, 1930.

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Figure 3.3: The sanctuary of the Martyrs’ Shrine.

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Figure 5.1: Location of St John’s Island and Lazarus Island in Singapore.

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Figure 6.1: The main gate of Nakano Prison.

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Figure 6.2: The design proposal of the PFES in which a four-storey school building turns its back to the gate and encloses the entire gate.

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Figure 7.1: Cowra Japanese Garden.

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Figure 7.2: Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park.

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Figure 8.1: Ohel Moshe Synagogue was restored and converted into the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in 2007.

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Figure 8.2: Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai was once the largest synagogue in the city.

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Figure 9.1: The relocation route of the former Provisional Government of Korea before the end of the Second World War.

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Figure 9.2: Left to right: a. the sign of the SPGK on Madang Road, Xintiandi; b. the main gate of the SPGK; c. the exhibition of the signatures of South Korean presidents on their state visit. 199

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Figure 10.1: Map of Kyushu.

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Figure 10.2: Suffering innocents. Image of mother and child at exhibition commemorating postwar Japanese exiles in Siberia at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum.

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Figure 10.3: Peace Statue at the Gokoku Shrine, Fukuoka.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to a number of institutions and individuals for their help in bringing this edited volume to press. The book’s foundation was laid at a session titled Cross-border Reworking on Difficult Memories and Places in Asia at the 2018 Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference held in Hangzhou, China, where more than half of the chapter authors met and agreed to collaborate further in researching difficult heritage in the Asia-Pacific. The next year, several of us convened again in Bangkok, Thailand, for another panel discussion at the 2019 AAS-in-Asia (Association for Asian Studies) meeting where we met Joan Vicens Sard (former acquisitions editor of Hong Kong University Press), who invited us to consider submitting a book proposal. The three editors subsequently gathered at a 2019 conference in Fukuoka on the Politics of War-Related Heritage in Contemporary Asia. That conference was generously funded by Kyushu University’s Progress 100 scheme, the Resona Asia-Oceania Foundation, and the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. The War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP), the main organizer of the Fukuoka conference, was originally established with funding from the Leverhulme Trust (UK). It was after the 2019 Fukuoka conference that we finalized our proposal and submitted it to Hong Kong University Press. As editors, we are greatly indebted to all contributors for working with us to finalize their various chapters. We would also like to acknowledge the travel grants provided by a number of institutions, including the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (109-2410-H-002-168-MY2), the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea, and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies under Grant (AKS-2016-LAB-2250005). Our gratitude also extends to Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, which funds Kyushu University’s interdisciplinary Taiwan Studies Program; Dr Shiho Maehara, attached to that Program, contributed to the organization of the 2019 Fukuoka conference. Ms Kyoko Murooka provided invaluable administrative support. Student helpers who were key to ensuring the success of the

x Acknowledgements

conference included Mervin Low, Wan Yi, Li Yang, Sayaka Fukuda, Haruna Kasai, and Alessandra Ferrer. We appreciate the constructive feedback provided by the three anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript. Our special thanks go to Thomas Marling for his invaluable copy-editing skills. His work was generously funded by a Publication Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. We also appreciate the support granted by the Resilient Material Project (funded by Kyushu University’s QR Program [Qdai-jump Research Program]). We thank the University of the Ryukyus Research Institute for granting the Island Studies Project ‘Comparative border research on island countries and regions of the Asia-Pacific: the Yaeyamas and Palau’ (Lead: Koji Furukawa) as well. Yasmine Hung, acquisitions editor at Hong Kong University Press, carefully guided us through the reviewing and editing process. Some of the maps were produced by Dami Kim (Introduction, Chapters 9 and 10). We hope that these visual aids will help readers make sense of the complex patterns of heritage-making that the ten chapters explore and delineate, as we attempt to explore memories of conflict and colonialism in a manner that challenges and transcends rigid territorial boundaries. Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, Edward Vickers February 2022

Introduction Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee

Conflict over Asia’s Conflict-Related Heritage: Three Vignettes In late July 2020, one of the present editors, Shu-Mei Huang, was invited by a Taiwan-based television producer to participate in a programme commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary that August of the end of World War II.1 In a preparatory meeting, she was asked, ‘Can you show us some artefacts that demonstrate the brutality of nuclear bombing? For example, photos showing how the victims were hurt or how objects were deformed?’ Wondering why the producer seemed particularly fixated on the atomic bombing of Japan, Huang responded that she did not possess this kind of material. But as the conversation progressed, it became clear that the producer was intent on making Japanese victimhood a principal focus of the programme. Eventually, Huang refused the invitation. In March 2021, Edward Vickers (in collaboration with Mark Frost) edited a special issue of Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on ‘The “Comfort Women” as Public History’ (Frost and Vickers 2021a). With the issue already in press, a storm of controversy arose over an article in the International Review of Law and Economics by the Harvard University professor J. Mark Ramseyer casuistically portraying the ‘comfort women’ system as the extension of an essentially consensual commercial sex industry (Ramseyer 2021).2 The journal editors hurriedly commissioned a 1. Precisely what Taiwanese were commemorating on this anniversary was itself a matter of some debate. Many younger, typically independence-leaning historians have preferred to talk simply of the ‘end of the war’, borrowing the term commonly used in Japan (zhongzhan 終戰; Jp. shūsen), in preference to kangzhan 抗戰, short for the ‘War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression’, favoured by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang (KMT). Talking simply of the ‘end of the war’ elides the question of victory or defeat or judgement concerning responsibility for the conflict. Its use in Taiwan is a mark of sympathy for and, to some extent, identification with Japan among pro-independence elements repelled by the rhetoric of Chinese nationalism now loudly broadcast by the regime in Beijing. 2. The article was first published online on December 1, 2020. Following protests from numerous scholars pointing out the many problems with Ramseyer’s use (or abuse) of evidence, the journal withdrew the paper. See Frost and Vickers (2021a).

2 Introduction

supplement in which prominent scholars lined up to condemn Ramseyer’s article. Frost and Vickers had sought to use the special issue to draw attention to tensions between ‘heritagization’ and regard for nuance and complexity in interpreting past atrocities. The Ramseyer affair underlined both the pressing need for scholarly nuance and the difficulty of maintaining such a stance amidst the welter of controversy surrounding the ‘comfort women’ issue. Finally, in mid-2021, Huang, Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee all participated in a webinar discussing the treatment of the Holocaust as heritage in East Asia, involving heritage practitioners from the region as well as curators and scholars from Israel and North America. The Israeli scholar co-convening the webinar circulated several discussion questions beforehand, including one asking the practitioners how their institutions dealt with China’s ‘human rights record’ or that of Israel in relation to Palestinians. He noted that both issues ‘have been entangled with Holocaust remembrance and are politically sensitive’. In response, several participating heritage practitioners signalled their reluctance to debate this question publicly.

The Transnational Politics of Difficult Heritage in Contemporary Asia These vignettes touch upon various aspects of the transnational politics of heritage across the Asia-Pacific today and their links to wider global debates. One concerns the spectre of Eurocentrism or Western ‘hegemony’ which haunts much contemporary debate over public history. The Ramseyer imbroglio, for example, saw the pronouncements of a single Harvard professor receive enormous publicity both in America (where the New Yorker ran a lengthy article denouncing him) and in East Asia (where Japan’s rightist press and Korean media lined up on either side). The very act of convening a symposium on the Holocaust and its heritage in East Asia also testifies to the influence of Western discourse on atrocity commemoration and interest in framing Asian victimhood within this Western template. Calls for the ‘decolonization’ of historical narratives and of heritage, boosted since 2020 by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, may thus seem relevant to the Asian context. But while Eurocentrism continues to distort understanding of the past in Asia as in the West, we should beware of reducing transnational heritage politics to a contest between Western ‘hegemony’ and a ‘counter-hegemonic’, nonWestern response. The BLM movement and the peculiarly American racial politics out of which it sprang are, after all, Western phenomena, so transferring their preoccupations to Asia if anything exacerbates Euro- or West-centrism. When we see a Taiwanese broadcaster framing World War II as a story of Japanese victimhood, or Asian heritage practitioners declining to debate Chinese policy, we are witnessing the influence of political forces emanating not from the West but from Asia. Here,

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 3

the reach of China’s communist regime is particularly evident as our own experience in compiling this volume further illustrates.3 Talk of colonialism also raises problems of definition that are especially contentious in Asia. Campaigns for ‘decolonization’ of heritage tend to portray colonialism itself as intrinsically Western and to locate it in the past, even while emphasizing its continuing contamination of our present-day consciousness. However, in Asia colonialism has been both Western-imposed and homegrown, and is definitely not confined to the past. Strategies for maintaining or expanding territorial control and neo-colonial dominance (arguably encompassing both China’s Belt and Road Initiative and America’s longstanding network of alliances and bases across the region) crucially shape our present-day geopolitical—and ‘geocultural’—landscape (Winter 2019). The complexity of memories of conflict across the Asia-Pacific, and their intertwining with colonialism past and present, informs the analysis in this volume of ‘difficult heritage’. Adopting a transnational approach (in contrast to the methodological nationalism that still characterizes much scholarship on heritage), we seek to deepen understanding of how movements to commemorate colonialism or conflicts relate not only to national politics but are increasingly entangled with regional and global political forces and discourses. Taken together, the various chapters analyse how the repackaging of the ‘difficult past’ as heritage can serve either to transcend or reinforce the frontiers that demarcate our collective identities and impinge upon international relations. Conceiving difficult heritage sites as ‘frontiers of memory’, we illuminate how heritage has played an instrumental role in expanding or contracting the temporal boundaries of the remembered past. Memory left unattended or uninhabited may be lost beyond a retreating frontier, while memory assiduously inhabited and cultivated can come to form a new centre for communal consciousness or even galvanize into aggressive actions within or between states. A particular focus is the relationship between transnational discourses of peace or humanity and the role typically assigned to difficult heritage in fostering national consciousness. Rather than promoting cross-border dialogue and critical reflection, in the East Asian context, transnational elements tend to be deployed—whether in the heritage sector or through schooling or other media—to transmit nationalist messages. With respect to World War II, Mitter (2020, 50) notes that East Asia lacks the kind of ‘unified liberal discourse’ on war associated with Western Europe and North America, and which finds strong echoes in Australia and New Zealand. Despite significant Sino-American rapprochement in the 1970s–1980s, Cold War tensions have persisted across East Asia, notably in the form of the frozen conflicts between Taiwan and mainland China and the two Koreas (with such tensions 3. A Chinese scholar, who was due to contribute a chapter to this volume on Japanese colonial heritage in Northeast China, felt compelled to withdraw his contribution on seeing a reference in this introduction to Chinese policy in Xinjiang.

4 Introduction

contributing also to the stigma still attached to the leftist camp in Japan; see Chapters 6 and 10). Meanwhile, what Mitter terms ‘circuits of memory’ frame modern conflict within a larger narrative of resistance to imperialism or colonialism—Western, Japanese, or both. While experiences of colonialism and war might in theory serve as a basis for transnationally shared memory, politics in the Asia-Pacific has tended to favour shoring up national frontiers (actual and metaphorical) rather than transcending them. In part, this can be attributed to the legacy of Japan’s efforts to justify its oppressive ‘East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere’ by invoking pan-Asian solidarity, thus helping to discredit notions of a cohesive East Asian identity. But Hitler’s abortive drive to construct a Festung Europa (‘Fortress Europe’) did not noticeably hinder postwar moves towards Western European unity—arguably quite the opposite (Mazower 2009). Mitter (2020) observes that postwar Asian attitudes to Japan were more ambivalent than those of Europeans or Americans towards Nazi Germany; revulsion against Imperial Japan did not unite East Asians in the way that revulsion against Nazism came to unite the elites of postwar Western Europe. Sheltered by the US’s protective (or suffocating) embrace, postwar Japan quickly regained its status within Asia as a beacon of prosperous modernity but simultaneously turned inwards, becoming a model for its Asian neighbours of corporatist, developmental statism underpinned by a profoundly chauvinistic, albeit proudly pacifist, form of nationalism. The tendency for colonial legacies to reinforce rather than erode the imagined barriers between nations is evident in the way that, across the Asia-Pacific, colonial heritage generally serves to fuel national victimhood and grievance rather than provoke self-reflection. Here, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser degree, Japan, and Taiwan are outliers, witnessing more or less vigorous debate over responsibility for the destruction and suffering inflicted by colonial settlement or expansionist imperialism.4 Elsewhere, colonialism and racism are almost uniformly portrayed as crimes inflicted by foreigners (Western or Japanese), occluding the memory—and enduring reality—of colonialism perpetrated by Asians on Asians (Vickers 2015). The orthodox narrative of China’s modern history, organized around a ‘Century of Humiliation’ commencing with the Opium War of 1840, encapsulates this dichotomy of foreign imperialists versus native patriots; so too does the glorification by

4. Though we should remember that Australia and New Zealand, too, with their sacrosanct ‘ANZAC’ narratives and rituals concerning World War I and the Gallipoli Campaign more specifically have long fostered national mythologies of wronged innocence based on highly partial historiography. Emphasis on victimhood inflicted by metropolitan British arrogance and stupidity, and on Antipodean heroism in the face of adversity, largely obscured or distracted from more troubling aspects of the past: the complicity of Australian elites in whipping up enthusiasm for war, the contemporary suffering of Indigenous people, or the wider prevalence of racism on the home front. And mainstream accounts of the ANZACs seldom accorded much acknowledgement to the suffering of British soldiers also involved in that campaign, let alone of the Turkish ‘enemy’. See Cochrane (2015).

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Japanese conservatives of the Meiji Revolution5 which hails Japan’s role as a beacon of Asian modernity (and consequent success in fending off the depredations of Western imperialists), ignoring the collateral damage to Asian societies invaded by a modernized Japan (see Chapter 10 in this volume). Epitomizing the hypocritical denial of homegrown Asian coloniality, 2020 treated us to the spectacle of a Chinese government, while presiding over internment of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, tweeting ‘I can’t breathe’ in sympathy with American BLM protesters (Kim 2020). There have been exceptions to this pattern of narrowly focusing on national victimhood while occluding the transnational dimension. Transnational collaboration in ‘comfort women’ activism constitutes one notable case in point (Frost and Vickers 2021a). The 2010s witnessed an international campaign to secure a UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ inscription for the ‘Voices of the “Comfort Women”’ archive, involving activists and scholars in Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and elsewhere (Shin 2021). Another instance involves Sino-Korean talk of a joint application for a UNESCO heritage designation for colonial Japanese prisons (Huang and Lee 2019; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). However, such transnationalism in heritage diplomacy has tended to be highly fragile and contingent on nationalist calculation and diplomatic realpolitik; in both these instances, Beijing abruptly withdrew its support after 2016 as it sought to ‘punish’ South Korea for participating in America’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defence programme (Suh 2017). Meanwhile, Japanese pressure forced UNESCO to suspend registration of new ‘Memory of the World’ inscriptions pending reform of the process for vetting applications. The key Japanese demand, motivated by fierce opposition to the ‘comfort women’ inscription (and anger at an earlier successful Chinese application to inscribe Nanjing Massacre-related documents), was that state parties be granted a veto over inscriptions to which they objected. In the heritage arena, neither the Japanese nor Chinese governments have shown willingness to dilute their control over narratives of the national past. Where concerted attempts have been made to connect Asia’s war heritage to prominent themes of global commemorative discourse, these have generally derived impetus from profoundly nationalistic considerations. This is particularly evident with respect to World War II (except in Australia and New Zealand where World War I looms larger). In Japan, efforts to associate suffering inflicted by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the Nazi genocide of the Jews date back to the 1960s when publicity surrounding the Adolf Eichmann trial alerted Japanese observers to the totemic status that the Holocaust was gaining in Western consciousness (Zwigenberg 2015). Much later, from the 1990s, China’s Communist Party, seeking a legitimating narrative more attuned to its new pursuit of capitalism than Marxist class struggle, alighted on memories of the mid-century conflict with Japan and strove to present atrocities suffered at Japanese hands as ‘China’s 5. Otherwise known as the Meiji Restoration. See Chapter 10 for a discussion on the distinction.

6 Introduction

Forgotten Holocaust’. A burgeoning trend of ‘philo-Semitism’ in Chinese attitudes to Jews, paradoxically rooted in profoundly anti-Semitic stereotypes (Ainslie 2021), extends to envious admiration for Israel’s historical statecraft, manifested in its weaponization of Holocaust victimhood as a legitimating narrative. The conjunction of atavistic nationalism with consciousness of the Holocaust’s global status as the ultimate atrocity has sparked competitive efforts to drape the sanctifying mantle of the Holocaust over national memories of conflict (Frost and Vickers 2021b; Vickers forthcoming). In this volume, Chapter 8 on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM) shows how Chinese authorities keen to stress China’s leading role in the global anti-fascist struggle of the mid-twentieth century have increasingly invoked comparisons with, or connections to, the Holocaust. The SJRM narrative promotes an image of Sino-Jewish friendship, Chinese benevolence, and the shared ‘traditional’ virtues of the two peoples. Not to be outdone, some activists on behalf of former ‘comfort women’ also embrace comparisons between the plight of these women and the victims of Nazi genocide (Frost and Vickers 2021b). This competitive deployment of tropes borrowed from Holocaust commemoration illustrates how invoking universal themes of suffering, sacrifice, and the evils of war or colonialism can serve as thin cover for antagonistic nationalisms. In South Korea the mainstream media tends to dichotomize innocent but brave Korean resisters confronting brutal Japanese aggressors. The result is to highlight the theme of Korean suffering and sacrifice but ignore or deny the kind of nuance and complexity (or collaboration and compromise) that inevitably characterized most interactions between colonizers and the colonized (as some work on colonial Hong Kong has emphasized; see Law 2009). While scholarship may acknowledge such nuance, public history seldom does; the enshrining of memories of war and colonialism as ‘heritage’ typically involves assertion of unique national victimhood, ignoring others’ memories of suffering. For example, we may search in vain in Korean or Chinese museums or textbooks for details of the horrors inflicted on Japanese civilians by atomic bombs or firebombing, just as mainstream public history in Japan features only the most perfunctory references to suffering inflicted by imperial forces on other Asians. A commitment to ‘peace’ is universally invoked but generally to advance nationalism under the banner of pacifism. This collection stems from a conversation begun in Hangzhou during the 2018 Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) biennial conference and continued in Bangkok and Kyushu in 2019, and during the 2020 ACHS conference (conducted online, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic). It reflects our shared interest in exploring memory and the politics of heritage across the Asia-Pacific transnationally and comparatively, countering the narrow methodological nationalism that continues to characterize much scholarship in this field. In his recent study of how memory of World War II is shaping a ‘new nationalism’ in China, Mitter (2020, 17) observes that ‘the analysis of trans-Asian memory of the Second World War is still a work in

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 7

progress, with China especially underexamined’. Progress in this area may be somewhat more advanced than Mitter acknowledges with volumes by Morris, Shimazu, and Vickers (2013); Morris-Suzuki et al. (2013); and Frost, Schumacher, and Vickers (2019) examining the transnational politics of ‘imagining Japan’ and commemorating conflict in contemporary East Asia. Nonetheless, those earlier collections adopt a somewhat narrower focus than the present volume, which brings together themes of colonialism, anti-colonial resistance, postcolonial nationalism, and related conflict under the rubric of ‘difficult heritage’. As Mitter correctly notes, to understand the particular ways in which war is remembered across contemporary East Asia, it is essential to understand also the role of colonial legacies in shaping the imagination of national identity across the region, and that is central to our purpose here. Our work is informed by recent scholarship that injects into current debates over heritage and memory a dose of healthy scepticism regarding the role played by commemoration of conflict or atrocity in ‘healing’ or reconciliation (David 2020). Memory is not history, and maintaining and explaining this distinction is crucial to limiting the potential for crude or simplistic visions of the past to stoke antagonistic tribalism (Lowenthal 1998; Margalit 2002). As David Rieff (2016, 54) has eloquently argued, the concept of ‘collective memory’ is also something of an oxymoron; as a metaphor for shared identities based on shared narratives of the past, it is powerful—but also potentially dangerous. And while memory can be anchored and partially fixed by heritage, heritage is not a ‘thing’: instead, it refers to ‘a set of attitudes to, and relationships with, the past’ (Harrison 2013, 14). Recent attempts to emphasize the ‘future orientations’ of heritage ‘as a series of activities that are intimately concerned with assembling, building and designing future worlds’ (Harrison 2020, 4) may be well meaning; however, commemoration, remembrance, or the conversion of memory into ‘heritage’ do not constitute some sort of intrinsic good. When handled badly, with disregard for historiographical nuance and complexity, the commemoration of the ‘difficult past’ can institutionalize division and entrench hatred, rather than facilitate reconciliation (Frost and Vickers 2021b). By the same token, attempts to destroy or bury relics of a shameful or troubled past are often symptomatic of nationalist efforts to whitewash the past, distorting our present identities and relationships with foreign ‘others’. Discussing the removal of the old prison gate in Tokyo’s Nakano district, Tomoko Ako, in Chapter 6 of this volume, references the case of Chiayi Prison in Taiwan to underline the importance of penal heritage relating to former political prisoners for drawing public attention to attempts to stifle social dissent in the present. Invoking foreign examples in this way is nothing new in the heritage field: activists in Taiwan earlier cited the cases of the Abashiri or Seodaemun prisons (in Japan and Korea respectively) to justify their efforts to preserve former sites of the incarceration of political prisoners. Special effort is often required to persuade a sceptical public of the need for preservation of prisons, and overseas precedents can be useful for such purposes.

8 Introduction

But while transnational precedents have thus sometimes been invoked in support of calls for critical reflection on sensitive aspects of the national past, far more pervasive across the Asia-Pacific is the borrowing of heritage tropes to reinforce the nationalist politics of competitive victimhood (Frost, Schumacher, and Vickers 2019). The politics of determining what to commemorate and what to obscure or forget means that repackaging the difficult past as ‘heritage’ typically involves shoring up the imagined frontiers that divide communities. The transnational politics of difficult heritage thus carry often-disturbing implications for present relations among the region’s different nations and communities. In exploring these themes, the current volume presents recent scholarship examining both the making and consumption of difficult heritage across the AsiaPacific. We do not aspire to be ‘global’ in our scope: our focus is trained on East Asia and Australasia, and on the heritage of colonialism and conflict that these societies broadly share. While geographically quite disparate, these societies possess significant elements of a shared recent past, especially in relation to colonialism (mainly British and Japanese) and war. While the coverage here of Australasia and Southeast Asia is relatively thin, the inclusion of the Palau and Australia–New Zealand–Japan cases is warranted by their connection to the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II, commemoration of which is a major theme of this volume. That war is also intimately related to the legacy of colonialism, and imperialism is our other major cross-cutting theme. Analysing discourses of commemoration, as well as their architectural embodiment in museums, memorials, and other sites, necessarily involves an interdisciplinary approach, and this volume therefore features contributions from scholars specializing in critical heritage studies, area studies, anthropology, the built environment, history, cultural geography, and cultural studies. The frontiers we seek to transcend are thus disciplinary as well as national; neither type of boundary is easily surmountable, but it is important to make the attempt.

Difficulties with ‘Difficult Heritage’ ‘Difficult heritage’ has been associated with ‘places of pain and shame’ (Logan and Reeves 2009), summoning up memories of violence, occupation, oppression, and other forms of trauma.6 In their landmark 2009 volume, Logan, Reeves, and their contributors discussed the challenges of managing ‘difficult heritage’ sites, examining cases drawn from a variety of cultural contexts concerning painful and/or shameful historical episodes. Some of these cases, mostly involving civil unrest 6. Since the 1990s, a vast array of terms has been coined to describe ‘undesirable heritage’ (Macdonald 2006), distinguishing it from mainstream ideas of heritage as positive, glorious accomplishments of human civilization. These include ‘dissonant heritage’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; Graham 2002), ‘difficult heritage’ (Logan and Reeves 2008; Macdonald 2009), ‘heritage that hurts’ (Uzzell and Ballantyne 1998), ‘negative heritage’ (Meskell 2002), ‘contested heritage’ (Tunbridge, Jones, and Shaw 1996; Shaw and Jones 1997; Winter 2007), and ‘dark tourism’/‘dark heritage’ (Lennon and Foley 2000). For further discussion of this terminology, see Lee (2019, chap. 1).

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 9

Figure 0.1:  The constellation of cases discussed in this volume. Map by Dami Kim and Hyun Kyung Lee.

10 Introduction

and war, defied efforts to manage or ‘package’ them as heritage, especially where the cause of trauma remained real and present. Writing at around the same time, Sharon Macdonald (2009) also deployed the concept of ‘difficult heritage’ in her work on Germany, focusing specifically on the Nazi ceremonial sites at Nuremberg. Macdonald examines how heritage ‘difficulties’ can evolve during the post-conflict period; how they are implicated in the formation, or reformation, of community identity and collective memory; and administrative and political challenges this can pose. In this volume, we seek to advance understanding of how sites of pain and shame have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in the contemporary Asia-Pacific in a context of intensifying cross-border contestation and competition. War sites, prisoner-of-war camps, prisons, and colonial architecture, as Logan and Reeves observed in the early 2000s, have in many societies increasingly become the object of efforts simultaneously to expand tourism and to mobilize memorial sites for purposes of national (re)branding. But as Logan and Reeves also observed, what constitutes heritage, and what makes it ‘difficult’, are often highly contentious matters, interpreted very differently by different groups. With respect to Indigenous heritage,7 for example, in parts of the early twenty-first-century Asia-Pacific—notably in Australia, New Zealand, and (to some extent) Taiwan—sites associated with Indigenous culture have become the focus of efforts to remind the public of the suffering and injustice inflicted by settler colonialism (Huang, 2021). Elsewhere, for example in China regarding its ‘ethnic minorities’ but also in the case of Japan’s Ainu (see Chapter 2 of this volume), Indigenous communities continue to find their heritage exoticized and commodified, with ‘difficulties’ involving relations with the majority ethnic community almost entirely buried, denied, or elided. If ‘difficult heritage’ is often hard to pin down, this is perhaps because, properly considered, all heritage is in some way, or to some degree, ‘difficult’. When it serves merely to romanticize, exoticize, or crudely moralize—for purposes of commodification, profit, or propaganda—heritage simplifies and distorts the complexities of the past, with consequences that can be deeply divisive and politically dangerous. Japan’s nationalists have sought to promote the legacy of the Meiji era largely because they see this as a way of distracting public attention from the ‘difficulties’ of the mid-twentieth century and fostering instead an uncomplicated pride in national success. At the time of writing (June 2021), this extends to the prime-time airing on public broadcaster NHK of a weekly ‘Taiga drama’ celebrating the life of the nineteenth-century industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi. But what for some is the unproblematic object of sepia-tinted nostalgia can for others bear associations of intense pain and shame, as witnessed by Korean protests over public portrayals of Japan’s UNESCO-listed ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’ that ignore the wartime 7. In this edited volume, the term ‘Indigenous’ is capitalized as a sign of respect, whether it is used as part of a proper name, in reference to a specific group, or as a generic term. For more see Chapter 2 by Roslynn Ang.

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 11

employment at many such sites of Korean (and Chinese) slave labour (see Chapter 10 by Vickers). These disputes find an echo in recent controversy over the role of profits from slave trading in the construction of many of Britain’s country houses (Huxtable et al. 2020). Whether it be the quaint streets of a Japanese castle town or a Palladian mansion in rolling English countryside, the setting for a cosy costume drama can conceal a dark or ‘difficult’ past. A crucial aspect of the ‘difficulty’ of difficult heritage involves the act of publicly debating or writing about it. Pressures to censor or self-censor research on past conflict and its commemoration operate constantly and in more or less subtle ways. Such pressures explain why Japanese scholars are mostly inclined to avoid contentious topics related to World War II such as the ‘comfort women’ (see Vickers 2020). The situation elsewhere in East or Southeast Asia is often even more severe and can extend to intimidation of scholars in the diaspora (Hamilton and Ohlberg 2020, chap. 11; Soh 2008). Such pressures have intensified significantly since around 2010. In Japan, following Abe Shinzo’s return to the premiership in 2012, the country’s diplomats have effectively been tasked with policing worldwide efforts to commemorate or debate ‘comfort women’ (Schumacher 2021; Dezaki, Frost, and Vickers 2021). Despite—or because of—their acute political divisions, the opposing sides in Northeast Asia’s history wars broadly share a highly politicized and profoundly instrumentalist approach to heritage. This is evident, for example, in attempts to globalize difficult heritage by linking it to universalistic notions of human rights or peace, thus weaponizing memory in the service of essentially nationalistic goals (evidenced in chapters here by Huang, Vickers, and others). The 1996 UNESCO World Heritage listing of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (the Genbaku Dome) set a regional precedent for the reworking of difficult memories and places into vehicles for ostensibly universal, humanistic messages—a precedent that People’s Republic of China (PRC) officials have been eager to follow, for example, through pursuit of a ‘Memory of the World’ inscription for a Nanjing Massacre-related archive.8 For many involved in promoting such listings, the loud espousal of a commitment to ‘peace’ serves as a cover for, or means of legitimating, a heightened sense of national moral superiority. The connection between morality and the politics of apology for past wrongs has attracted growing scholarly attention in recent years (Cooper 2001; Cunningham 1999; Daase 2010). Some have attributed the difficulty of achieving reconciliation in East Asia to a uniquely ‘Asian’ connection between morality and memory, contrasting Asian cultures of ‘honour and shame’ with Western cultures of ‘dignity and guilt’ (Kim and Schwarz 2010). Like Morris-Suzuki (2013), however, we find this dichotomy unconvincing; it obscures the diversity of approaches to memory within all societies as well as the ways in which dominant understandings of the past change over time. East Asia’s intractable apology diplomacy has not been 8. On Hiroshima, see Zwigenberg (2015).

12 Introduction

a constant of the postwar regional order; only since the 1990s has it really come to the fore, as political leaders in China, Japan, and newly democratic South Korea sought to secure a new basis for their legitimacy in a fluid post–Cold War world. The causes of this phenomenon thus appear fundamentally political rather than cultural, products of attempts by political leaders to appeal to a nationalist base by establishing or defending their nation’s position atop a regional moral hierarchy.9 If state-to-state apology diplomacy has demonstrated its ineffectiveness as a tool of reconciliation in East Asia, this is largely because such manoeuvring by political elites is widely—and often accurately—perceived to be directed at narrower, less elevated goals. The desire of political leaders to achieve harmonious inter-state relations often involves a willingness to bury the difficult past, irrespective of the wishes or feelings of victims of past atrocities. Indeed, a staged apology can actually set back the cause of reconciliation, marginalizing victims while sidestepping the difficult business of confronting and, crucially, teaching the troubled history of the recent past in all its complexity.10 State-to-state efforts at reconciliation thus tend to be ‘thin’ at best in the absence of more far-reaching societal engagement with the difficult past (Morris-Suzuki 2013; Shin, Park, and Yang 2008). This implies an important role for civil society in transcending political divisions and building bridges between communities schooled in starkly different interpretations of the past. However, while in many societies non-state actors have been increasingly involved in the management of heritage sites (Adams 2005; Waterton and Smith 2010), this remains difficult or impossible across much of the Asia-Pacific, especially in mainland China. UNESCO is one cross-border arena for the competing projection of national influence through heritage that has witnessed intensifying intimidation as its perceived significance has grown. As noted above, the processes whereby heritage is certified as ‘globally’ significant can actually serve to dramatize and exacerbate international divisions. Indeed, the weaponization of UNESCO heritage listings by rival Asian nationalists tends to reinforce cynicism regarding their rhetorical espousal of ‘peace’ or ‘reconciliation’. In response to Japanese pressure, UNESCO has already changed the rules governing consideration of applications to the Memory of the World Register and is due to determine during the forty-fourth session of its Assembly ‘whether and how sites associated with recent conflicts and other negative and divisive memories might relate to the purpose and scope of the World Heritage Convention’ (UNESCO 2018).11 Excluding applications for the registration of such 9. Indeed, the principle of ‘hierarchy’ has itself recently been invoked by apologists for the PRC regime, as they attempt to sanctify Beijing’s claims to regional supremacy through appeals to ancient ‘Confucian’ tradition (Bell and Pei 2020). 10. One example of this is Japan’s blatantly unapologetic apology to Korea over the ‘comfort women’ issue in December 2015 which was accompanied by a continuing drive by the Japanese authorities to suppress commemoration of victims both within Japan and internationally. Far from marking a positive turn in Japanese– Korean relations, this seemed only to intensify their downward spiral. 11. The editors would like to thank William Logan for this insight. For more detail on the controversy surrounding

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 13

heritage may constrain the hypocritical use of UNESCO procedures to weaponize the rhetoric of ‘peace’, but Tokyo’s aims have more to do with simply suppressing difficult history. If, as Morris-Suzuki (2013, 12) argues, ‘profound and lasting reconciliation needs to be based on openness to inconvenient truths’, then UNESCO’s ‘non-platforming’ of debate over East Asia’s difficult heritage signals worsening prospects for ‘profound and lasting reconciliation’.

Borders and Frontiers: Geographical and Mnemonic One way of thinking about the relationship between conflict-related heritage and the challenge of reconciliation involves ‘frontiers’ or ‘borders’—as both political reality and historiographical metaphor. Here we conceptualize borders and frontiers as ‘multifaceted social institutions’ rather than solely legal, political markers of territorial sovereignty (Laine 2016, 467). But as Edward Boyle, a contributor to this volume, argues, heritage sites can also symbolically delineate ‘borders of memory’ by virtue of their function as ‘spaces where the competing collective memories of neighbouring East Asian governments and societies clash and rub up against one another’ (Boyle 2019, 293). Such clashes themselves play an important role in the construction or reconstruction of memory, albeit typically with the effect of reinforcing the borders dividing national narratives, rather than transcending them to forge some new transnational consensus. This process also involves shoring up divisions between those aspects of the past deemed worthy or unworthy of commemoration. While some conflicts, atrocities, or narratives or anticolonial resistance attain the status of sacrosanct national myth, others are excluded or marginalized. In the contemporary PRC, for example, World War II (or the ‘War of Patriotic Resistance against Japanese Aggression’) is the focus of state-directed efforts to construct an image of virtuous Chinese unity in the face of egregious foreign ‘bullying’. Meanwhile, the atrocities of the Mao Zedong era, which claimed many more lives, languish beyond the pale of officially sanctioned patriotic history. Similarly, in Korea the dominant narrative of the national past is organized around a myth of united resistance to Japanese colonialism, excluding more difficult and complex aspects of the colonial experience (such as collaboration). As nationalist politics mould mnemonic frontiers, the effect is typically to reinforce the imagined boundaries between malevolent outsiders and the nation as violated innocent, united in virtuous victimhood. The notion of ‘frontier’, deployed in this volume’s title, subtly differs from the more static idea of a ‘border’; in Kristof ’s classic definition, frontiers embody the idea of change, expansion, or forward movement. Kristof defined the frontier as ‘a manifestation of the spontaneous tendency for growth of the ecumene’, which expands to ‘the only limits it can acknowledge, namely, the limits of the world’. The frontier, the 2015 registration of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution, see Nakano (2018) and Nam (2020).

14 Introduction

he argued, was not the end but rather the beginning of the state (Kristof 1959, 270) and designated an area just beyond the inhabited hinterland, potentially marked for incorporation within it. Another political geographer J. R. V. Prescott argued that, whereas borders suggest clear lines, frontiers are ‘the zonal divisions between states’ ([1965] 2015, 34). Like these geographical frontiers, here we conceive of ‘frontiers of memory’ as zones of expansion, shrinkage, or movement. Also following Prescott, it is useful to think of frontiers as separating not just one state from its neighbours but also the settled and unsettled ‘zones’ within a particular state. To extend the metaphor, memory’s frontiers, at the edges of the remembered past, may be lost through being unattended and uninhabited, or else, through assiduous cultivation, may come to form the nexus of a new communal consciousness. In different ways, at different times, regions discussed in this volume, such as Hokkaido, Taiwan, or Palau, have found themselves on both the geographical and mnemonic frontiers of the states that control them. More broadly, the notion of frontiers of memory as shifting, indeterminate zones of contestation between rival narratives—spaces where heritage actors vie to plant their flags and stake their claims—runs through the studies that comprise this volume.

Difficult Heritage at the Crossroads of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Transnationalism The legacy of colonialism constitutes a crucial zone of contestation between rival narratives of the past across the Asia-Pacific. The imagined frontier between victims and perpetrators of colonial oppression has played a pivotal role in framing narratives of national identity in almost all regional societies. Repackaging the built legacy of the colonial past as heritage has served efforts to appropriate for national ends artefacts of an imperialist project that aimed at flattening national or local identities. As Leo Ching (2001, 204) has argued in the case of Taiwan, the colonial mode of production was a system in which ‘systematic variation and heterogeneity’ were ‘transformed into standardization and singularity’. Within Japan itself, traces of the imperialist era are largely absent or concealed; as Ako and Vickers note in their chapters here, heritage does not serve to remind Japanese of their record as perpetrators of colonialism. But colonial heritage looms large in the formerly colonized societies of Taiwan and Korea, albeit in radically different ways—with Taiwan lovingly preserving relics of a colonial past that Koreans are more inclined to erase (Huang and Lee 2019; Morris et al. 2013). Colonialism across the Asia-Pacific varied significantly from place to place and over time, both in the manner in which it was practised and the ways in which it was experienced and remembered. In the settler colonial societies of Australasia, an earlier focus on the victimhood of unjustly exiled convict ancestors (especially in Australia) has in recent decades been complicated by growing recognition of the harm inflicted on Indigenous peoples by European settlement. In Northeast and

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 15

Southeast Asia, meanwhile, most existing literature on difficult memories and heritage addresses the legacies of Japanese, British, French, or Dutch colonization rather than instances of internal colonialism or settler colonialism as practised within those societies prior to, during, or following the period of European or Japanese rule (Andrade 2008; Sugimoto 2018; Vickers 2008). In comparative discussions of colonialism, the status of Indigenous peoples in Japan and Taiwan (not to mention mainland China; see Vickers 2015) is still often ignored (Sugimoto 2018; Tuck and Yang 2012). As noted above, lingering anti-colonial sentiment can provide a basis for transnational collaboration in the heritage field—for example, in relation to ‘comfort women’ commemoration—but with collaboration often serving as a platform for broadcasting competing nationalisms, rather than a means of transcending them. While there are civil society groups that harbour a genuine commitment to transnationalism, for most governments, control of the national narrative presented through heritage as through other media (e.g., school curricula) is a non-negotiable core state function. In Robinson’s (1998) terms, a real shift towards transnationalism requires an ‘ontological shift’ which shows no sign of occurring in Northeast or Southeast Asia. The barriers to transnationalism are institutional as well as ontological. Ever since societies across the Asia-Pacific acquired the trappings of modern statehood, whether under colonial occupation or during periods of anti- or postcolonial state formation, most governments have established and maintained structures for ensuring strong bureaucratic control of school curricula, museums, and memorials. Publicly funded museums are often directly accountable to national ministries that to a greater or lesser degree monitor and control the way these institutions narrate the past, just as education ministries vet the content of history textbooks for use in the nation’s schools. Having acquired this machinery for fostering statecentred patriotism, few governments have been willing to significantly relax their grasp on the levers of control.12 This is as true of Southeast as of Northeast Asia. In 2017, for example, a proposal to invite  a Chinese scholar to deliver a keynote on ‘comfort women’ heritage in China at a conference hosted by the Singapore National Museum was vetoed by the local authorities, apparently reflecting official anxiety at appearing to ‘take sides’ on an issue of such sensitivity for both China and Japan.13 State control over the public representation of the past remains a crucial factor limiting the scope for autonomous action by civil society in the heritage and education sectors. The lack of any ontological or institutional shift across most of Northeast and Southeast Asia is explained largely by the entanglement of memories of colonial 12. Although post–martial law Taiwan constitutes one significant exception; see Denton (2021). 13. This was the ‘Exhibiting the Fall’ conference of September 2017 hosted by the National Museum of Singapore and the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP) of which Vickers is a core member.

16 Introduction

victimhood with the legitimating narratives of post-independence authoritarian regimes. Taiwan’s shifting towards greater pluralism involved the simultaneous rejection both of Chinese nationalism and of a regime that had staked its legitimacy on that ideology (Denton 2021). The further association of nationalism with the security threat from across the strait also meant that debate over conventional notions of nationhood in post–martial law Taiwan acquired a critical edge rare elsewhere across the region (Corcuff 2002) as many Taiwanese felt driven to imagine their identity in more transnational, pluralistic ways. To be sure, this has involved its own forms of mythmaking in which a conviction of Taiwan’s essential victimhood has for many remained central (Vickers 2008). But in most other East or Southeast Asian societies, victimhood narratives tend to underpin a consciousness of monolithic nationhood that limits prospects for transnational collaboration or reconciliation.

Rescuing Memory from State-Directed Heritage Politics In his renowned study of historiographical debate in early twentieth-century China, Rescuing History from the Nation (1995), Prasenjit Duara critiques the dominance of nationalist historiography across modern Asia. He attributes the pathology of statist nationalism to the mimicking by Asian nationalists of the linear, evolutionary, teleological, and historiographical vision typical of post-Enlightenment Europe. The cases analysed in this volume bear out his observations concerning the tight grip of nationalism on Asian thinking about the past. There are groups across the region that have sought to rescue difficult heritage from the nation through local or transnational action, but they operate at the margins. Across Northeast and Southeast Asia, difficult heritage is almost invariably refracted through the prism of the nation. But the tendency to dichotomize ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ that underpins the work of Duara and many other contemporary scholars seems historically dubious. Nationalism and colonialism are manifestations of the atavistic tribalism to which all human societies are prone. While nineteenth-century Darwinism lent pseudoscientific legitimacy to aggressive projects of colonialism and national aggrandizement premised on the dehumanization of ‘lesser breeds’, such ideas found fertile soil in Asia because of pre-existing beliefs concerning lineage and the inferiority of ancestrally and culturally alien ‘barbarians’ (Dikötter 1992; Teng 2005). The idea that premodern Asians inhabited some harmonious, prelapsarian Nirvana until the destructive intrusion of Western imperialists therefore does not survive close scrutiny. Duara (2015) rightly calls for a re-examination of Asian traditions in search of resources for ‘transcending’ the divisive and destructive tendencies of ‘global modernity’ and securing a ‘sustainable future’, but this call should be extended to the diversity of ‘traditions’ generally. To distinguish ‘Asian’ from ‘Western’ tradition, as if these constitute two separate blocs, is essentially untenable given the profound

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 17

cultural unity of Eurasia (Goody 2006). The Industrial Revolution that began in Europe and North America has had devastating environmental consequences, but unsustainable attitudes to the natural world were never a Western prerogative; the severe degradation of China’s ecology through rampant extraction of resources was already evident by the early nineteenth century (Elvin 2004). Mahatma Gandhi, that great Asian prophet of non-violence, cited Western thinkers such as Ruskin and Tolstoy among his chief inspirations. For him, the point of overthrowing Western colonialism was emphatically not to assert the innate superiority of ‘Asian’ over ‘Western’ tradition but to realize a vision of rooted, sustainable, small-scale communities capable of liberating their members from dehumanizing external systems of control, whether colonial or industrial (Kumar 1989). The pathology of the national ‘capture’ of difficult heritage, and public history more broadly, is therefore fundamentally not just transnational but global, transcending any supposed Western–Asian divide. The difficulties of ‘rescuing’ difficult heritage from the nation in the Asia-Pacific cannot be explained by reference to the corrupting influence of ‘Western modernity’ to be purged through recovery of pristine ‘Asian’ tradition. Indeed, such arguments, often advanced by well-intentioned Western critics of colonialism (not least in Australia and New Zealand), risk legitimating in Asian societies just the sort of chauvinism that such scholars decry at home (Chibber 2013). In our efforts here to explore the reasons for the absence in Asia of any resolutely transnational approach to conflict-related heritage, we thus eschew essentialism of the kind associated with simplistic distinctions between cultures of ‘honour and shame’ and ‘dignity and guilt’ (Kim and Schwarz 2010). In contrast to much related work on ‘history wars’ in East Asia or the Asia-Pacific (e.g., Morris-Suzuki 2013; Shin and Sneider 2011), our principal focus here is on built heritage. We also pay greater attention to the commemoration of ‘difficult’ history associated with colonialism, rather than exclusively focusing on war-related heritage as Frost, Schumacher, Vickers, and contributors do in their volume Remembering Asia’s World War Two (2019). And rather than focusing exclusively on the treatment of heritage related to Japanese imperialism and militarism (see also Kushner and Muminov 2019), our analysis also extends to consideration of the difficult legacy of Western colonialism across the region. Building on previous work by Huang and Lee (2019), we pay special attention to geopolitical processes and the diversification of stakeholders within and across national frontiers, and related efforts to lay claim to ‘off-shore heritage’. The special attention devoted here to the transnational dimension of heritage making reflects a conviction on the part of all contributors that commemoration of the ‘difficult’ past has the potential to contribute positively to peace, diversity, and sustainability across the Asia-Pacific. However, this requires a decoupling of the management of heritage from manipulation and control by nation-states, more extensive transnational dialogue, and a far greater role for civil society. For reasons

18 Introduction

already alluded to in this introductory essay, the chances of such a transformation in heritage politics occurring any time soon appear vanishingly slim.

Outline of the Chapters The ten chapters in this volume are divided into three subsections, each dealing with different aspects of difficult heritage across the Asia-Pacific. The first section, ‘Memory Politics, Colonialism, and Conflict’, looks at the politics of colonial heritage in formerly colonized territories. Chapter 1, by Edward Boyle, points to how war memories continue to shape the memorial contest on the small island of Peleliu, Palau, even seventy-five years after it was the site of a bloody World War II battle. Boyle adopts the notion of the ‘tidemark’ to illuminate the material and epistemological impact of this ongoing process of memorialization. In particular, the forcible evacuation of Peleliu’s Indigenous population since the war has created difficulties, to say the least, regarding the commemoration of their island’s cataclysmic history. The following chapter, by Roslynn Ang, examines Hokkaido, Japan’s northern frontier until the Meiji period, and a region not fully brought under central government control until then, when it was seen as essential to the country’s defence against Russia. The extension of Japanese administration on the island brought with it a thoroughgoing programme of assimilation for the Indigenous Ainu. Ang argues that the contested representation of the Ainu illustrates the difficulties in achieving nuanced, accurate treatment in today’s Japan from the ways in which disparate transnational, national, and local actors have interacted within a settler colonial framework. Ang focuses on how Ainu have been represented in relation to the discourses of Japanese nationalism that have evolved from the Meiji period onwards. She shows that the difficulty of representing Ainu culture and history is a symptom of broader problems resulting from the legacy of conflict and tension between settlers and Indigenous populations in this region, and the lack of critical public reflection on this legacy, in a context where any official acknowledgement of distinct Indigenous heritage has come only recently. Moving to what was, from 1895 to 1945, the southern end of the Japanese archipelago, Lu Pan’s study of Taiwan in Chapter 3 analyses an instance of the postretrocession commemoration of Chinese nationalist martyrs at a space previously given sacred significance by the Japanese colonial authorities. Yuanshan Area on the outskirts of Taipei, the site of the National Martyrs’ Shrine, also became the location for the Chiang Kai-shek regime’s Grand Hotel Taipei, the de facto Cold War ‘headquarters’ of the anti-communist allies of the ROC (Republic of China) in Taiwan. As it has subsequently evolved into a tourist destination, Yuanshan Area has gone through significant changes that reflect the ongoing transformation of Taiwanese culture and public discourse concerning national identity. The volume’s second section, ‘Making Heritage Out of Memories of Incarceration’, examines the musealization of prisons, a quarantine station, and

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 19

prisoner-of-war camps. At such sites, inmates were confined in the name of hygiene or justice, or as enemy aliens during wartime. While ‘prison’ as a social institution remains an unavoidable feature of modern society, the varying ways in which prisons dating to the era of colonialism and imperialism in Asia have been reconfigured as heritage—or, in the Japanese case, have been effectively erased from the heritage landscape—is revealing of the different ways in which the legacies of that era are woven into discourses of political identity today. Memories of incarceration entwined with colonialism are perhaps most evident in Hong Kong and Singapore, two former colonial port cities of the British Empire. In Chapter 4, Lachlan Barber examines Hong Kong’s carefully restored former Central Police Station Compound (renamed as Tai Kwun), while in Chapter 5, Desmond Hok-Man Sham discusses the neglected site of the St John’s Island quarantine station in Singapore. While the Tai Kwun site—comprising the former Central Police Station, Victoria Gaol, and Central Magistracy, among other buildings—celebrates the heritage of the Hong Kong Police Force, Barber’s analysis demonstrates how ruptures and selectivity in the process of conservation seem calculated to prevent visitors from critically engaging with the past. This is an instance of potentially difficult heritage ‘made easy’, in a context where the legacies of colonial policing remain a prominent and highly controversial feature of the postcolonial present. While race is one ‘difficult’ feature of Hong Kong’s policing heritage that receives little public acknowledgement there,14 in narrating the history of the former colonial quarantine facilities on Singapore’s St John’s Island, race has been unduly highlighted, according to Sham. Whereas quarantining has typically been represented as a racial practice unfairly targeting ethnic Chinese, Sham’s research points to alternative memories of this experience, as he argues that class was more significant than race in determining who was subjected to the indignity of quarantine, and how they were treated while in quarantine. Addressing another aspect of the heritage of incarceration, Tomoko Ako’s study of the gate of Nakano Prison in Tokyo—the only remaining vestige of this infamous prison’s original structure—deals with an attempt to suppress an aspect of Japan’s difficult pre-1945 past, and local efforts to resist this suppression. As one of the local activists resisting efforts to remove this landmark, Ako argues that preservation of the gate allows the history of the prison to be openly debated and reflected upon. However, her experience shows that the forces in Japanese society ranged against such openness remain formidable. Chapter 7, by Anoma Pieris, focuses on prisoner-of-war camps in the AsiaPacific and the attempt to transform them into ‘peace parks’ symbolizing late twentieth-century friendship between Japan and its former adversaries in Australia. The momentum here did not come from nation-states but from local action taking 14. Besides retaining commanding roles in the police force for themselves, the British long relied heavily on Sikh recruits to police Hong Kong’s Chinese community.

20 Introduction

on a transnational dimension, involving collaboration between citizens of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. In tracing these actions, Pieris illustrates the interconnected memory politics of these former prisoner-of-war camps in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and how this has led to the self-conscious creation of commemorative landscapes. Her research provides a window onto the underlying complexities of the formalized ‘memoryscapes’ that convey the stories of collective national trauma. At the same time, the framing of this heritage within the rubric of ‘peace’ reflects mainstream tropes in the commemoration of Japanese suffering (see the chapters by Ako and Vickers discussed in this volume). This suggests that actors in Australian and New Zealand may have been unwittingly drawn into legitimating narratives of the Asia-Pacific War that, in espousing a generalized commitment to ‘peace’, gloss over the more troubling aspects of pre-1945 Japanese militarism. The third and final section, ‘Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Difficult Heritage Making’, features three chapters dealing with cases of East Asia’s difficult heritage making that highlight the limits of transnationalism, or its perversion in the service of nationalism. Shu-Mei Huang’s study of Jewish heritage in Shanghai (Chapter 8) reveals the difficult heritage diplomacy that simultaneously celebrates and suppresses one of the most unexpected examples of the heritagization of Jewish memories of desperate flights from continental Europe and Russia to Shanghai. In light of the globalization of the memory of the Holocaust, Huang discusses how China has developed its own complex web of weaponized memory, with the Municipal Government of Shanghai pushing for a UNESCO Memory of the World inscription in a diplomatic dance with the state actors of China, Israel, and the US. Also looking at Shanghai, Hyun Kyung Lee’s research into the preservation of the former headquarters of the Shanghai Provisional Government of Korea (SPGK) in the former French Concession investigates the politics and diplomacy of South Korean–Chinese attempts to commemorate shared heritage. Only after the 1987 revised Constitution proclaimed the SPGK as the root of the Republic of Korea did collaboration between South Korea and China begin, leading to this particular case of Korean heritage making in China. Lee’s investigation of the divergent interpretations of this historic site demonstrates how transnational heritage making can struggle to transcend national mnemonic boundaries. The final chapter, by Edward Vickers, analyses the interpretation of war-related commemorative sites in Kyushu, Japan, the region at the forefront both of Japan’s modernization from the Meiji period onwards and of Japanese expansionism in Asia. Elaborating on the theme of memory’s ‘frontiers’, he argues that, in Kyushu as in Japan more widely, the frontier with the Asian mainland tends to be imagined as relatively soft or porous in the premodern past. But this willingness to recognize, and even celebrate, premodern cultural transnationalism in East Asia largely evaporates when we reach the modern era. Here the frontiers of memory dramatically harden with heritage relating to the Meiji period and after presented within a far narrower national frame. This intensely ‘securitized’ approach to the national past

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 21

ironically epitomizes the similarities between Japan and its closest East Asian neighbours in their treatment of difficult heritage, even while it obscures the historical ties that bind them.

References Adams, Kathleen M. 2005. ‘Public Interest Anthropology in Heritage Sites: Writing Culture and Righting Wrongs’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 11(5): 433–439. Ainslie, Mary J. 2021. ‘Chinese Philosemitism and Historical Statecraft: Incorporating Jews and Israel into Contemporary Chinese Civilization’. The China Quarterly 245 (March): 208–26. Andrade, Tonio. 2008. How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Bell, Daniel, and Wang Pei. 2020. Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage’. Japan Forum 31 (3) (July): 293–312. Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London and New York: Verso. Ching, Leo T. S. 2001. Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cochrane, Peter. 2015. ‘The Past Is Not Sacred: The History Wars over ANZAC’. The Conversation, April 25. https://theconversation.com/the-past-is-not-sacred-thehistory-wars-over-anzac-38596. Cooper, David. 2001. ‘Collective Responsibility, Moral Luck and Reconciliation’. In War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing: A Reader, edited by Aleksandar Jokic, 205–15. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Corcuff, Stéphane. 2002. Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan. New York and London: Routledge. Cunningham, Michael. 1999. ‘Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology’. The Political Quarterly 70 (3): 285–93. Daase, Christopher. 2010. ‘Addressing Painful Memories: Apologies as a New Practice in International Relations’. In Memory in a Global Age, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 19–31. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. David, Lea. 2020. The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denton, Kirk. 2021. The Landscape of Historical Memory: The Politics of Museums and Memorial Culture in Post-Martial Law Taiwan. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Dezaki, Miki, Mark R. Frost, and Edward Vickers. 2021. ‘Debating Shusenjo: The Main Battlefield of the “Comfort Women” Issue—Director Miki Dezaki in Conversation with Mark Frost and Edward Vickers’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 11: Article ID 5554. Dikötter, Frank. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst.

22 Introduction Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 2015. The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elvin, Mark. 2004. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frost, Mark R., Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, eds. 2019. Remembering Asia’s World War Two. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Frost, Mark R., and Edward Vickers, eds. 2021a. ‘The “Comfort Women” as Public History’. Special issue, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 3: Article ID 5541. Frost, Mark R., and Edward Vickers. 2021b. ‘Introduction: The “Comfort Women” as Public History—Scholarship, Advocacy and the Commemorative Impulse’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 3: Article ID 5546. Graham, Brian. 2002. ‘Heritage as Knowledge: Capital or Culture?’ Urban Studies 39 (5/6): 1003–17. Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, Clive, and Mareike Ohlberg. 2020. Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World. London: Oneworld. Harrison, Rodney. 2013. Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge. Harrison, Rodney, Caitlin Desilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon MacDonald, Nadia Bartolini, Esther Breithoff, Harald Fredheim, et al. 2020. Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press. Huang, Shu-Mei. 2021. ‘Indigenous Heritage in Diplomacy: Repositioning Taiwan in the Austronesian Network and Its Cultural Implications’. Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development. Online first. DOI:  10.1108/JCHMSD-052021-0082 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. Huxtable, Sally-Anne, Corinne Fowler, Christo Kefalas, and Emma Slocombe. 2020. Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties Now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery. Swindon: The National Trust. Kim, Jo. 2020. ‘With Support for Black Lives Matter, China Crosses a Thin Line’. Japan Times, July 1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/07/01/commentary/worldcommentary/support-black-lives-matter-china-crosses-thin-line/. Kim, Mikyoung, and Barry Schwartz, eds. 2010. Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past: Essays in Collective Memory. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Kristof, Ladis K. D. 1959. ‘The Nature of Frontiers and Boundaries’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49 (3): 269–82. Kumar, Krishna. 1989. ‘Profiles of Educators: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948)’. Prospects: Quarterly Review of Education 72: 591–96. Kushner, Barak, and Sherzod Muminov, eds. 2019. Overcoming Empire in Post-imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Laine, Jussi P. 2016. ‘The Multiscalar Production of Borders’. Geopolitics 21 (3): 465–82. Law, Wing Sang. 2009. Collaborative Colonial Power: The Making of the Hong Kong Chinese. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Shu-Mei Huang, Edward Vickers, and Hyun Kyung Lee 23 Lee, Hyun Kyung. 2019. Difficult Heritage in Nation Building: South Korea and Post-conflict Japanese Colonial Occupation Architecture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Lennon, J. John, and Malcolm Foley. 2000. Dark Tourism. London: Cengage Learning EMEA. Logan, William, and Keir Reeves, eds. 2009. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macdonald, Sharon. 2006. ‘Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 12 (1): 9–28. Macdonald, Sharon. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Margalit, Avishai. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mazower, Mark. 2009. Hitler’s Empire. London: Penguin. Meskell, Lynn. 2002. ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 557–74. Mitter, Rana. 2020. China’s Good War: How World War Two Is Shaping a New Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morris, Paul, Naoko Shimazu, and Edward Vickers, eds. 2013. Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2013. ‘Introduction: Confronting the Ghosts of War in East Asia’. In East Asia beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence, edited by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu, 1–26. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu, eds. 2013. East Asia beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence. Oxon and New York: Routledge. 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. Prescott, John Robert Victor. (1965) 2015. The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries. London: Routledge. Ramseyer, J. Mark. 2021. ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’. International Review of Law and Economics 65: Article ID 105971. Rieff, David. 2016. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Robinson, William I. 1998. ‘Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies’. Sociological Forum 13 (4): 561–94. Schumacher, D. 2021. ‘Asia’s Global Memory Wars and Solidarity across Borders: Diaspora Activism on the “Comfort Women” Issue in the United States’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 6: Article ID 5547. Shaw, Brian J., and Roy Jones, eds. 1997. Contested Urban Heritage: Voices from the Periphery. Aldershot: Ashgate. Shin, Gi-Wook, Soon-Won Park, and Daqing Yang, eds. 2008. Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia: The Korean Experience. London and New York: Routledge.

24 Introduction Shin, Gi-Wook, and Daniel Sneider, eds. 2011. History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories. London and New York: Routledge. Shin, Heisoo. 2021. ‘Voices of the “Comfort Women”: The Power Politics Surrounding the UNESCO Documentary Heritage’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 8: Article ID 5551. Soh, Chunghee Sarah. 2008. The Comfort Women. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sugimoto, Tomonori. 2018. ‘Settler Colonial Incorporation and Inheritance: Historical Sciences, Indigeneity, and Settler Narratives in Post-WWII Taiwan’. Settler Colonial Studies 8 (3): 283–97. Suh, J. J. 2017. ‘Missile Defense and the Security Dilemma: THAAD, Japan’s “Proactive Peace”, and the Arms Race in Northeast Asia’. Asia Pacific Journal 15 (9), no. 5: Article ID 5033. Teng, Emma Jinhua. 2005. Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40. Tunbridge, John E., and Gregory J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Tunbridge, John E., Roy Jones, and Brian Shaw. 1996. ‘Editorial: Contested Heritage: Perth, 1995’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 2 (1/2): 5–9. UNESCO. 2018. State of Conservation Report: Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining. Accessed September 8, 2020. https://whc. unesco.org/en/soc/3704. Uzzell, David, and Roy Ballantyne, eds. 1998. Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation: Problems and Prospects. Norwich: The Stationery Office. Vickers, Edward. 2008. ‘Original Sin on the Island Paradise: Qing Taiwan’s Colonial History in Comparative Perspective’. Taiwan in Comparative Perspective 2 (December): 65–86. Vickers, Edward. 2015. ‘A Civilising Mission with Chinese Characteristics? Education, Colonialism and Chinese State Formation in Comparative Perspective’. In Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship, edited by Edward Vickers and Krishna Kumar, 50–79. New York and London: Routledge. Vickers, Edward. 2020. ‘Turtles or Dragons? Academic Freedom in Japanese Universities’. In Academic Freedom Under Siege: Higher Education in East Asia, the US and Australia, edited by Zhidong Hao and Peter Zabielskis, 181–203. Cham: Springer. Vickers, Edward. Forthcoming. ‘Celebrating the Humane Superpower: China, the Holocaust and Transnational Heritage Politics—the Case of Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum’. Holocaust Studies. Waterton, Emma, and Laurajane Smith. 2010. ‘The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (1–2): 4–15. Winter, Tim. 2007. Post-conflict Heritage, Postcolonial Tourism: Culture, Politics and Development at Angkor. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Winter, Tim. 2019. Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the TwentyFirst Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Zwigenberg, Ran. 2015. Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I Memory Politics, Colonialism, and Conflict

1 Lapped by the Tide Borders of Memory on the Island of Peleliu, Palau Edward Boyle

The islands of Palau are located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 900 km north of West Papua and 900 km east of the Philippines.1 For scuba connoisseurs, Palau is famous as a dive destination, particularly around the southern section of the large reef enclosing most of the archipelagic nation’s islands. Dive sites around Peleliu Island are noted for a series of ‘walls’, ‘corners’, and ‘gardens’ that offer unparalleled opportunities for spying on underwater tropical delights. These are all products of where the reef hugs close to the island’s shore, which offers the ideal habitat for coral and its attendant piscatorial partners to flourish, while also sheltering the island from the waves and currents of the Pacific Ocean. Yet, while this reef has sheltered Peleliu from many a storm, the island itself remains indelibly marked by the ‘typhoon of war’ (Poyer, Falgout, and Marshall Carucci 2001) which broke upon its shores in September 1944 and has shaped the island’s landscape ever since. This chapter will understand the material remnants of the Battle of Peleliu, as well as a series of monuments and memorials subsequently constructed to it, as collectively constituting ‘difficult heritage’ for Peleliu today. It will consider the difficult heritage that remains on Peleliu as ‘tidemarks’ left on the island’s topography by the rising or ebbing tides of Japanese and American empire. The chapter will use the material and epistemological markings to which the notion of tidemarks refers as the means of analysing the borders of memory that remain inscribed in the island today. These borders of memory stem from the encounter that occurred on this island between two expansive imperial formations seventy-five years ago, one small part of a broader confrontation that occurred throughout the Pacific in the first half of the twentieth century. From September 1944 onwards, an intense, tragic synecdoche of this wider engagement played out upon the thirteen square kilometres of Peleliu, 1. In transcription, I use whichever term is most familiar. For instance, Palau in Palauan orthography would be ‘Belau’, but its name in English remains Palau, which is what I have gone with in this chapter.

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which in quieter times had possessed five villages inhabited by a mere 900 islanders. In the course of the Battle of Peleliu, an 11,000-strong defensive bulwark of Japanese military and naval personnel was ultimately engulfed by the onrushing tide of US forces over the course of three months of intense fighting. By the end of November 1944, the Americans were masters of the island and able to bypass Japanese forces elsewhere in Palau as they moved on to further battles in the Philippines, Okinawa, and eventual victory. The drowning of Japan’s rule over the island in the great wave of military force emanating from the US did not signal the final act but was part of a process which continues to shape the physical and mnemonic topography of the island. The explicitly political and military contest between the two powers in the 1940s would be replayed through the battle’s subsequent memorialization. This process began even before the battle was concluded, gathered momentum from the 1960s onwards, and has continued with renewed force in recent years, even as the number of individuals with actual memories of the battle dwindles precipitously.2 The 350 or so people who reside on Peleliu today do so amid a landscape overflowing with mnemonic markers established and venerated by memory communities located far beyond the shores of the island.3 This chapter considers the ongoing memorialization of Peleliu Island as a site of difficult heritage cut through by the borders of memory that exist between different communities. Methodologically, the chapter consists of a detailed historical analysis of the events that led to the scattering of both material remains of the conflict and memorials to it across the island. It sketches out the relationship that exists between material legacies of past events and the memorials and monuments subsequently erected to preserve and commemorate them. It then details how these markings are incorporated as a system of mnemonic objects, one that is striated and cut through by borders of memory. It concludes by noting how the borders of this system are not fixed, as the system itself is fungible, with the borders defining it open to being redrawn and renegotiated in the present. This examination of the borders of memory present in the disputed heritage on Peleliu will proceed as follows. First, the notion of the ‘tidemark’ is introduced as a key means of analysing this heritage in order to clarify how the island’s sites function as borders of memory for transnational memory communities invested in narrating their meaning. The notion of a tidemark serves to capture the idea of heritage as incorporating both remnants of and monuments to the past and highlights the way in which this difficult heritage marks the sovereign soil of Palau today. Subsequent sections proceed in a broadly chronological vein and seek to build up, layer by layer, a picture of how this mnemonic material has been left scattered 2. The last Japanese survivor, Keiji Nagai, passed away in November 2019. 3. The population fluctuates but is usually given as between 300 and 480 people. The state of Peleliu has an official population significantly larger than this, but much of it resides elsewhere in Palau.

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over the island. The second section details the twin transnational ‘tides’ emanating from Japan and the US in the first half of the twentieth century and how these are materialized on Peleliu today. The third section shows how the intense struggle for influence that played out on Peleliu in a few short months in 1944 continues to shape the island’s topography into the present, highlighting the dislocation of the Indigenous population, and the effect of this on their marginalization from the memorialization process. This memorialization process itself is the subject of the chapter’s fourth section, highlighting the patterns of forgetting and remembering that have led to the island’s present profusion of heritage sites. While the US was victorious in the Battle of Peleliu, the process of memorialization has been largely driven by the activities of those commemorating their defeated Japanese opponents. Periods of direct American rule and Palauan independence have seen a growing proliferation of memorials associated with Japanese memories of the battle, even as these have transplanted a series of memorial contestations over remembrance of the AsiaPacific War onto Peleliu itself. As the fifth section highlights, this proliferation of memorials reflects not only transplanted, transnational contestations over national memories but also differences between distinct national communities, resulting in a heritage space cut through with borders of memory. These national borders are materially mediated by the marks they incorporate, constituting a space within which new markers of memory can be introduced. The borders of this contest are therefore not fixed but open to being reshaped and redrawn and thus form a system of mnemonic objects constituting a ‘frontier of memory’. The chapter’s concluding section argues that focusing on transnational memory communities highlights the island as a mnemonic frontier open to colonization by the US and Japan. The tidemarks on Peleliu analysed here are primarily by and for memory communities located far beyond the borders of Palau, with its sites largely constituting ‘offshore heritage’ (Huang and Lee 2019, 148). The conclusion emphasizes that, as a frontier, these borders of memory on Peleliu are not indelibly marked, instead constituting a mnemonic space whose markings are open to redefinition. Understanding marks of the past in the future is an ongoing (geo)political question.

Tidemarks, Memories, and Their Borders This chapter uses the notion of ‘tidemarks’ in order to make sense of the history and heritage of Peleliu, for which I draw on the work of Sarah Green (2011, 2018). As Green emphasizes, a tidemark refers to both a mark that is left at the highest or lowest points of the tide and a mark made in order to indicate the highest and lowest points a tide has reached. In other words, the notion refers to both the mark itself and the use of such a mark in measurement. Peleliu is particularly crowded

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Figure 1.1:  Memorial sites and borders of memory on the island of Peleliu mentioned in the text. Map by Megumi Sasaya and Edward Boyle, adapted with permission from Furukawa and Ruluked 2020.

with sites of difficult heritage serving as markers for stories of and about the island’s past. The vast majority of these marks indicate and narrate periods of Japanese and American influence on the island, and coalesce in referencing the period in which these two states clashed on it. This chapter will use this notion of tidemark to understand the difficult heritage that exists on the island of Peleliu today. In speaking about the tidemarks left on the island of Peleliu, this chapter understands the Battle of Peleliu to be made present on the island today as and through a system of mnemonic objects, one that encompasses both material legacies and material traces of the past which are present today, seventy-five years after the battle’s conclusion. The sites of difficult heritage present on Peleliu encompass both the remains of the past and material markers that have been subsequently

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erected to it. The former encompasses material objects still on the island, beached there following these successive high tides of imperial intervention and rule. Such objects include structures that remain from the era of Japanese rule, actual material detritus left over from the conflict itself, and the (re)shaping of the island carried out during periods of Japanese and American occupation. These provide traces of past tides, leftovers reminding us of political and other relations not fully present in the present. These traces are important to the work of memorialization because they contextualize and justify monuments subsequently constructed to the battle itself, as a tidemark left by the sea justifies marks made to measure the height of the tide. The latter marks consist of monuments and memorials erected in the years since the Battle of Peleliu in order to celebrate and commemorate events connected to it. These mark and measure events that occurred during the struggle between the US and Japan over this insular environment seventy-five years previously. The monuments and memorials constructed in the battle’s aftermath are legacies of the battle, something bequeathed to Peleliu itself and the imagined Peleliu of those no longer present upon it. Collectively, this series of tidemarks should be understood as being constituted by both the actual material remnants of the war and by the particular epistemology used to mark and measure it. This analysis of the difficult heritage associated with the Battle of Peleliu as tidemarks therefore combines both an examination of the material and epistemological bases of this heritage and of how it plays out upon the insular environment of the island itself (Green 2018, 81). This focuses on the ‘borders of memory’ that emerge at and through these tidemarks. Borders of memory refer to the role ascribed to sites of memory in policing and demarcating the bounds of memory communities (Boyle 2019). These borders are made visible through the deployment of heritage and other mnemonic sites within antagonistic narratives. The chapter here pushes back against a trend within border studies to denigrate the role of ‘artefacts on the ground’ (Agnew 2008) in the constitution of borders, which are understood to be ‘enacted by ordinary people as well as (nation) states, to make sense of and “do work” in the world’ (Cooper and Perkins 2012, 57). The notion of tidemarks allows for recognition that borders should not be understood as self-evident objects placed in a landscape to mark territory, while rejecting a narrow understanding of borders as highlighted by demarcated territorial lines. Here, the borders of memory concept analyses the markings constituting Peleliu’s difficult heritage as sites of cultural encounter whose material and epistemological meaning is open to political contestation and redefinition. I begin by offering a detailed examination of the process through which a series of tidemarks left on Peleliu comes to constitute its difficult heritage today before returning to this political process of redefinition in the conclusion.

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Shifting Tides of Influence The island of Peleliu is today one of sixteen constituent states that make up the Republic of Palau. Peleliu presents two distinct faces to both residents and visitors. The sleepy community of around 350 souls inhabits what appears from the water to be a stereotypical tropical island. Away from the glistening, postcardperfect views of its shoreline, however, the island reveals its other face in the twisted metal and discarded detritus of military matter left abandoned there. Peleliu today remains particularly marked by the remains of the Battle of Peleliu from seventyfive years earlier (for an account of the battle itself, see Moran and Rottman 2015). This marking includes large quantities of unexploded ordinance strewn across the island’s cave floors and shores as well as larger structures—the concrete frames of buildings and pillboxes littered across the landscape, the island’s one remaining airstrip, and the roads carved through the jungle. These provide fixed material foundations atop which the island’s monuments and memorials intervene into its contested memorialization in the present. This fixity is in contrast to the ideas held of islands like Peleliu in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Japan. Then, the Japanese discovery of the Pacific saw the emergence of a broad, ill-defined space constituting ‘a shimmering frontier that promised fulfilment of personal ambition and national destiny at the price of great risk’ (Peattie 1992, 320). The Pacific Islands existed as a zone of opportunity, a space onto which imperial dreams could be projected and in which colonial fantasies could be nourished. These desires were shaped from the outset by the presence in the Pacific of the competitive high imperialism that characterized the tail end of the nineteenth century and outset of the twentieth, and into which Japan enthusiastically threw itself. Following the formalization of its rule over Okinawa in 1879, and colonization of Taiwan in the aftermath of its victory over the Qing dynasty in 1895, the Japanese state was encouraged to assert its sovereignty over both individual islands and broader swathes of the Pacific by a series of entrepreneurial colonizers (Hiraoka 2018; Kreitman forthcoming). The nation’s dreams of a Pacific empire would ultimately come to be realized through its acquisition of Peleliu and the rest of Palau in the second decade of the twentieth century. Palau itself had come under the loose authority of the Spanish throne and colonial administration of the Philippines in the late seventeenth century, which formally declared the islands part of the Spanish East Indies in 1885. In 1899, one year after the Spanish-American War and the US’s seizure of the Philippines and Guam, Spain sold its claims to Palau, along with the rest of the Caroline Islands and the Northern Marianas, to Germany, which placed the islands under the authority of German New Guinea. Trade in the islands rapidly came under the control of the Japanese, however (Peattie 1992, 24–26), and following the outbreak of World War I, despite British efforts at dissuasion, two Japanese fleets occupied all of the islands of German Micronesia over the course of September and October 1914 (Hiery 1995).

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Japan’s control was confirmed with its receipt of a League of Nation’s mandate over the islands in 1919 (the ‘South Seas Mandate’), and in 1922 the governorate for the mandate was established at Palau’s principle settlement of Koror. Palau thus became the central node from which Japan’s new civilizational frontier would be governed. In contrast to the preceding colonial powers, as well as the subsequent US administration, Palau under Japanese control was characterized by active and interventionist efforts to ‘develop’ the islands, economically and otherwise. By the late 1930s, thanks to immigration from Japan, of which around half came from the southern island prefecture of Okinawa, Palau’s Indigenous inhabitants formed barely a quarter of the population on their own islands (Maki 2011). The Palauans were subject to aggressive forms of colonial control while being economically marginalized by Japanese industrial development, which was increasingly orientated towards imperial self-sufficiency. Investment poured into mines, agricultural plantations, infrastructure, and industry. The arrival of colonial modernity to Koror, materialized in bathhouses and geisha, streetlights and concrete, was dependent on the island’s linkages with Japan—and through it, to Asia and the world. Japan’s claims to primacy in the Pacific Ocean overlapped with the US’s presence in and perceptions of the region, and growing concern regarding the threat posed by the US led to the construction of military facilities on many of the Japanese-controlled islands in the latter half of the 1930s, including on Peleliu. In 1936, the Imperial Japanese Navy took the fateful decision to locate Palau’s primary airstrip on the southern end of Peleliu. For over two years between mid-1937 and the autumn of 1939, a sizeable workforce, largely made up of Okinawan and Korean labourers, was imported to the island and put to work constructing Peleliu’s airstrip. Building this necessitated the forced relocation of two of the island’s five villages, and the dynamiting and levelling of the southern half of the island. It was a laborious operation with no industrial earth-moving equipment, and the runways were laboriously hacked through the jungle and concreted with crushed coral. This was the high tide of Japanese military preparations for war with the US, as the decision was made to utilize the islands of Micronesia as a series of ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’ to deny the US access to the Pacific (Hirama 1991). Increasing militarization of the island after the war began saw the construction of further buildings, including power plants, barracks, messes, bathhouses, and bomb shelters. These structures, often surviving today as concrete frames or the cracked shells of buildings, offer a fair facsimile of their condition at the close of battle; their wear and tear augmented by seventy-five years of nature taking its course (for details of what remains, see the tables in Knecht, Price, and Lindsay 2012, 266–69). With one or two exceptions, these structures are not being actively conserved, except in the most rudimentary sense (see Figure 1.2), but they remain present as marks indicating the high tide of Japan’s presence on the island. As the above narrative indicates, it was a tide that swept away Indigenous understandings of the island, whose topography was dramatically reshaped in the course of a few short years through a process

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Figure 1.2:  Makeshift wooden joists propping up the second storey of an old Japanese power plant. Photo by the author, December 2018.

which largely banished local residents. This spring tide of Japanese influence was already sufficient to overwhelm the lives of Peleliu’s inhabitants, whose dislocation was deepened in the years that followed.

Tidal Bore With seeming inevitability, the tidal surges emanating from these two empires on opposite sides of the Pacific met in a thunderous maelstrom from late 1941. The resultant war saw a wave of military advances initially surge outwards from Japan, but by 1944 Japan’s early successes had long since been turned back, and the ‘island hopping’ of the US military was inching inexorably closer to the Japanese mainland. On September 15 of that year, following an intense naval bombardment, US marines began their assault on the Japanese defenders dug in on Peleliu itself. The impact of this titanic military clash continues to reverberate across the islands of Palau, which remain marked today by the wave of human and material circulation deposited by the brutal imperial competition washing over these islands. The wave did not strike all parts of Palau equally, however, plunging rapidly over certain areas while slowly inundating others in a morass of misery. The reason

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for this was Peleliu’s airstrip, hacked into the island five years earlier. In 1944, the Americans perceived this to be of strategic value: the commanders of US forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, (unusually) agreed on the necessity of capturing Peleliu in order to deny the airstrip to the Japanese and aid in the recapture of the Philippines. As a result, the island of Peleliu together with neighbouring Angaur were to be forcibly wrested from their Japanese defenders through invasion. Japanese preparations also included, in Peleliu’s case, the forced evacuation of all its residents to Ngaraard on the large island of Badeldaob, north of Koror. Collective Palauan memories of the war are centred on the twelve-month period that began in September 1944: the US capture of Peleliu’s airstrip intensified the bombing, strafing, and starving of the remaining military, civilian and Indigenous populations also evacuated to Badeldaob, which continued until the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Peleliu’s population shared this fate with their fellow Palauans, but their experiences and memories are distinct from those made on the island itself,4 with important consequences for the geography of heritage present in Palau today. The aptly code-named Operation Stalemate II was initially conceived of as a brief three-day operation by US military planners, but dragged out into a dogged, brutal, eleven-week struggle for control of an island defended by 11,000 Japanese troops and 3,500 conscript labourers, largely hunkered down in the limestone peaks that form the spine of the island. When the bulk of the fighting concluded on November 24, a mere 19 Japanese troops survived to surrender to the Americans, along with 462 Korean and Okinawan conscript labourers who had managed to avoid being killed during the fighting.5 Another group of 34 Japanese troops surrendered in April 1947; long after the conclusion of not only the battle but the war itself. Around 14,000 corpses of Imperial Japanese armed forces personnel and conscript labourers were left on the island’s blasted landscape from which the US would continue ‘hopping’ towards the Japanese mainland. The assault on Peleliu was justified in terms of aiding this task. The US had bombed the airstrip to uselessness in March 1944, but secured possession of it within three days of the September 15 landing and were flying missions from it long before the end of the battle for the island. As soon as resistance ended in November, the US Navy repaired many military installations, greatly expanded the airstrip, dynamited another harbour into the reef at the southern end of the island, and re-laid its road network. Peleliu’s population, meanwhile, was not allowed to return until the summer of 1946, and when they did so could barely recognize their denuded island, stripped back to white coral, with vast numbers of American hangars, warehouses, and huts joining the remains of concrete Japanese structures around the airstrip 4. And from the experiences of those on Angaur, where the Indigenous inhabitants were not all evacuated before the battle began. For their accounts, see Walter 1993. 5. These numbers are drawn from US records. Japanese sources give the number of dead at just over 10,000 and note the survival of 14 incapacitated troops.

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(Murray 2016, 119). The marks indicating this high tide of Japanese influence were scratched deeper into the island’s topography as the US appropriated and recycled military facilities, supplemented with infrastructure of its own.

Tidal Ebbs and Countercurrents Less than a year after the Battle of Peleliu began, the war was over, and the Pacific, Japan’s former frontier, was transformed from contested maelstrom to ‘American lake’. In Palau, together with the Marianas, Marshall Islands, and much of Micronesia, the victorious US replaced Japan as the ruling authority, acquiring the islands of Japan’s South Seas Mandate as a ‘Strategic Trust’, a United Nations successor to the League of Nations’ mandate system (Hara 2007). American rule was equally unconcerned with Palauan sensibilities, however, and on Peleliu itself the US Navy base mimetically followed the militarized complex of Japan’s naval airstrip in restricting access for the island’s inhabitants. Peleliu’s returning residents ended up doubly dispossessed, surrounded by markings representing a battle and a transformation of their homes of which they had no memory, and constrained and restricted in their reclamation of the island by the US’s presence and institutions. The process of memorializing American sacrifice had begun while the battle still raged. A cemetery was established near to where US troops had first landed on the island, code named Orange Beach, southwest of the airstrip. The 1,800 or so Americans who fell during the fighting were initially interred there. Following the battle’s conclusion, the white crosses that marked the individual graves were supplemented by a small coral chapel and a pair of stone obelisks erected for the victorious 81st Infantry Division, who concluded the battle in place of the shattered 1st Marine Division. While the bodies themselves were later disinterred and transferred to the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines and the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawai‘i, and the chapel has subsequently collapsed, the obelisks themselves still stand today with a bed of plants spelling out ‘USA’ between them. This is the beginning of the battle’s memorialization by the US, erected even as the conflict was still raging in the ridges, across the airstrip from the landing beach. Following the successful conclusion of the battle, late 1944 saw the establishment of two other stone monuments for the 323rd and 321st Infantry Regiments. The presence of these memorials to Americans who had perished in the course of the island’s capture created sites of memory for personal expressions of commemoration, but interest in the island from American visitors was minimal, an attitude mirrored by the American Trust Territory administration. After 1948, the Navy base was dismantled, and direct American involvement in the island life of Peleliu was terminated until the arrival of Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s. As a result, there is little evidence of commemoration, official or otherwise, on the island for the next twenty years.

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This slack tide would turn as Japanese engagement with Palau resumed. Until the 1960s, the American administrators of the Trust Territory mimicked their Japanese mandate forbears by severely restricting access into and out of the territory. It was only in the mid-1960s that access was liberalized, a period which coincided with two other crucial trends which affected memorialization on Peleliu: Japan’s economic growth and the increasing prominence of private individuals dissatisfied with official efforts to seek out Japanese war dead. In Peleliu, such private efforts are associated with one individual in particular, Funasaka Hiroshi. Funasaka was a survivor of the American invasion of Angaur and undertook his first trip to the battlefield on Peleliu in 1965, following which he publicized the bleached bones of Japanese soldiers that were apparently strewn across this and other Pacific battlefields (Trefalt 2015). Thanks to the efforts of Funasaka and others, in the latter half of the 1960s, Peleliu began to be visited by groups of Japanese on spirit-consoling and bonecollecting missions, including those dispatched by the various prefectural groups associated with the Nihon Izokukai, the Japan War-Bereaved Families Association (on the association, see Seraphim 2006). These missions were known colloquially on Peleliu as the ‘ireidan’, memorial tours, and aimed to recover the bones of the island’s Japanese defenders from where they lay on the island, deposited by the Americans into mass graves or scattered across the island’s ridges or the floors of its caves. Responding to these private initiatives for spiritual repatriation, from 1967 the Japanese government also stepped up its own efforts to recover the bones of the island’s Japanese defenders through the Ministry of Health and Welfare (now the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). The subsequent fifty years have seen numerous clashes between private individuals and groups and the government regarding responsibility for the collection of bones. As this contestation over responsibility for the repatriation of bones shows, Japanese memorial activities occurring on Peleliu are not solely associated with the state. The incorporation of Peleliu within the memorial space of the Japanese Empire was an inherently contested process that involved a number of actors from overseas seeking to assert their primacy in memorializing Japan’s presence on this island. This Japanese re-engagement with Peleliu did not constitute a concerted national ‘riptide’ undercutting American claims to control but instead formed a series of contested ‘eddies’ involving different groups invested in transnational memorialization. In the process of removing Japan’s osteological deposits, through either cremation or repatriation, the contestation occurring between such groups also came to be materialized in what was put back onto the island. This is most obvious at the local cemetery in the village of Ngerchol, where a number of stone monuments to memorialize the battle and commemorate its victims have been erected since 1967. Two memorials apparently erected in that year indicate the beginnings of the formal memorialization of the battle by the Japanese and show the borders of memory dividing these transnational modes of

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commemoration. A large polished metal plate erected by Funasaka Hiroshi (dated January 17, 1968) has next to it a small, unassuming memorial stone put up by the Japanese government (dated 1953, the year the Japanese government began seeking to retrieve bones from overseas; on both memorials being erected in 1967, see Murray 2016, 158). It is possible to read into the two monuments a contrast: the dull rock and bland invocation to the ‘war dead’ (senbotsusha) of the government’s memorial representing the insufficiency of its response—which in turn motivated Funasaka’s angry efforts on behalf of those soldiers who bravely fought for a ‘noble’ peace. The ‘fractiousness of social memory’ (Bull and Ivings 2019) revealed by the differences in these memorials testifies to the absence of a single Japanese understanding of the war (Seaton 2007). Instead, the erection of these memorials reflects ‘the struggle of different groups to give public articulation to, and hence gain recognition for, certain memories and the narratives within which they are structured’ (Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper 2000, 29). The competing narratives in which these groups invest are materialized in the memorial landscape of Peleliu, which results in a heritage landscape cut through with borders of memory. These memorials collectively constitute the material marks of an ongoing competition to shape Japan’s official war memory which has washed up on the island of Peleliu itself. The two monuments are shaped by the border of memory running between them, and the borders cutting through this commemorative space have multiplied as these original markers have come to be joined by a large memorial tower, further memorials to specific groups, and a series of stones celebrating a range of individuals who died in the battle. The contested nature of the memorialization conducted here refracts outwards to encompass the other memorials elsewhere on the island. Erected by a variety of groups and private organizations, these range from panegyric celebrations of Japan’s troops giving their lives for peace in Asia to invocations of the lessons to be learnt from the brutality of war and thus the importance of not allowing it to happen again. Nevertheless, while the borders of memory demarcated by these material markings are clear, these contested and overlapping tidemarks all serve to stake out the claims of Japanese to make meaning on the island. Such claims emerged in conjunction with the presence of Japanese tourists on Peleliu from the 1970s, the infrastructure for which developed out of the establishment of guide services and other facilities by enterprising Palauans, largely of Japanese ancestry, to assist and cater to the ireidan (Iitaka 2018). This process was inseparable from a broader postwar reconnection of Palau with Asia and the world, which was initially driven by visitors from Japan, among whom were investors who ploughed money into hotels and infrastructure development (Yamashita 2000). Tourist numbers surged in the 1980s with the liberalization of international aviation, which had previously tightly regulated access to the region (Carlile 2000), and the 1990s and 2010s saw further sustained increases. Although the new generation

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of Japanese visitors primarily visit Palau for its diving and beaches rather than to atone for a war of which they have no memory, many are exposed to the tidemarks on Peleliu through one-day battlefield tours for guests staying in the resorts concentrated around Koror, a seventy-five-minute boat ride away.6 The itineraries of such tours, indeed, are increasingly marked by the monuments and memorials constructed on the island. It is these, rather than the slowly disintegrating material objects from prior to or during the battle, which are multiplying in number and extent. The prevalence of such memorials, marking the heights reached by this undercurrent of Japanese influence, promotes for Japanese an ‘ego-centred’ gaze (Bender 1993) that looks upon Peleliu’s landscape with a proprietary air. Yet this claim to possession is challenged on two grounds. First, there is the presence of American memorials and the island’s Indigenous inhabitants, both side-lined by this gaze but always present in the corner of its eye. Second, while the record of the tides of Japanese sentiment conducted by these material markings is clear enough, the meaning accorded to them remains contested. The monuments and memorials which have been constructed to the battle serve to provide the epistemological foundations through which the visitor can interpret it, and this is why the borders of memory operating at such sites are open to being drawn and redrawn into the present.

Borders of Memory Exposed by the Tide The landscape of Peleliu today is what remains when the twin transnational tides of Japanese and American imperialism have receded. The Battle of Peleliu remains present within the collective memory of various communities, primarily located far beyond the borders of Palau itself. A process of memorialization supports the Battle of Peleliu’s continued presence in the minds of distant publics. These memorials do not constitute transparent reflections of the memories held by particular communities, but serve as mnemonic objects for their creation and maintenance. The form of such memorials and monuments, encompassing both material objects and public ceremonies of commemoration, continue to shape and channel understandings of the Asia-Pacific War and the Battle of Peleliu held by various communities (Olick 1999). These borders of memory operating between the three groups invested in the island—Japanese, American, and Peleliuan—are clearest when examining the erection of monuments to the battle. The most obvious border of memory is apparent in the memorializing actions of the Japanese and US governments. As already noted, US engagement with Peleliu after 1948 was sparse, and while the Trust Authority retained some responsibility for seeing to the upkeep of the memorials that had been raised on the island in 6. These are currently run by a number of operators but without much variation in their itineraries.

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the 1940s, this was assigned to particular army units. It was only in 1984 that the US Marine Corps, whose troops had led the invasion, also erected its own memorial atop the levelled area that marked the southern end of what the Americans termed ‘Bloody Nose Ridge’ (see the book cover image), which today is dwarfed by an expanding Peleliuan shrine located next to it. In terms of national commemoration, the entire island was declared by the US to be the Peleliu Battlefield National Historic Landmark on February 4, 1985, a status which it retains today. However, the sole material marker of this status is a plaque in the main village of Kloulklubed. Efforts to develop the island into a National Historic Park in the 1990s were cursory and seemingly foundered on an inability to negotiate with the Indigenous population (Murray 2016, 185–86). The comparative lack of American concern for marking its presence on Peleliu is highlighted through the contemporaneous establishment of the largest monument to the war on Peleliu. In the early 1980s, the Japanese government cooperated with Palau’s nascent administration (which had received self-governing status four years earlier) to establish the Palau Peace Memorial Park at the southern end of Peleliu Island. While the marks of Japan’s rule in these islands are even today deeply etched into Peleliu’s surface, the US’s tidemarks have been revealed by the retreating tide of formal US hegemony to be somewhat shallower. The centrepiece for Japan’s renewed scoring of the island’s surface is an expansive memorial space consecrated on March 8, 1985. The Monument of the War Dead in the Western Pacific appears to project out into the sea from the southernmost point of Peleliu, towards the island of Angaur on the horizon. The monument, the second constructed by the Japanese government on the island, offers an explicitly cosmopolitan and inclusive site of memory which commemorates ‘all those who sacrificed their lives in the islands and seas of the West Pacific during World War II and in dedication to world peace’. Alone among the monuments and memorials on the island, it does so in Palauan as well as Japanese and English. The cosmopolitan equivalence between the three communities that the Monument of the War Dead in the Western Pacific gestures towards is noteworthy for being unique among the memorials on the island, which otherwise reference one or both combatants. This tendency is most clearly visible through the Peleliu World War II Memorial Museum, which opened in an old Japanese ammunition storage bunker in 2004. Established by the state of Peleliu, the museum relies on material collected on the island itself as well as that donated by Japanese and American sources. The museum recreates the border of memory present between the two sides of the Battle of Peleliu by spatially dividing Japanese and American memories of the battle down the centre of the museum building. This potentially provides a space of connection between the two sides but is one from which Indigenous residents are excluded, despite their role in maintaining and managing the museum itself. The marks left today in and on the terrain of Peleliu exist as a form of difficult heritage requiring negotiation in the present. The management of these memories

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takes ‘place in a context in which memory is also conditioned by “the flow of mediated narratives within and across state borders”’ (Cento Bull and Clarke 2019, 246, citing De Cesari and Rigney 2014, 14). However, on Peleliu, the island’s residents are largely not participants in this ongoing battle to remember the battle, as it were. Unlike in many other postcolonial settings, including examples detailed in this volume, resistance or opposition to the heritage associated with a former imperial power is not central to this contestation. Here, the consumers and actors of heritage are largely those transnational purveyors of memory associated with the two distant imperial nations of Japan and the US, which have left a variety of monuments and scars on the landscape of Peleliu. This undoubtedly reflects a wider trend whereby ‘[Pacific] Islanders and their island environments are typically relegated to the background of a drama that was perceived to have unfolded only between Japanese and Americans’ (Dvorak 2017, 238). Nevertheless, the question of how to narrate the stories of Pacific Islanders and the Pacific Islands is not a simple one, given that what exists is an absence of memory, rather than simply amnesia. Peleliu’s inhabitants were not physically present when the battle occurred, having been forcibly relocated elsewhere in Palau before the battle began. They are thus disengaged from the battle itself but also irrevocably sundered from their own history on the island. The twin tides of Japanese and American rule literally reshaped Peleliu itself and thus destroyed the inhabitants’ relationship to and connections with their own past. What remains today is a landscape deeply marked by a battle in which they were not involved.7 As a result, irrespective of cosmopolitan gestures, the island’s inhabitants are currently excluded from the memory making taking place on their own island.

Conclusion: Transnational Tidemarks This chapter has analysed how the tidemarks stemming from eras of Japanese and American control are central to the memories materialized on the island of Peleliu. The bulk of these mnemonic objects relate to seventy-five years in the past; to a three-month period in which the island bore witness to its own microcosm of the cataclysmic struggle that the militaries of Japan and the US played out multiple sites across the Pacific Ocean. These objects are both material remains from the period and monuments erected to mark it—collectively narrating the island’s past to their communities today. The chapter points to the persistence and importance of these tidemarks which, by materially marking the island with Japanese and American memories, separate the people of Peleliu from their own past. The chapter utilizes the notion of tidemarks and the concept of borders of memory as analytical tools with which to examine the memorialization occurring 7. Olympia Esel Morei, director of the Belau National Museum and a Peleliu native, noted how the destruction visited on the island’s topography by colonization, invasion, and its aftermath destroyed the connections of the islanders with their own past. Interview with the author, December 7, 2018.

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on the island of Peleliu today. By comparison with Northeast Asia (Hook 2015), the politics of Japanese memories in and of the Pacific appear positively, well, pacific. Nevertheless, as this piece has shown, Japan’s memories of its Pacific empire and the battles undertaken to preserve it are affirmed and contested by various groups. The creation of heritage sites that mnemonically operationalize such narratives produces material and symbolic spaces that are able to stand at the intersection between various memory collectives. However, as we have seen for the inhabitants of Peleliu themselves, the anchoring of meaning within these material marks limits participation in the process of collective memory making. While the analysis offered above would appear to fix the borders of memory present on Peleliu, this should not be presumed. In 2019, to celebrate the seventyfifth anniversary of the Battle of Peleliu, a new memorial to the victory of the US was consecrated at the southern end of the island. This ceremony builds on a greater interest in commemorating the American presence on Peleliu, which has been visible since the establishment of the Peleliu Historical Society in 2005. The monument suggests a renewed attention to celebrating the US victory and dominance of this island, and by extension the wider Pacific, at precisely the moment it comes under threat. The commemoration ceremony, attended by the US and Japanese ambassadors to Palau as well as the vice-president of Palau, highlighted how it is relations between these three communities which mark the Battle of Peleliu and thus the island itself. While the residents of Peleliu remain largely excluded from this marking, renewed American interest in commemorating this battle suggests that the frontier of memory between these three groups is not closed. Rather, it should be understood as open to being reshaped and channelled in the future by diverse tides … and the marks they leave behind.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by a University of the Ryukyus’ Research Institute for Islands and Sustainability Research Grant into ‘Comparative Border Research on Island Countries and Regions of the Asia-Pacific: The Yaeyamas and Palau’, led by Koji Furukawa; and by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number: JP 16K17071). The production of this chapter was supported by funding from the ‘Resilient Material: The Role of Built Structures in Post-disaster Recovery’ QR Program (Qdai-jump Research Program) 02101. Fieldwork in Palau was conducted with Koji Furukawa, Akihiro Iwashita, and Hirofumi Danjoh, while the aid of Kaoru Ruluked on that trip was indispensable. The author would like to emphasize his tremendous debt of gratitude to Shingo Iitaka for his collegiality and support, and to Sarah Green for supplying her publications and, more importantly, offering encouragement. Earlier versions of this piece benefitted greatly from the careful reading and comments of Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyung Lee, and Desmond Hok-Man Sham, as well as two

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anonymous reviewers. Responsibility for any and all remaining errors lies solely with the author, of course.

References Agnew, John. 2008. ‘Borders on the Mind: Re-framing Border Thinking’. Ethics & Global Politics 1 (4): 175–91. Ashplant, T. G., Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper. 2000. ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’. In The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, edited by T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, 3–85. Abingdon: Routledge. Bender, Barbara. 1993. ‘lntroduction: Landscape, Meaning and Action’. In Landscape: Politics and Perspective, edited by Barbara Bender, 1–17. Oxford: Berg. 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): 336–57. Carlile, Lonny. 2000. ‘Niche or Mass Market? The Regional Context of Tourism in Palau’. The Contemporary Pacific 12 (2): 415–36. Cento Bull, Anna, and David Clarke. 2019. ‘Administrations of Memory and Modes of Remembering: Some Comments on the Special Issue’. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 32: 245–50. Cooper, Anthony, and Chris Perkins. 2012. ‘Borders and Status-Functions: An Institutional Approach to the Study of Borders’. European Journal of Social Theory 15 (1): 55–71. De Cesari, Chiara, and Ann Rigney. 2014. ‘Introduction: Beyond Methodological Nationalism’. In Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited by Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, 12–41. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dvorak, Greg. 2017. ‘Who Closed the Sea? Archipelagoes of Amnesia between the United States and Japan’. In Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings, edited by Lon Kurashige, 229–246. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Furukawa Koji, and Kaoru Ruluked, eds. 2020. Shitte-okitai Parao: Katsute no bōdāranzu no kioku wo tabi suru [Palau: Through memories of a forgotten borderland]. Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press. Green, Sarah. 2011. ‘What’s in a Tidemark?’ Anthropology News 52 (2): 15. Green, Sarah. 2018. ‘Lines, Traces, and Tidemarks: Further Reflections on Forms of Border’. In The Political Materialities of Borders, edited by Olga Demetriou and Rozita Dimova, 67–83. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hara, Kimie. 2007. ‘Micronesia and the Postwar Remaking of the Asia Pacific: “An American Lake”’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 5 (8): 1–27. Hiery, Hermann. 1995. The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hirama, Yōichi. 1991. ‘Japanese Naval Preparations for World War ll’. Naval War College Review 44 (2): 63–81. Hiraoka, Akitoshi. 2018. Japanese Advance into the Pacific Ocean. Singapore: Springer.

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Hook, Gavin D. 2015. ‘Excavating the Power of Memory in Japan’. Japan Forum 27 (3): 295–98. Huang, Shu-Mei, and Hyun Kyung Lee. 2019. ‘Difficult Heritage Diplomacy? Rearticulating Places of Pain and Shame as World Heritage in Northeast Asia’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 25 (2): 143–59. 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, 141–59. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Knecht, Rick, Neil Price, and Gavin Lindsay. 2012. ‘WWII Battlefield Survey of Peleliu Island, Peleliu State, Republic of Palau’. US National Park Service Report. July. Kreitman, Paul. Forthcoming. Japan’s Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mita Maki. 2011. ‘Manazashi no Jubaku: Nihon Toji Jidai Parao ni okeru “Domin” to “Okinawajin” wo megutte’ [With spellbound eyes: ‘Islanders’ and ‘Okinawans’ in Palau under Japanese rule]. Contact Zone 4: 138–62. Moran, Jim, and Gordon L. Rottman. 2015. ‘Peleliu’. In The Pacific War: From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa, edited by Robert O’Neill, 112–29. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. Murray, Stephen C. 2016. The Battle over Peleliu: Islander, Japanese, and American Memories of Ear. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. ‘Collective Memory: The  Two Cultures’. Sociological Theory 17 (3): 333–48. Peattie, Mark R. 1992. Nan’yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Poyer, Lin, Suzanne Falgout, and Laurence Marshall Carucci. 2001. The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Seaton, Philip A. 2007. Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II. Abingdon: Routledge. Seraphim, Franziska. 2006. War Memory and Social Politics in Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 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, 270–81. London: Routledge. Walter, Karen. 1993. ‘Through the Looking Glass: Palauan Experiences of War and Reconstruction, 1944–1951’. PhD dissertation, University of Adelaide. Yamashita, Shinji. 2000. ‘The Japanese Encounter with the South: Japanese Tourists in Palau’. The Contemporary Pacific 12 (2): 437–63.

2 Whose Difficult Heritage? Contesting Indigenous Ainu Representations Roslynn Ang

The difficulty of representing heritage and history in East Asia, especially within the historical context of Japan’s colonial expansion, is usually due to contested histories between social and political actors in the same region. However, this chapter connects Japan’s colonial history with the transit of settler colonial structures from North America to East Asia by focusing on the scholarly critiques of and disputes over the representation of Ainu culture and history in a museum context.1 The contested representation of the Indigenous Ainu is a site where disparate transnational, national, and local actors intersect within a global settler colonial system. I argue that, although these critiques and disputes are seemingly over how to represent Ainu cultural heritage and their history in museums, the crux of this contentious history is actually the clash between North American settlers’ and Japanese settlers’ understanding and critique of each other’s colonialisms, empires, and settler colonialisms. While seemingly in contestation with each other, their discourse retains common settler-national concepts and a shared belief in the settler’s authority to produce knowledge. Ainu representations are not the problem. Rather, the difficulty in representing the Ainu in museums is a symptom of the settler colonizers’ ‘difficult heritage’, as explicated in the relations between settlers, empires, and settler colonialism in this chapter. I start with an outline of an academic exchange in the journal Museum Anthropology, followed by a brief introduction to the context of the politics of representing the Ainu in museums. To understand the political tensions between the scholars in Museum Anthropology, it is necessary to explain the structure of settler colonialism and how it intersects with the rise and retreat of the Japanese empire and its racist ideologies through nihonjinron (日本人論, literally translated as ‘theories of Japaneseness’).2 Lastly, I return to the texts exchanged between the 1. See Byrd (2011) for the transit of settler colonial logics on Indigenous, Asian, and Black bodies in the US context. 2. Refer to Wolfe (2006) and Byrd (2011) for settler colonialism in a North American context.

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scholars to explain how their contested positions are interrelated in structures of settler colonialism and (post-)empire. As a Singaporean, my background as a postcolonial of the Japanese and British empires informs my interest in the intersections of different empires and colonialisms. I work with the Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai (Sapporo Upopo Preservation Society) to promote and revitalize traditional Ainu upopo and rimse performance, and my research explores the barriers and limitations of settler ontology and epistemology that the Ainu encounter. Consequently, the object-focus of analysis is settler production of knowledge as a symptom of settler colonialism, rather than of the Ainu people.

Representing Ainu Culture and History in Museums In 1994, Sandra Niessen wrote a critique of the Ainu exhibit in Osaka’s National Museum of Ethnology (hereafter Minpaku)3 in the journal Museum Anthropology, based upon her six-month visit as a guest researcher at Minpaku. She observed that Minpaku overly focused on sanitized traditional representations of Ainu culture that were disconnected from their contemporary lives and the exhibit lacked historical representations of Indigenous political struggles. While observing the filming of a weaving process, she noted that the museum tried to ‘produce a fictitious illusion of authenticity’ with no attempt to collaborate or receive directorial input from the Ainu weaver (Niessen 1994, 23). In 1996, Museum Anthropology published three articles: responses from two curators at Minpaku, Akitoshi Shimizu and Kazuyoshi Ohtsuka, coupled with Niessen’s reply to them. The war of words between respected academics was an exciting read. Shimizu and Ohtsuka responded in righteous anger, accusing Niessen of being a North American scholar imposing her dominant version of Western universalizing practices upon Minpaku and treating Minpaku curators as ethnological subjects instead of fellow academics. They explained that their curatorial decisions were based upon specific needs within the local context of Japan, and there were constraints due to the political sensitivity with certain Ainu groups combined with vested interests from well-respected Ainu leaders. Niessen (1996, 141) described their response as ‘personal and sometimes unprofessional’. She counteracted with her own analysis of their reaction as part of Japan’s politics of representation in the museum and critiqued the museum’s authoritative power to produce knowledge of the Ainu. Niessen’s observations reflect a common critique of Japan’s settler strategies to depoliticize and ahistoricize Ainu-related exhibits in museums. Nakamura (2007) observed that, with the exception of the Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, museums in Hokkaido with permanent exhibits on the Ainu tend to portray Ainu society 3. Kokuritsu Minzoku-gaku Hakubutsukan in Japanese. The museum is abbreviated as Minpaku by extracting ‘min’ 民 and ‘haku’ 博 from its name.

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as unchanging and exotic with no content on their contemporary lifestyles. Sasaki (2000) noted that there is a lack of collaboration with members of the Ainu community in the production of museum exhibits in Hokkaido. This trend of depoliticization and lack of collaboration in museum practices parallels the drafting process and effects of the two latest government policies on the Ainu. Both were drafted without consultation or collaboration with the Ainu community and work to depoliticize Ainu movements. Siddle (2002) critiqued the Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997 as an attempt from the Japanese state to focus on salvaging Ainu culture without recognizing their political status as Indigenous. This act works to promote or commoditize Ainu culture, but the Ainu have no self-determination over the content of their culture (Hasegawa 2009). In their analysis of the Japanese Constitution with respect to the Ainu and the Okinawans, Uemura and Gayman (2018) noted that the ‘Resolution Seeking to Recognize the Ainu as an Indigenous People’ passed by the Japanese state in 2008 recognized that modernization policy had inflicted ‘serious damage’ on Ainu culture and acknowledged the need to restore Ainu culture. The discourse in this resolution remains focused on culture, even though it did mark the first time that postwar Japan had recognized the existence of minorities in a supposedly homogeneous Japan. However, there is no concrete recognition of the Ainu as a political entity, with no change to the Japanese Constitution’s focus on individual rights rather than the collective Indigenous rights of the Ainu. In short, there is an institution-wide effort to depoliticize the Ainu by focusing on their culture and Niessen’s critique is supported to a large degree in contemporary Japan.4 I re-read this academic brouhaha as a contention over which settler presence is really in the representation, while the actual subject of the contested representation, the Ainu, remains in various degrees of absence.

The Flux of Ainu Presence and Absence in Settler Colonialism Usually, I do not ask the question ‘Who are the Ainu?’, nor do I attempt to figure out the best way to represent a coherent and singular Ainu voice in my analysis. Neither do I write about the problems or the difficulties in representing authentic or real Ainu culture. This is part of my attempts to resist the liberal desire for a legible subject.5 As mentioned in my introduction, the difficulty of representing the Ainu in museums is not a problem but, rather, the symptom of a problem. This method of not problematizing Ainu representations is my way of answering Unangax scholar Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to ‘suspend damage’ to the Indigenous communities we work with. As such, I examine the conditions that render Ainu representations as a problem. I lay out the politics behind the contestations over Ainu representations by showing how various actors invested in Ainu representations are really focused on 4. However, lewallen (2016a) has shown that the Ainu have been utilizing this focus on their culture as a strategic tool to forward their political aims and cultural revitalization. 5. See McKittrick (2020) for a critique on how description is not liberation.

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different interpretations of colonial oppressors and their histories without working with and perceiving or ‘seeing’ the members of the Ainu community. Although my analysis is on the politics of (not) seeing, I ask the reader to remember that the Ainu, the subject or object under discussion here, remain in real existence, albeit in a form that might not be easily discernible to the majority nor in a category legible for a settler frame of analysis or suitable to representation in a museum. As an analytical frame, settler colonialism is the structure that sets the conditions for seeing and not seeing the Indigenous Ainu, or defining who counts and who does not count as Ainu, or determining which history or culture counts as Ainu. Generations of people in the Ainu community have experienced and are still experiencing the effects of settler colonialism. These effects produced different ways of discerning the Ainu. Their presence is visibly represented as that of a primitive and unchanging culture. Consequently, they tend to be absent as contemporary Indigenous people and practitioners of their lived heritage. When visible in contemporary Japan, they are used to perform a new multicultural Japan under the keyword of kyōsei (共生, harmony) in the (now rescheduled) Tokyo Olympics. Tessa Morris-Suzuki (2020) critically terms this the ‘Harmony Olympics’. Wolfe (2006, 388) explains that ‘settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base . . . settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event’. While similar to colonialism in the sense that political power is in the hands of the colonizers, settler colonialism includes large-scale migration of settlers into the wild frontier that is supposed to be ‘unoccupied’. The main settler colonial drive is to occupy lands, even as it continues to extract human and natural resources for the colonial metropole. It is necessary to define this as a structure instead of an event due to the tendency to perceive settler colonialism as an event in the past that no longer structures social and political relations today. The Ainu were originally spread across Ezo (Hokkaido), Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands. The Tokugawa government called the main island Ezo, and the consequent Meiji government officially colonized it in 1869 by renaming it Hokkaido. Meanwhile, the same land was known by the Ainu as Ainu Mosir (‘the quiet land that Ainu or humans dwell in’) or Yaunmosir. The representation of the Ainu as primitive barbarians justified the frontier violence and the occupation of Hokkaido and supported the ideology of a superior Japanese civilization (Siddle 1996). The frontier violence and foreign diseases brought in by Wajin (和人, ethnic Japanese)6 settlers before 1869 (Walker 2001) may not have been directed by the Japanese government, but trade policies, combined with regulations that were either lacking or which disenfranchised the Ainu, contributed to sexual violence and the destruction 6. Ainu language is originally a spoken language, although most Ainu speakers and learners transliterate their language to either romanized script or Japanese katagana.

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of familial kinships (lewallen 2016b). This uncontrolled frontier violence that is often directed on Indigenous populations reflects one of the processes to eliminate the native in the settler colonial-state formation (Wolfe 2006, 392). The Meiji government established the Development Commission (Kaitaku-shi, 開拓使) in 1869 to ‘develop’ instead of ‘colonize’ Hokkaido. The usage of the word ‘develop’ is normalized into everyday parlance in Hokkaido and is often used in conjunction with Hokkaido’s history. The Wajin settlement of Ainu lands is neither perceived as colonialism nor settler colonialism by the Wajin. For example, the Hokkaido prefectural museum was called Hokkaido Kaitaku Kinenkan 北海道開拓 記念館 in Japanese while its official English translation was the Hokkaido Historical Museum. Since kaitaku 開拓, which means development in English, encountered increasing critique from academics and the Ainu for its historical inaccuracy and insensitivity, the museum changed its name to the Hokkaido Museum (Hokkaido Kinenkan 北海道博物館) in 2015. Kaitaku/development was an act of settler colonization in Hokkaido made possible with extended strategic exchange of colonial strategies from the US (Hennessey 2020). The Development Commission employed seventy-six foreign experts from the US and Western Europe, including Horace Capron, a former commissioner of the Department of Agriculture in the US (Siddle 1996, 56). There were knowledge exchanges of settler colonizing technologies to ‘develop’ Indigenous lands between the US and Japan (Hennessey 2020). Decades of violence, forced labour, and forced relocations, with increasing restrictions on land use and hunting, decreased the Ainu population. This prompted the enactment of the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act (Hokkaidō Kyūdojin Hogohō 北海道旧土人保護法) of 1899, its contents parallel to the Dawes Act (otherwise known as the General Allotment Act) of 1887 in the US with regards to the Native Americans. The 1899 Act ingeniously termed the Ainu as former ‘natives’ (dojin 土人, which was and still is a derogatory term in Japan), designating them as neither full Japanese nor authentic ‘natives’. The 1899 Act presented the Ainu as people who had failed to adapt to modernity and, ironically, positioned the Wajin settlers as people trying to ‘help’ the Ainu by ‘giving’ them land for farming and assimilating their children through education. The relative success in assimilating the Ainu was one of the factors that led to the aforementioned Ainu Cultural Promotion Act of 1997. At the risk of attributing too much agency to the Wajin state actors, the Ainu community were involved in organizing and protesting against both the 1899 Protection Act and the 1997 Promotion Act, with protests against the former leading to the latter. Further trans-Indigenous organizing led to the ‘Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir’ in 2008, which became the impetus for the Japanese government to recognize the Ainu as Indigenous later in the same year. As mentioned, these state policies or referendums have remained focused on Ainu culture while evading political recognition of the Ainu in terms of selfgovernance, self-determination, and reparations.

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In short, I have presented settler colonialism as a structure that represents the Ainu in a spectrum of presence and absence (for example, either primitive or assimilated/missing) for the production and legitimization of the settler society.7 I have also tried to draw attention to some of the ephemeral connections between Japan and the US as fellow settler colonial nation-states. Ways to represent the Ainu can be the subject of much contention in this spectrum of absence and presence when settler colonial values are used. A good example is their population numbers. While Japan does not use the same terms as the US, concepts like ‘blood quantum’ and the ‘one-drop rule’ were applied when two Hokkaido politicians stated that it is impossible to determine the ‘real’ Ainu in 2014, implying that there are no pure or authentic Ainu. On top of the official numbers published by the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, there are members in the Ainu community who are not in the association and who are not counted in its census. There are Ainu who prefer to conceal their heritage for fear of discrimination because the homogeneous-nation ideology remains in force. The modern nation-state’s apparatus for determining race and/or ethnicity is insufficient for measuring the Ainu population and the parameters for their representation remain elusive for museums.

Nihonjinron as the Detritus of Empire and Settler Colonialism The discursive reality that links the concerns of all three scholars involved in the Museum Anthropology controversy is their interpretation of nihonjinron and its ties to empire and settler colonialism. Nihonjinron is a theory that attempts to explain the uniqueness of Japan and its mythic origin. The contemporary ideology of Japanese homogeneity is part of the discourse of exception that makes up nihonjinron, but the same term was also used to justify Japan’s multi-ethnic empire before the Asia-Pacific War. As a form of discourse, the concept of Japan’s exceptionalism changes over time, but the central core remains self-explanatory through a circulatory national ideology that explains Japaneseness as being always unique. In other words, the presence of national ideology and imperial history, and the three curators’ varied attempts to redress various historical injustices caused by nihonjinron through Ainu representation in the museum, is the glue that connects the positions of all three curators. The concept of nihonjinron has been contested and deconstructed in academia but remains a material force in policies and institutions, and is re-enacted in the everyday lives of people invested in the production of ‘Japan’. Various European scholars influenced the first generation of Japanese scholars trained in Western scientific disciplines in the 1880s, thus generating a range of arguments on the origins of the Ainu (Siddle 1997, 138–41). Much of the research on the origins of the Ainu 7. For more details on this process, refer to Ang (2017).

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people was related to the racial origins of the Japanese and their search for a definition of a national identity vis-à-vis a ‘primitive’ Other designated as being inferior to the Japanese civilization. The ‘West’ remained as the desired, modern, but threatening colonial figure for both scholars and politicians in Japan, from the Iwakura Mission to the US in 1876 (Kume 2009; Miyoshi 2005) to a postwar Japan that was shaped by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in the form of General Douglas MacArthur (Dower 1999). These theories justify the racial origins of the Japanese and simultaneously rationalize the expansionist and assimilation policies of prewar Japan in the global context of empires and settler colonizers in modern history. Japaneseness is purported to be unique because it represents the epoch of civilization in the Asia-Pacific, thus justifying the expansion of its empire into a multi-ethnic Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (Daitōakyōeiken 大東亜共栄 圏) with Japan as its leader. The representations of the Ainu as barbarians and the decrease in their population following Japan’s early settler violence provided the foundations for this theory of Japanese superiority and national identity (Mason 2012). From 1895 to 1945 there was a parallel body of literary works on Japan’s colonies that represented Japan as engaged in ‘imperial mimicry’ of the Western empires’ civilizing mission toward ‘non-modern’ subjects, although these literary works receded in the wake of postwar historical amnesia (Tierney 2010). The discourse of the expanding multi-ethnic empire, followed by the evacuation of colonies in the contracting postwar empire, enforced the belief of contemporary Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation (Oguma 2002). Citizenship was inflated to be equal to homogeneous national identity, belonging, biological race, and ethnic culture (Yoshino 1992). This point is reflected in Uemura and Gayman’s (2018) survey of the Japanese Constitution with respect to the Ainu and the Okinawans. They concluded that, despite Japan’s attempts to recognize diversity within the nation, there was no change in the Japanese Constitution’s interpretation of the nation as a de facto ‘ethnically homogeneous nation state’ (Uemura and Gayman 2018, 15). Recognizing every individual as an equal citizen of Japan is recognizing every individual within the context of nihonjinron without taking into consideration the historical and current structural inequalities that minorities in Japan experience as a collective. The problem of critiquing national ideology as false proves illusory when said ideology, conflated into a mix of racial discourse and cultural practices, continues in contemporary Japan. There have been several instances of politicians making explicit references to the ethnic homogeneity of Japan,8 and the Japanese government maintained that there were no ethnic minorities in Japan until the state’s recognition of the Indigenous status of the Ainu in 2008. Numerous studies on the 8. Burgess (2010) has a table listing politicians’ name, rank, date, and translated statements that reference either Japan’s homogeneity or lack of ethnic minorities.

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contemporary presence of Japan’s minorities show that while ethnic diversity is not overtly visible, minorities do exist in tension with the performed homogeneity in Japan (Amos 2011; Hook and Siddle 2003; Roth 2002; Ryang and Lie 2009; Smits 1999; Weiner 1997). Burgess (2010) notes that the ideology of homogeneity remains, to be reproduced as everyday discourse that has a material effect on people and institutions. Thus, nihonjinron might be under fire from critical deconstruction but remains in popular effect within and outside Japan.

Intersecting Histories Returning to the Museum Anthropology episode, I argue that Niessen’s, Ohtsuka’s, and Shimizu’s varying interpretations of nihonjinron generated their specific positions on Ainu representations. The Minpaku scholars understood their representation of the Ainu to be radical because it was presented as being distinct from the section on Wajin culture in the museum. They were ‘writing’ against an imperialist ideology that justifies the success of Ainu assimilation to the Japanese core by recourse to the supposed shared ancestry and racial similarities among the colonized (Oguma 2002) and the supposedly inherent superiority of the Japanese civilization (Fukuzawa 1973; Fukuzawa and Kiyooka 1992; Saaler and Koschmann 2007; Tanaka 1993). In the context of Hokkaido, this historical discourse continues to legitimize settler colonialism through the government’s refusal to recognize the Ainu as Indigenous until 2008 and through the discourse of kaitaku as a cover for settler colonialism. While Shimizu (1996, 122) admitted that there were certain elements of nostalgia in the exhibits, Minpaku aimed to convey the message that ‘it is inappropriate to distinguish ethnic cultures as developed or underdeveloped, or as civilized or primitive’. By situating the section on Ainu material culture alongside the Wajin section, Shimizu was pointing to a narrative of equality rather than hierarchy between Ainu and Wajin cultures. Ohtsuka (1996, 115) elaborated on the role of Minpaku in helping to revitalize Ainu traditions through reconstructions, explaining how they helped Ainu artisans gain permission to strip elm tree bark as material for producing the museum exhibits, and included a quote from Ainu visitors’ response to the exhibit: ‘We never thought our own culture was so wonderful. It is a pity we ourselves, as Ainu, cannot plan such an exhibit.’ Here, Ohtsuka was pointing to Minpaku’s positive portrayal of Ainu material culture as having led to ethnic pride. Shimizu and Ohtsuka were addressing two related discourses in the nihonjinron framework through the Ainu exhibits: the supposed superiority of the Japanese civilization (also a part of nihonjinron) and the consequent inferiority of Ainu civilization that resulted in their assimilation to Japan during the expansion of the Japanese Empire. Niessen did recognize Minpaku’s radical attempts in her 1994 critique, but her concern with the homogeneous-nation discourse was not located in the (Japanese) imperial present. Rather, she focused on the settler colonial present and was

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informed by the Indigenous struggles in North America. To her, Minpaku’s representation of ‘authentic’ Ainu culture was disconnected from the present everyday and political struggles of the Ainu. In her first critique, she wrote: I also asked Professor Umesao why it was that the museum chose not to represent the Ainu struggle with dominant Japanese culture in its exhibits, and instead concentrated on a fictitious image of the past, avoiding any indication of the centuries of negative interaction between the Ainu and the Japanese. His answer to this question also coincided with the discourse surrounding the goals of the exhibit—i.e., the museum underscores the point that the Ainu are a separate folk, distinct from the Japanese. It is only natural, I was told, that they should make this point by exhibiting the culture of the past. Implicit was that the culture of an assimilated people would not be able to make this point. (Niessen 1994, 23)

What was obvious to Niessen was the absence of representation of the politics of assimilation and the effacement of Ainu resistance, two interconnected elements that sustain the current discourse of homogeneity in Japan. The unquestioned homogeneity of Japan today will be disrupted if museums show the work done by the Japanese empire to assimilate its colonial subject, its contemporary effects on the Ainu (and other ethnic minorities), and the continued resistance against it. To Niessen, in both her first and second critique, Minpaku was an institution wielding its power as a gatekeeper over the production of knowledge and over Ainu collaborators. Ohtsuka’s quote from the Ainu visitors may exemplify Minpaku’s reparative work in cultivating ethnic pride among the Ainu, but read differently, she argued, it indicated the loss of cultural sovereignty over defining the content and value of their traditions. Although Minpaku provided a space to exhibit Ainu culture, the planning remained in the hands of Wajin curators, as noted by the Ainu visitors when they commented that ‘it is a pity we ourselves, as Ainu, cannot plan such an exhibit’ (Shimizu 1996, 115). This point resonates with Boyle’s observations on the lack of involvement from Peleliu’s Indigenous population in the memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War in Chapter 1. Further, Niessen pointed out that the Ainu were only allowed to strip the bark of a limited number of elm trees for bark-fibre weaving to make attush (bark cloth). Before Wajin settler regulations, they would not need to strip an entire tree, thus killing it. Again, the emphasis is on the loss of sovereignty over Indigenous lands, and looming unaddressed in the background is the issue of politics and power with the Wajin settlers and the effacement of the Ainu in contemporary homogeneous Japan. To allegorize, Niessen, Shimizu, and Ohtsuka were the blindfolded touching different temporal parts of the settler colonial elephant. All three curators were addressing the processes of colonialism and settler colonialism that were made legitimate through various reincarnations of nihonjinron. However, the Minpaku curators focused on prewar Japan’s racialization and subsumption of the Ainu into the Japanese polity, while Niessen pointed to the postwar effacement of Ainu

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presence in contemporary Japan. Recall Wolfe’s (2006, 388) emphasis that settler colonialism as ‘invasion is a structure not an event’. Settler colonialism is not an isolated event in history but is connected with other events as part of an enduring structure that continues today. By addressing Ainu representation as a symptom of a specific time, the Minpaku curators and Niessen all represented the settler colonization of Ainu bodies and land as an event and not a structure. They were addressing different events even though the expansion of the Japanese empire within the context of global empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, settler colonialism, and nihonjinron are all linked across time. This leads to the next question: which parts of the allegorical elephant were they not touching? On a superficial level, the answer is obvious in the critiques that Niessen and the Minpaku curators levelled against each other. According to Niessen, the Minpaku curators were not addressing the presence of nihonjinron in contemporary Japan and how it effaced the presence of the Ainu through a noncoeval representation of Ainu traditions in the museum. Ohtsuka did respond with the observation that Wajin visitors were not so simple-minded as to interpret the Ainu exhibit as representative of their ways of living in modern Japan today. In reply, Niessen acknowledged her ignorance of local visitors’ reception but stood by her critique that the exhibit would, at the very least, mislead overseas visitors. To supplement Niessen’s critique, it is necessary to add my general observations in the field here. The exchange between Niessen and the Minpaku curators took place between 1994 and 1996, while I conducted my fieldwork on Ainu representations in Hokkaido between 2007 to 2009, followed by another period of fieldwork with upopo and rimse (song and dance9) performance groups from 2014 to 2015. Throughout the two terms of my fieldwork, all my Wajin friends in Hokkaido told me they had never met an Ainu because the stereotypical image of the Ainu is of the ‘native’ living in a straw hut in the mountains. At the same time, urban Ainu communities living in Sapporo were advocating for the revision of national history textbooks used in schools because these books contributed to the general understanding of the Ainu as a dying race, which works to propagate the illusion of homogeneity. While Ohtsuka is an academic who is knowledgeable in the critical history of Japan and Ainu culture, and who is in close contact with his Ainu interlocutors, he underestimated the power of national ideology and education in effacing Japan’s colonial violence and the presence of the Ainu from the public. In response to the Minpaku curators’ rejoinder that Niessen could not replicate the critique of non-coeval representations of the First Nations peoples in Canada in the context of Japan, Niessen observed that the curators were not acknowledging how Ainu involvement in trans-Indigenous political and social movements—an act that transcends national boundaries based on nihonjinron—could and would 9. This is a superficial translation for the sake of expediency. There are several singing genres in Ainu intangible culture. Upopo is styled as a canon, with two groups singing the same song at different intervals.

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influence Ainu communities and impact local Ainu movements. This meant that Niessen’s analysis, extended from the Lubicon Cree Nation’s resistance against nostalgic representation of Indigenous cultures in Canada, was applicable to Minpaku’s focus on representing Ainu traditions—despite Minpaku’s accusations of Niessen’s analysis as being Orientalist. Curiously, another part of the settler colonial elephant that the Minpaku curators did not realize that they were touching concerned the validity of incorporating the Ainu into Japan’s national boundaries. There is a logical contradiction in placing Niessen as the foreigner, while drawing the Ainu into the Japanese national polity in this academic contest, when the aim of their exhibit was to posit the Ainu civilization as being separate and equal to the Japanese civilization. Paradoxically, in doing so, the Minpaku curators were recreating a Japanese imperial discourse in a contemporary format in their response to Niessen with the Ainu incorporated into the particularity of Japan against the universal West. In a similar vein to some of the other chapters in this volume, were the curators deploying ‘difficult Ainu heritage’ to defend exclusionary national narratives? Can the Ainu be separate but still equal when they are subsumed within the Japanese polity? Although Japan recognized the Indigenous status of the Ainu in 2008, it remains a performative move with no mention of self-governance or self-determination (Uemura and Gayman 2018). On the other hand, the fact remains that Niessen is rehashing the clichéd play of Orientalism between a Western anthropologist and an Eastern native as ethnographic subject in her analysis. She used her interactions with the Minpaku curators and English-language work on the Ainu as raw data, instead of taking seriously the written and spoken work of the ‘natives’,10 be it Wajin curators or Ainu informants. This led to the Minpaku curators’ critique on the part of the allegorical elephant that Niessen neglected to touch: her anthropological authority in writing about a culture or society without understanding said culture’s language and history after spending a mere six months in the field. In his article, Shimizu started his response with a comment on how anthropologists of past generations—Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Margaret Mead, Evans-Pritchard, and the like—ignored the history of colonization and depicted colonized peoples as primitive or lacking the assumed critical elements of civilization.  .  .  . She [Niessen] conducted participant observation within the museum but failed to investigate Japanese-language literature. She thus imagined a museum without history, situated in a non-literate Japan. She interpreted this imagined museum in terms of its Japanese setting, then criticized it by referring to 10. In this chapter, ‘Indigenous’ refers to Indigenous communities structurally affected by and engaged in various forms of resistance against settler colonialism. The term is capitalized as a sign of respect. ‘Native’ and ‘settler’ are fluid terms that change in different contexts here. ‘Native’ can signify Indigenous peoples (Wolfe 2006), which includes the Ainu as Indigenous. It is also used to refer to cultural anthropology’s ethnographic subject as the native, which can signify the Wajin curators in relation to Anglophone researchers. ‘Settler’ is a fluid term that refers to Anglophone settlers in relation to First Nations or Wajin settlers in relation to the Indigenous Ainu.

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Whose Difficult Heritage? supposedly global criteria which she thought had been reiterated in the area she called ‘North America’; this area represents the civilization with which she identified herself. (Shimizu 1996, 120)

In a sense, the Museum Anthropology articles are a narrative of the successfully modernized and thus now-on-an-equal-footing (Wajin), native-as-ethnographic subject talking back to the (Western) anthropologist. This time, the native rejects the translation of the anthropologist by refusing to ‘play native’ for the application of a universal analytical paradigm of colonialism in Japan. However, which ‘native’ is the subject of the discussion here? Who is the colonized? Or to use my terminology here, whose presence is really in the various representations under discussion here? It would seem that this is a conversation between settlers and their take on settler colonialism, while the figure of the Ainu is utilized in varying degrees to designate the ‘good’ versus the ‘bad’ anthropologist.

Sifting out the Geopolitics of (Post-)empires A broader perspective on settler colonialism as a structure that connects Japan and the West through the figure of the Ainu is visible through Japan’s historical geopolitics in two pivotal processes: the rise of the modern Japanese nation in the context of imperial and gunboat geopolitics and global market forces (Auslin 2004; Beasley 1987; Miyoshi 2005; Toby 1984); and, following this, postwar Japan’s ‘reversal’ in the Cold War and the resultant politics of forgetting, a process facilitated by the US occupation forces, or SCAP (Ching 2001; Dower 1999; Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama 2001; Morris-Suzuki 1998; Yoneyama 2016). The first marked the end of Japan’s ‘closed door’ policy and the fall of Tokugawa’s shogun system, the rise of the Meiji government and the beginnings of a nation-state model, clearly delineated geographical boundaries, and, at its peak, an expanding empire. The second moment marked Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War, the loss of its colonies (with the arguable exception of Hokkaido and Okinawa), and the start of its homogeneous-nation discourse. Different forms of Ainu representation are threaded through these two historical moments. Some examples are the utilization of the Ainu as the ‘savage, uncivilized natives’ to bolster Japan’s civilizational hierarchy in the West, as mentioned in the previous sections, or an assimilated Ainu submerged in the performance of Japan’s exceptional homogeneity during the Cold War for the liberal West. Instead of a cultural-relativist tug-of-war between Western anthropologist and Japanese-asnative anthropologist perspectives, the difficulty of representing Ainu history and heritage highlights the transnational relations between settler colonial practices and (post-)empires. As such, settlers’ social worlds are mediated through various Ainu representations to sustain their ethical coherence and the legitimacy of their progress, and to

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justify their histories. Any analysis disconnected from the context of the sociopolitical history of empire and settler colonialism in the Asia-Pacific will ignore the layers of intertwined relations of power between the researcher and the researched. The tensions behind these relations of power are found in Ohtsuka’s response: Niessen comes closest to raising an important issue when she says, ‘While correcting Japan’s monoethnic self-presentation for the visiting public, the exhibit nevertheless skirts the nub of the monoethnic controversy—i.e., the issue of current Ainu existence’. If only Niessen had focused her efforts to research into this question, she might have written a very fruitful article. But since she failed to understand the contribution by leading Ainu to the Minpaku exhibitions, or discussed the question with Ainu people, what could have become an interesting contribution is reduced to just more vapid rhetoric. Niessen has forgotten how an anthropologist should elucidate what is on the cultural ‘menu’ of an ethnic group. Thus, it is the Ainu themselves who have the right and obligation to make their own choice from their ‘menu’. Instead she seems intent on brainwashing not only the anthropologists of the Minpaku but also the Ainu people with her own ideas. (Ohtsuka 1996, 117)

Ohtsuka was reminding Niessen to examine the context behind Japan’s performative homogeneity, instead of assuming that Japan’s colonization of Hokkaido was simply a replica of the North American occupation of Indigenous lands. In failing to consider this, Niessen would not understand the reasons behind the Ainu collaborators’ own interests in focusing on the traditional aspects of Ainu culture in the Minpaku exhibits. Nihonjinron was the basis for a flurry of research, oftentimes quite unethical, on the Ainu within the field of anthropology, which even included the theft of ancestral remains. Memories of mistreatment at the hands of Wajin scholars remain among most Ainu today, leading to ethnographic refusals (Simpson 2007) for anthropologists attempting to conduct research in Ainu communities (lewallen 2007). This is especially the case for Wajin anthropologists, as compared to non-local scholars, as several universities in Japan are still negotiating the repatriation of stolen ancestral remains (Nakamura 2018). Most Wajin scholars whose work involves the Ainu tend to focus their research on the less politically sensitive premodern cultural practices or linguistics, instead of contemporary politics and culture. This is reflected in Minpaku’s focus on traditional Ainu culture and Niessen’s critique of the same representation as being depoliticized. While there is a historical context to the Minpaku curators’ evasion of contemporary Ainu politics, I am not making an excuse for the lack of Indigenous cultural sovereignty-based collaboration in museum practices. The prevalence of national homogeneity in contemporary Japan needs to be countered with a focus on Ainu presence and activism in society today. What is ‘present’ here is the Wajin settlers’ attempt to resolve the problematic history of nihonjinron through Minpaku’s delineation of the Ainu as a ‘separate but equal’ entity within Japan. They need to present

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traditional Ainu culture as equal so as to be a form of reparation that supposedly resolves the violence of nihonjinron that posits the Ainu as inferior in Japan’s civilizational hierarchy. However, the settler colonization of Hokkaido and its role in Japan’s attempts at empire making remains unaddressed. While Niessen and the Minpaku curators focused on different aspects of Ainu representations to sustain their interpretation of nihonjinron, what about the Ainu collaborators in this narrative? The very politically informed decision of Wajin anthropologists like the Minpaku curators to work on depoliticized data are acceptable to most Ainu, since they have lost traditional knowledge due to a century of forced assimilation. Attempts to recover lost Indigenous knowledge are a step towards cultural recovery and revival. The issue is not about representation (with settlers as the audience) or the preservation of culture and technical knowledge in the museum (for the settlers), but rather in the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, the actual practice of their culture, and the transformation of their bodies. In other words, most members in the community focus on cultural survival and their self-transformation or self-production as Ainu. One of Niessen’s central arguments regarded what she perceived to be Minpaku’s deliberate attempt to orchestrate ‘authentic’ Ainu weaving by dictating the actions of a ‘Mrs. Kayano’ during the process of filming a documentary video for the museum. In response, Ohtsuka visited Mrs. Kayano to get her comments on this accusation. In assuming that the cameraman had generally orchestrated her [Mrs. Kayano’s] actions, including forcing her to move to the hut, she [Niessen] did not realize how Mrs. Kayano’s behavior could stem from her own consciousness as an Ainu. When I asked Mrs. Kayano directly about this point, she laughed and explained, ‘I needed to do a bit of weaving in the kitchen because I needed to prepare for the filming, I don’t do it normally. . . . You can’t do the weaving properly in the kitchen of the house. In the house, the room is too small to pull the warp, and first of all you don’t have the pillar around which to attach the bundles of threads. If she could have asked me about that, there would have been no misunderstanding. It is so inconvenient not to be able to communicate because of language problems.’ She added: ‘But I was very glad to do all the processes of weaving. Thanks to this opportunity, I became aware for the first time of what I had almost forgotten and what I didn’t know.’ (Ohtsuka 1996, 113)

For Mrs. Kayano, she was reaping the benefits of self-production. For Ainu women, material culture might be a detour from overt political activism, but cultural revival is a process towards community organizing and rights-based activism (lewallen 2016a). Clearly, both Minpaku curators and their Ainu collaborators wished to reconstruct Ainu cultural traditions but for different purposes. The Minpaku curators were addressing Japan’s imperial past for the Wajin audience, but their Ainu collaborators were focused on relearning traditional knowledge that had almost been eliminated by the settler colonizing empire. The process happened to place them on the same path, but their destination was different.

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Conclusion: ‘They Are Damned if They Are, and Then Damned if They Are Not’ ‘They are damned if they are, and then damned if they are not’ was Niessen’s comment on the Ainu with regards to the issue of assimilation in her 1996 response to Shimizu and Ohtsuka (Niessen 1996, 142n10). The Ainu are damned if they are present as Ainu, as that would mean that they have to live as the kind of ‘authentic natives’ represented in Minpaku with no access to modern education, housing, technology, and social support. However, they are damned if they are not present as Ainu, as that would mean that they have disappeared as assimilated subjects of the Japanese nation-state. They are also doomed to have no political representation in contemporary Japan. However, the difficulty of representing the Ainu is not the problem, especially when these representations are symptoms of settler consumption of Indigeneity or, as Jack D. Forbes (2008) calls it, wétiko psychosis. Niessen faced the same conundrum with Shimizu and Ohtsuka. If she redirected the efforts of her scholarship on the anthropology and history of nihonjinron, her rebuke of Minpaku’s power over Ainu representations would have lost ground within the unresolved debate of agency and power that links Japan and the West on one hand and Wajin and Ainu on the other. Elements of this same debate were played out in Museum Anthropology to no resolution. The Minpaku curators were fixed on the former and Niessen was fixed on the latter, linked by layers of histories as fellow empires and settler colonizers. The discussion remained mired in binary categories of race and nation, East and West, connected through the transit of settler colonialism and Ainu representations. Of course, in standing by her rationalized language and analytical paradigm of an objective outsider without including a history of nihonjinron in the global context of empires and national ideology, as shown in her 1996 response to the Minpaku curators, Niessen was subject to the problem of the East versus West divide of knowledge production and analytical methods (Asquith 1999; Kuwayama 2004). As for the Minpaku curators, they were caught between the Scylla of acceding to universal norms on museum practices on exhibiting ‘native’ and Indigenous peoples, and the Charybdis of local politics and contested agendas from different Ainu communities. As is apparent by now, they are also caught in the dilemma of regurgitating Japan’s imperial discourse of benevolence (Siddle 1996, 48, 89) in their attempts to help the Ainu, but the repercussions of occupying Ainu lands remain unsettled if they do nothing. Although Niessen was making a reference to the Ainu in the opening title of this section, I am arguing that the settlers (including Shimizu, Ohtsuka, and Niessen) are damned if they try to represent the native and Indigenous, and damned if they don’t. I have in broad strokes linked various ‘weak messianic’ moments (Benjamin 2007) of settler colonial histories together to show the interdependent and symbiotic ties between the Minpaku curators’ and Niessen’s interpretations of various

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settler colonial and nihonjinron past. I argue that this is an intersection of settler colonial and (post-)empire narrative as reflected in their attempts to apprehend the global and local dialectics of nihonjinron using Ainu representations. Harootunian (2015, 23) stated that ‘the past could not lay claim to the identity of being historical in itself but rather acquires this status through the mediation of the present’. Their mediation of the present is based on politics of difference-making by essentializing the settler nation, instead of the relationality of shifting Ainu representations within the continuity of global settler colonial structures and settler knowledge production. The difficulty of representing Ainu culture and history is not because Ainu heritage is a problematic or difficult heritage. This is a symptom of a larger and broader problem, that of interlocking settler relations, desires, and the lack of analysis on these connections. Put simply, Ainu representations as ‘difficult heritage’ is the problem of settler colonial/(post-)empire methods of producing knowledge and representation. I am making an ethnographic refusal (Simpson 2007) to produce a representable and legible Ainu voice for settler consumption here. Instead, settlers and scholars need to apprehend this discordance with further decolonizing research on how webs of relations, as they intersect time and space, sustain facets of nihonjinron and the contemporary social worlds of settlers across continents.

Acknowledgements This chapter was written with support from the Global Perspectives on Society Postdoctoral Fellowship (New York University Shanghai) and I would like to thank the curators in Hokkaido Museum, Yoh’ichi Ootani and Rie Kōchi, for their insights on the politics of representing Ainu culture.

References Amos, T. D. 2011. Embodying Difference: The Making of Burakumin in Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Ang, Roslynn. 2017. ‘Recursions of Colonial Desire for Differences: The Doubly Erased and/ or Hyper-Visible Ainu’. In ‘Critique of/in Japanese Studies’, edited by Ioannis Gaitanidis, special issue, New Ideas in East Asian Studies: 8–16. Asquith, Pamela J. 1999. ‘“World System” of Anthropology and “Professional Others”’. In Anthropological Theory in North America, edited by E. L. Cerroni-Long, 31–49. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Auslin, Michael R. 2004. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beasley, W. G. 1987. Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.

Roslynn Ang 61 Burgess, Chris. 2010. ‘The “Illusion” of Homogeneous Japan and National Character: Discourse as a Tool to Transcend the “Myth” vs. “Reality” Binary’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 8 (9), no. 1: Article ID 3310. Byrd, Jodi A. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ching, Leo T. S. 2001. Becoming ‘Japanese’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dower, John W. 1999. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton. Forbes, Jack D. 2008. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Fujitani, Takashi, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds. 2001. Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fukuzawa, Yukichi. 1973. An Outline of a Theory of Civilization. Tokyo: Sophia University. Fukuzawa, Yukichi, and Eiichi Kiyooka. 1992. The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi. Lanham, MD: Madison Books. Harootunian, Harry D. 2015. Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hasegawa, Yuuki. 2009. ‘The Rights Movement and Cultural Revitalization: The Case of the Ainu in Japan’. In Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights: Intersections in Theory and Practice, edited by Michele Langfield, William Logan, and Mairead Nic Craith, 208–25. London: Routledge. Hennessey, John L. 2020. ‘A Colonial Trans-Pacific Partnership: William Smith Clark, David Pearce Penhallow and Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido’. Settler Colonial Studies 10 (1): 54–73. Hook, Glenn D., and Richard Siddle. 2003. Japan and Okinawa: Structure and Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Kume, Kunitake. 2009. Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe. Edited by Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young. Leiden: Cambridge University Press. Kuwayama, Takami. 2004. Native Anthropology: The Japanese Challenge to Western Academic Hegemony. Rosanna, VIC: Trans Pacific Press. lewallen, ann-elise. 2007. ‘Bones of Contention: Negotiating Anthropological Ethics within Fields of Ainu Refusal’. Critical Asian Studies 39 (4): 509–40. lewallen, ann-elise. 2016a. The Fabric of Indigeneity: Ainu Identity, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Japan. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press. lewallen, ann-elise. 2016b. ‘Intimate Frontiers: Disciplining Ethnicity and Ainu Women’s Subjectivity in Early Colonial Hokkaido’. In The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire, edited by Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis C. Washburn, 19–37. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Mason, Michele. 2012. Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McKittrick, Katherine. 2020. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Miyoshi, Masao. 2005. As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.

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Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1998. Re-inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 2020. ‘Indigenous Rights and the “Harmony Olympics”’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 14 (4), no. 6: Article ID 5346. Nakamura, Naohiro. 2007. ‘The Representation of Ainu Culture in the Japanese Museum System’. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 27 (2): 331–65. Nakamura, Naohiro. 2018. ‘Redressing Injustice of the Past: The Repatriation of Ainu Human Remains’. Japan Forum (March): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2018.1441168. Niessen, Sandra A. 1994. ‘The Ainu in Mimpaku: A Representation of Japan’s Indigenous People at the National Museum of Ethnology’. Museum Anthropology 18 (3): 18–25. https://doi.org/10.1525/mua.1994.18.3.18. Niessen, Sandra A. 1996. ‘Representing the Ainu Reconsidered’. Museum Anthropology 20 (3): 132–44. https://doi.org/10.1525/mua.1996.20.3.132. Oguma, Eiji. 2002. A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-Images. Melbourne, VIC: Trans Pacific Press. Ohtsuka, Kazuyoshi. 1996. ‘Exhibiting Ainu Culture at Minpaku: A Reply to Sandra A. Niessen’. Museum Anthropology 20 (3): 108–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/mua.1996.20.3.108. Roth, Joshua Hotaka. 2002. Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ryang, Sonia, and John Lie. 2009. Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/ 9780520098633.001.0001. Saaler, Sven, and J. Victor Koschmann, eds. 2007. Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders. New York: Routledge. Sasaki Toru. 2000. ‘Hakubutsu-kan Minzokugaku to Ainu minzoku bunka tenji no hyōka ni kansuru kangaekata’ [Museum anthropology and evaluation of exhibiting Ainu culture]. Tōhoku Ajia Kenkyū [Northeast Asian Studies] 4: 65–80. Shimizu, Akitoshi. 1996. ‘Cooperation, Not Domination: A Rejoinder to Niessen on the Ainu Exhibition at Minpaku’. Museum Anthropology 20 (3): 120–31. https://doi.org/10.1525/ mua.1996.20.3.120. Siddle, Richard. 1996. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan. London: Routledge. Siddle, Richard. 1997. ‘The Ainu and the Discourse of “Race”’. In The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan, edited by Frank Dikötter, 136–57. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Siddle, Richard. 2002. ‘An Epoch-Making Event? The 1997 Ainu Cultural Promotion Act and Its Impact’. Japan Forum 14 (3): 405–23. Simpson, Audra. 2007. ‘On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, “Voice” and Colonial Citizenship’. Junctures 9: 67–80. Smits, Gregory. 1999. Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tierney, Robert Thomas. 2010. Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Roslynn Ang 63 Toby, Ronald P. 1984. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tuck, Eve. 2009. ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’. Harvard Educational Review 79 (3): 409–27. Uemura, Hideaki, and Jeffrey Gayman. 2018. ‘Rethinking Japan’s Constitution from the Perspective of the Ainu and Ryūkyū Peoples’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 16 (5), no. 5: Article ID 5121. Walker, Brett L. 2001. The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weiner, Michael. 1997. Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity. London: Routledge. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yoshino, Kosaku. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London and New York: Routledge.

3 Taipei’s National Martyrs’ Shrine The Past and Present Lives of a Difficult Monument Lu Pan

This chapter focuses on the spatial history of the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei (hereinafter referred to as the National Martyrs’ Shrine unless otherwise noted) and its surroundings, Taipei’s Yuanshan Area.1 Through an examination of the spatial transformation of Yuanshan Area and its visual representations, I argue that the changing nature, memory, and symbolism of Yuanshan Area was shaped by various regimes with their own urban modernization agendas and ideals constituted of Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese identities.2 The National Martyrs’ Shrine, located in Dazhi, Yuanshan Area, Taipei, manifests the legitimacy and dignity of the ‘Republic of China’ on Taiwan—even if its sovereign status is not recognized in the international community. The martyrs’ shrine (zhonglieci 忠烈祠) is a kind of Chinese war memorial that came into being in different places following the birth of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1911. Throughout Chinese history, ci, or ancestral temples, have been used as spaces where a community or the living generations of a family pay tribute to their deceased ancestors. In this sense, a ci is a ritual space that maintains the societal, communal, and familial hierarchical order. Unlike a ci, a zhonglieci is neither a space where private families or close communities perform rituals nor an object of worship for royal families during feudal times. Rather, it is a site of national remembrance. An early form of zhonglieci in China can be found on the original site of Linggu Temple, a Buddhist temple built during the Liang dynasty (502–557 CE) on the outskirts of Nanjing, where, in 1928, the ‘ROC’ government built the National Revolutionary Army War Memorial Cemetery. Although the legal document ‘Rules for Establishing Martyrs’ Shrines in Respective Provinces’—which was compiled 1. A more extensive version of this chapter can be found in the author’s 2020 monograph (Pan 2020). 2. Edward Vickers’ chapter in this volume briefly discusses the Gokoku Jinju (Gokoku Shrine) in Fukuoka and how its function also changed after World War II. It is worth noting that the status of Shintoism and the function of these shrines also changed in Japan itself, as militarism was supplanted by pacifism as the national ideology.

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under the ‘Complete Regulations on Special Favourable Treatment and Pensions for Past Fallen, Disabled, and Injured Revolutionary Soldiers’, published by the Ministry of the Interior of the ROC—was implemented in response to an urgent need to extend condolences to the soldiers and their families and boost morale in the battle against the Japanese in North China in 1931,3 the term zhonglieci was not officially used until May 1936 (Tsai 2010, 6). Following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Chinese Civil War, the fate of these commemorative shrines built on the Mainland took a drastic turn. Most of the martyrs’ shrines were demolished and the inscriptions on their monuments defaced, as they were perceived to be ‘undesirable’ legacies of the previous regime. After the Cultural Revolution, only the Nanyue Martyrs’ Shrine, built in 1943 in Hengyang, Hunan province, and the Graveyard of the National Heroes, built in 1945 in Tengchong, Yunnan, remained standing. While most such monuments on the Mainland have been physically eradicated and are no longer considered part of the national memory, the construction of commemorative shrines on the soil of Taiwan—an island originally ‘unfamiliar’ with martyrs’ shrines—especially after the full retreat of the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1949, aimed to continue the interrupted national memory-building project that had begun on the Mainland. However, the Kuomintang government first had to deal with numerous war monuments left by the Japanese colonizers—Shinto shrines that commemorated Japanese soldiers (Tsai 2010).4 These Japanese shrines were either demolished or repurposed as Chinese martyrs’ shrines. The National Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei, incorporating both newly constructed and repurposed elements, thus embodies a modern national mechanism of reward and mobilization in which ‘imagined fellow countrymen’ who were killed on the Mainland are honoured, worshipped, and, most importantly, taken as role models to guide the future behaviour of the living. Among many other martyrs’ shrines in Taiwan, the National Martyrs’ Shrine can be seen as the most important example of an existing martyrs’ shrine in Taiwan for two reasons. First, the National Martyrs’ Shrine is considered the highest-level commemorative monument in the postwar ‘national’ narrative of the ‘ROC’ in Taiwan. Therefore, it reveals some of the fundamental agendas, ideals, and ways of representing the formation of war memory in postwar Taiwan. Second, its transformation from a Japanese Shinto shrine to the National Martyrs’ Shrine, as well as the overall transformation of Yuanshan Area, reflects an intriguing aspect of the spatial ‘reappropriation’ and ‘reproduction’ of war heritage in contemporary Taiwan in its complicated relationship with mainland China, Japan, and its own past.

3. The conflict was precipitated by what is widely known as the ‘9.18 Incident’ or the ‘Mukden Incident’. 4. According to Tsai (2010), it may not be a coincidence that Japan also began to build similar military shrines just before Chiang Kai-shek ordered the construction of these monuments in China. Tsai believes that there is a parallel, if not a direct relation, between the Japanese and Chinese shrines in the sense that the latter were inspired by the former to a certain extent.

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Martyrs’ shrines all around Taiwan have received increasing academic attention in recent years, particularly as regards the relationship between these structures and their predecessor Shinto shrines built during the Japanese colonial period. Recent studies on ritual spaces from the Japanese colonial period to the KMT years under martial law have shed light on a critical turn in the present discourse about martyrs’ shrines (Chen 2004; Dong 2006, 2009; Sung and Chen 2013; Li 2016). In other words, martyrs’ shrines are seen as a thing of the past, not of the present. After the democratization of Taiwan, such shrines can be examined in the postcolonial and post–martial law contexts of Taiwan. In his comparative research on commemorative shrines in China and Taiwan and their counterparts in Japan (Gokoku and Yasukuni shrines), Chin-tang Tsai (2001, 2010, 2015) finds a parallel, if not an interconnection, between these two forms of ‘sacred sanctum’ for war-memorializing sacrifices. He goes on to examine whether such an interrelation remained after the war. Meanwhile, in his historical research on the establishment of a national commemorative system for the martyrs of the Anti-Japanese War, Shih-ying Chang (2010, 4) points out that the KMT government’s efforts to conduct a census of the fallen soldiers ‘concern[ed] the legitimacy of the regime’. However, as his analysis shows, the hasty and disparate procedures of martyr commemoration ‘challenged the legitimacy of the national government and devalued the efforts made’ in promoting martyrs’ shrines (Chang 2010, 4–5). This ‘failure’, along with the CCP defeat of the KMT in the Chinese Civil War and subsequent destruction of the commemorative shrines on the Mainland, erased memories of the Anti-Japanese War across the Taiwan Strait and transformed the shrines into ‘an empty symbol, which gradually lost their original meaning’ (Chang 2010, 4). Unlike previous research that mostly focuses on the institutional structure of the National Martyrs’ Shrine, my study focuses on three major aspects going beyond this shrine per se. These aspects all address the interrelation between the memory of Yuanshan Area and that of the National Martyrs’ Shrine itself. To trace the spatial history of the National Martyrs’ Shrine, I will first scrutinize the space-producing process in Yuanshan Area during the Japanese colonial period. Yuanshan Area is not only the site of the National Martyrs’ Shrine (and its predecessor the Gokoku Jinja, or Gokoku Shrine) but also the Taiwan Jinja (Taiwan Shrine, later upgraded to the Taiwan Jingu), which is considered the highest-level Shinto shrine in Taiwan. The spatial meaning of the National Martyrs’ Shrine in its postwar and contemporary forms is deeply related to how it was transfigured from its earlier spatial context in wartime mainland China. After the destruction of the Taiwan Jingu near the end of war and the takeover of Taiwan by the KMT, the visual image of Yuanshan Area was dominated by the Grand Hotel Taipei (Yuanshan Dafandian in Chinese, also known as Yuanshan Hotel), built in 1952 under the direct order of Soong Mei-ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-shek. This hotel was long considered to be a mysterious ‘castle’ that only hosted and entertained the ‘ROC’s’ friends, allies, and important guests invited by Chiang and his high-ranking officials during the Cold War period.

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The National Martyrs’ Shrine was nested in the space of the Gokoku Jinja until its full reconstruction in 1969. Apart from discussing the transformation of the spatial functions of the area surrounding the National Martyrs’ Shrine, I will analyse the aesthetic and spatial styles of this monument in relation to war mobilization, commemoration, and nation building via architectural form. Its architectural form is particularly revealing and is therefore considered important for a colony and a newly established regime where the built environment and its symbolism, spatial layout, and forms of representation serve ‘as an effective propaganda vehicle for the demonstration of power and the formation of identity’ and often plays ‘a constructive role in the legitimization of new authority . . . as a “power-radiating”, “image-generating” device to represent the modern state’ (Wang and Heath 2008, 21). I will also use various visual representations of the Shinto shrines and Yuanshan Area, and visual images of the National Martyrs’ Shrine to understand how the images of these monuments and spaces were circulated in relation to their conceived ideology and memory. These ideals are seen not only in visual representations of Yuanshan Area, such as maps, paintings, and propaganda films, but also in the style and function of the architectural artefacts in the area. In shaping Yuanshan Area in the postwar period, we see a subtle rivalry, but also an interdependence, between the National Martyrs’ Shrine and the Grand Hotel. On the one hand, the task of building the National Martyrs’ Shrine to commemorate the recently concluded Sino-Japanese War was suspended by the construction of the Grand Hotel under the more urgent political discourse of anti-communism and the Cold War. Yet, on the other hand, from a visual perspective, the Chinese ‘Northern Palace’ style of architecture, chosen for both the Grand Hotel and the National Martyrs’ Shrine, bespeaks a unified language of visual Chinese nationalism. Since the lifting of martial law in the 1980s, as a symbol of the KMT regime’s authoritarian nation making, the National Martyrs’ Shrine is not completely defunct but has been re-evaluated as an example of ‘difficult heritage’, defined by Sharon Macdonald (2009, 1) as spatial legacies associated with ‘a past that is recognized as meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity’.

Yuanshan Area during the Japanese Colonial Period The transformation and restructuring of Yuanshan Area since the beginning of Japanese rule in the early twentieth century can be viewed as a typical example of a colonial spatial practice that stripped away the spatial meanings originally conferred by the colonized. The stripping was initially realized by the Japanese military’s conquering of Taiwan’s land by force and then by the creation of new spatial artefacts. Su Shuo-bin (2010, 140) points out that the Japanese colonizers exerted their spatial governance in Taipei through the homogenization and visualization of

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space. First implemented in 1899, the ‘Taipei Urban Improvement Plan’ included infrastructural projects that aimed to modernize Taipei, specifically its administrative division, hygiene, transportation, roads, education, and social institutions (Su 2010, 139). These projects became tools of homogenizing and visualizing the city’s urban space in visual media such as maps, photos, and films. This plan also involved the construction of Japanese Shinto shrines, which was considered a major aspect of transforming Taipei’s urban structure. When Yuanshan Area became a key symbolic site for demonstrating colonial power, the construction of the Taiwan Jinja in 1901 established the axis of sacred space in the urban landscape of Taipei. The term jinja, which replaced previously common Japanese terms for similar commemorative spaces such as shokonsha or chūkondō, began to be widely used in the Meiji Era to refer to long-lasting sites for state rituals. Building new architectural artefacts, including government buildings, hospitals, schools, libraries, public halls, police stations, and parks, was an effective means of effectuating Japan’s colonial rule in its conquered territories. Similar to other Japanese colonies and subordinate territories such as Korea and Manchukuo, the colonial architecture in Taiwan, specifically its government buildings and public buildings, adopted, on the one hand, predominantly Western styles, including Queen Anne, neo-baroque, and gothic, sometimes mixed with traditional Chinese and Korean elements. The Western styles aimed to show off Japan’s colonial rule to the ‘Great Powers’ in the West (Nishizawa 2014, 27, 29). On the other hand, constructing state Shinto shrines in Japanese colonies played a key role in the assimilation of national subjects (both Japanese migrants and local residents) into the grand narrative of the Japanese Empire. The construction of the Taiwan Jinja in Yuanshan Area in 1901 set the tone of Yuanshan Area as a sacred space for the deities of the modern state. The Taiwan Jinja can be seen as a space for consignation—a gathering site of symbols—for two layers of myths. First, the original purpose of its construction was to commemorate Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa, who died during the Japanese Imperial Army’s invasion of Taiwan in 1895, allegedly after contracting malaria in Tainan. As the first member of the royal family to die outside of Japan, he was elevated to the status of a deity, and soon after his death, several shrines dedicated to worshipping him were built in both Tainan and Taipei. In this case, this shrine was built to honour the achievements of the imperial military and to pray for Japan’s effective governance of its newly conquered territories. Second, the Taiwan Jinja was constructed as an important extension of the Ise Grand Jingu (Ise Grand Shrine), as reflected in their architectural affinity (the shinmei-zukuri style) (Huang 2014, 21).5 Moreover, during the reconstruction of the Ise Grand Jingu (which takes place 5. Shinmei-zukuri is an ancient architectural style known for its simplicity in both visual form and use of materials. Meanwhile, given that the Taiwan Jinja was built during the Meiji period, this shrine is closely related with the Meiji Jingu, which was built in Tokyo in 1920.

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every twenty years) in 1929, sacred treasures, including an assortment of sacred mirrors, jade pieces, swords, bows and arrows, spears, and shields, were temporarily removed from this shrine to the Taiwan Jinja and were then passed on to the other shrines in Taiwan to transmit their ‘aura’ (Huang 2014, 55). A magnificent picture of the shrine was etched on a copperplate called ‘Territorial Map of Taiwan Shrine’ in 1906.6 The whole shrine space seems to have been inserted into a wonderland-like natural environment that comprises mountains, rivers, and plants as seen from the south side of the Keelung River (Himongi Shiryo Kenkyu Senta, n.d.) (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1:  Territorial map of the Imperial Shrine Taiwan Shrine, 1906. Source: The Zushi Minoru Collection, Database of Japanese Shrines Built Abroad During the Japanese Imperial Period, Research Center for Nonwritten Cultural Materials, Kanagawa University, http:// www.himoji.jp/database/db04/permalink.php?id=2210.

In the foreground, sailboats dot the flowing Keelung River while two steel bridges, namely, Meiji Bridge and Iron Bridge, connect the southern bank of the river to its north bank. The modern look of the foreground is further enhanced by the images of a billowing steam train running on Iron Bridge and two smoking chimneys on 6. The etching was commissioned and offered by prominent Taiwanese businessman Koo Kwang-ming who represented the Bangka gentries in welcoming Japanese troops upon their arrival in Taipei.

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the northern side of Meiji Bridge. Tiny human figures can be seen on the etching; the majority of them are on their way to the shrine. One can recognize the main architectural components, street names, and even the barely visible Yuanshan Park by reading the labels. Unlike the usual design of Shinto shrines, where only one torii gate is erected, this image of the Taiwan Jinja viewed from a distance shows four torii of the shinmei-zukuri style (Yonezawa 2017, 13).7 Apart from the two small torii on the visitor’s path leading to the shrine (sandō), two main torii can be found on the structure of the shrine proper. While a torii serves as a border gate that separates the world of humans from that of the deities, a two-layered torii enhances the visitor’s emotional experience of the space’s sacredness. In front of the first torii, the komainus, lion-dog statues which often come in pairs, reveal the shrine’s high-colonial colour. Unlike the komainus commonly seen in Japanese shrines, a pair of male and female stone lions, modified from Chinese stone lions, was put in front of the Taiwan Jinja by the Lin Ben Yuan family, a powerful business family in Taiwan. Two cannons used in the First Sino-Japanese War (labelled ‘First Sino-Japanese War between 1894 and 1895’ in Japanese on the map) are placed beside these lions. This amalgamation of iconic symbols and military weapons constructs a space of reality and imagery. Although one can take the map as a source of historical information about the Taiwan Jinja, the shrine is heavily wrapped with cloud and haze, suggesting an imaginary fairyland. These images lead one’s gaze from the ‘human world’ (by way of pathways, bridges, and main entrances) to the ‘sacred world’. Such perspectives prepare the viewer in approaching a divine space where no mundane humans, either Japanese or Taiwanese, are to be seen. This visual construction of the Taiwan Jinja as a heterotopia of divine otherness echoes the paintings of Yoshida Hatsusaburo, a Japanese cartographer who is most famous for his bird’s-eye-view maps of cities and towns in Japan and its occupied territories. One of his paintings presents a full view of the Taiwan Jinja from above the southeast side of Meiji Bridge (see Figure 3.2). Figure 3.2:  A painting of Taiwan Grand Shrine during Japanese colonial rule, 1930. Source: Government Propaganda Materials of Taiwan Expo, public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Painting_of_ Taiwan_Grand_Shrine.jpg.

7. Similar to other elements in shinmei-zukuri-style shrines, the torii of the Taiwan Jinja shows extreme simplicity in that it is free from any decoration compared with other styles. This torii style was also adopted by the Kashima Shrine in Ibaraki and the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

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A similar perspective can be found in the ink painting of Ogiya Shūkin, which was displayed in the first Taiwan Fine Art Expo (Taiwan bijutsutenrankai or Taiten for short) in 1927.8 These ‘imagined’ framings of the shrine area mirror the gaze at Yuanshan Area and the shrine favoured by official institutions.

Enhancing Chineseness in Yuanshan Area: The Grand Hotel and the Arrival of the Northern Palace Style A jet plane destroyed the Taiwan Jinja in an accident on October 25, 1944, the year before the surrender of Japan. This accident symbolized the decline of the spatial domination of Shinto beliefs in Taipei. After the KMT took over Taiwan, a new round of meaningful spatial inscriptions soon began to take shape. Following the full retreat of the KMT government to Taiwan in 1949, the country’s position in the ‘ROC’ began to change. Settling their power mainly in Taipei as the temporary capital, the KMT portrayed Taiwan as their main base for ‘reclaiming the Mainland’. In the following year, the military confrontation on the Korea Peninsula was intensified, marking the beginning of the tensions between communist China and the US after World War II. Under the control of the US’s World War II ally Chiang and the KMT government, Taiwan was considered a crucial strategic point for US military manoeuvres in the Asia-Pacific. For its part, the KMT government was in need of American financial and military support to defend itself from the possible expansion of communism into its last fortress. Under such circumstances, it is not difficult to understand why, in 1952, on the former site of the Taiwan Jinja, a considerable amount of money went to the construction of the Grand Hotel Taipei, a megastructure whose function differed entirely from that of the Taiwan Jinja. It is said that the idea of building the hotel started with former US General Douglas MacArthur’s visit to Taipei in the early 1950s, during which he stayed in the Yangmingshan Grass Mountain Royal Guest House built in 1923 by the Japanese to accommodate Prince Hirohito. In their reports of MacArthur’s visit, the Western media commented that Taiwan was still so Japanese that it had to host its revered guest in a Japanese house (Chen 2012, 24). In reaction to this comment, Chiang’s wife, Soong Mei-ling, proposed the construction of a new hotel. The site of the symbolic spiritual centre of colonial Taiwan thus gave way to accommodate the urgent need of Chiang’s government to host its Cold War allies, especially the US (Chen 2012, 6). Such significant changes in Yuanshan Area after the colonial period served as a foil to the marginality of the National Martyrs’ Shrine in the nearby area. This provincial shrine served as a weak monument because Chinese nationalism in Taiwan, as defined by the KMT, shifted its main emphasis in the postwar years. The relations 8. Taiten was an officially sponsored island-wide exhibition in colonial Taiwan that was organized every year from 1927 to 1934.

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of Taiwan with the US in the context of Cold War diplomacy and anti-communism were prioritized over its memories of the Anti-Japanese War and were considered more important in constructing national loyalty and mobilizing social sentiment than the National Martyrs’ Shrine. During this period, Taiwan was actually on the same side as the Japanese. Replacing the Taiwan Jinja, the colossal architecture of the Grand Hotel, in the Northern Palace style of the Qing dynasty dominated postwar Yuanshan Area and even the entirety of Taipei as a visual icon. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Grand Hotel determined the overall visual appearance of postwar Yuanshan Area. The National Martyrs’ Shrine, which was renovated and upgraded in 1969, also became part of this spectacle. The main image of the Grand Hotel as seen today was not completely formed until 1973. The structure of the hotel evolved from the Taiwan Hotel, built in 1949 and renamed the Grand Hotel in 1952, the same year that the Yuanshan Recreation Club was established (Chen 2012, 25). Both the early form of this hotel in the 1950s and the later fourteen-storey Grand Hotel were designed by Yang Cho-cheng (1914–2006), who was among the first generation of Mainland/Shanghai architects who came to Taiwan after World War II. In its early form, the hotel was characterized by a distinctive ‘Chinese’ style with its red columns and golden roof tiling that resembled the colour scheme and structure of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Yang designed Chiang’s residences in Shilin (1950) and Cihu (1961) in a similar style. In 1980, Yang was commissioned to design the Grand Hotel Kaohsiung and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and National Theatre, after which he constructed the National Concert Hall in 1989 and the gigantic square space of the Chiang Kaishek Memorial Park (Matten 2011, 57).9 These last three structures, which can be seen as a symbolic space of national cultural spirit, still occupy the centre of Taipei today. During Taiwan’s martial law period (1949–1987), the Grand Hotel represented the ‘national façade’ of Taiwan in accommodating revered national guests from overseas, such as former US President Eisenhower in 1960 and King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and his wife in 1963. The hotel was also famous for hosting important meetings. For example, the negotiations after the termination of diplomatic relations between the ‘ROC’ and the US took place in the hotel’s Emei Hall (now the Kunlun Hall) in 1978. The Grand Hotel proudly claims in its official introduction that it was ‘voted the Best Hotel by the U.S. magazine Holiday’, which described it ‘as a quiet oasis in a busy city’ (Grand Hotel Taipei, n.d.). Although the Grand Hotel was supposedly a ‘public space’ similar to the Taiwan Jinja, as a national guesthouse for the elite it was in fact much less accessible to the public. Therefore, the Grand Hotel remained a mysterious ‘palace’ for Chiang’s family and high-ranking officials from the Mainland. To add to the mysteriousness of the hotel, 9. According to Matten (2011, 57), the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park is 250,000 square metres (2,700,000 square feet).

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rumour had it that there was a secret emergency escape tunnel that led directly to Chiang’s Shilin residence. Many years later, a journalist revealed the truth of the tunnel: beginning with a twenty-metre sliding path and seventy-four steps built by its side, the whole tunnel meanders for eighty-five metres in total and leads to a metal gate that opens to Jiantan Park (Chen 2012, 92–93). This well-equipped tunnel was said to be initially built according to normal standards, but following the instructions of Kung Ling-chun (1919–1994), the manager-in-chief of the Grand Hotel and confidant of Soong Mei-ling, Yang redesigned the tunnel by upgrading its anti-explosive, soundproofing, anti-lightning, and general protective functions (Chen 2012, 92). The tunnel, however, was not built for public use, only for the privileged. In this way, Yuanshan Area and its ‘sanctity’, which was once represented by an imperial Shinto shrine, now shifted to that of another kind represented by the Grand Hotel as a space of Chinese national dignity and elite power. Both kinds of sanctity were nevertheless similar at their roots; specifically, they epitomized an imposed hierarchy of authoritarian power in Taiwan with a top-down (both visually and geographically) will. From the Ise style of Shinto shrine to a quasi–Northern Palace style, Yuanshan Area’s icon was always about ‘elsewhere’. Between 1970 and 1973, the Grand Hotel underwent renovation and became the fourteen-storey high-rise of today. The ‘modernity’ of the hotel also reached a new level. Following the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1976, the termination of the ‘ROC’–US diplomatic relations in 1978, and the gradual loosening of the tight political grip under Chiang Ching-kuo’s presidency from 1978 to 1984, the Grand Hotel no longer served as a ‘national’ space. Nevertheless, it remained Taiwan’s most ‘politically important’ hotel.10 Once a fortress-like retreat for KMT leaders, the hotel became a space that bore witness to historic moments in the democratization process in Taiwan. The KMT had dominated the one-party state system since its arrival in Taiwan, but in 1986 a new Taiwan-oriented political party rose to challenge its monopoly of power. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was formally established at the Grand Hotel.

The Belated Construction of the National Martyrs’ Shrine The fact that the construction of the Grand Hotel was prioritized over that of the National Martyrs’ Shrine as the first landmark to be built after the KMT government moved to Taiwan indicated that handling Cold War confrontations was more important than dealing with the legacies of the Anti-Japanese War in the ‘ROC’s’ postwar political agenda. While the Grand Hotel was completed soon after the demolition of the remains of the Taiwan Jinja, the National Martyrs’ Shrine was first based on

10. The Grand Hotel Kaohsiung was built in 1957, with the similar Northern Palace style as the one in Taipei.

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the architecture of the old Gokoku Jinju with only the name changed.11 It made for a strange scene when Japanese Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (who served from 1957 to 1960 and became Chiang Kai-shek’s trusted Cold War ally in their shared cause of anti-communism) laid his wreath for the fallen soldiers at the National Martyrs’ Shrine in 1957. When former US President Eisenhower and President Diosdado Macapagal of the Philippines visited the shrine in the early 1960s, they were shocked to see that the Chinese heroes were enshrined and worshipped in what was originally their enemy’s memorial space, which was in very poor condition after having been neglected for a long time (Tsai 2015, 80). In 1963, the high-ranking army general He Ying-qin (1917–1978) proposed in a meeting of the KMT Central Review Committee that a new National Martyrs’ Shrine should be erected in place of the dilapidated, repurposed Shinto shrine. However, this proposal was shelved by Chiang Kai-shek in 1965 because the funding was allotted to the construction of two large-scale memorial structures, namely, the National Dr Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (built in 1965) and the Chung-Shan Building (completed in 1966), named after the founder of the KMT and the first president of the ROC, respectively. As symbols of the KMT’s legitimacy as the government of all of China, these structures were seen as more urgently needed than the National Martyrs’ Shrine. Only when the torii-turned-entrance gate of the National Martyrs’ Shrine was about to collapse in 1967 due to the damage caused by termites, and when General He highlighted in the Review Committee Meeting the importance of renovating the old Shinto shrine into a new Chinese martyrs’ shrine, was the proposal finally approved (Tsai 2015, 81). In September 1967, the Executive Yuan (Xingzheng Yuan) approved an official renovation plan, and in December the renovation project finally began. The new National Martyrs’ Shrine was completed in 1969 and occupied almost five acres of land in the eastern part of Yuanshan Area. Echoing the Grand Hotel’s ‘Chinese style’, the National Martyrs’ Shrine presents a highly explicit imitation of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest hall in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Since its construction, the shrine has become an archetype for other martyrs’ shrines built in different municipalities across Taiwan, including those in Keelung, Taizhong, Tainan, Hualian, and Zhanghua.

A Chinese National War Monument in Taiwan Thus, the renovated National Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei could be treated as another significant example of the sweeping trend of the Chinese style. Although the official designer of the shrine was Yao Wen-ying (1907–?), as noted on the memorial plaque, the actual planner and designer was Yao’s son Yao Yuan-jhong (b. 1931), 11. Bensheng Taibei shi zhengfu chengqing huan jian gai shi zhonglieci yi andian qingcha zhaoyou (The Taipei City Government of this province has requested that the construction of the city’s martyrs’ shrine be suspended), 1950, file number 41270012106009, Taiwan Historica.

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whom Chiang chose over eight other contestants (National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine of R.O.C., n.d.) (see Figure 3.3). The overall design of the shrine borrowed the Qing royal architectural style as its main reference. Specifically, as Yao Yuan-jhong claimed in an interview, he drew upon Liang Sicheng’s (1901–1972) Qing Structural Regulations (1934). For Yao, Liang’s study of the methodologies and patterns of building from previous dynasties provided an important basis for defining ‘architectural Chineseness’. In writing Qing Structural Regulations, Liang consulted engineering treatises, documents, and craftsman’s manuscripts in addition to on-site observations that he made in field trips around China together with his wife, Lin Huiyin (1904–1955), his younger brother and archaeologist Liang Si-yong (1904–1954), and other companions. The book contains long sections on the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the major city gates in Beijing. Under the guidelines of Liang’s writing, Yao’s design of the major components of the shrine, including the gateway, wing rooms, drum tower, bell tower, shrine portal, civilian martyrs’ shrine, and military martyrs’ shrine and sanctuary, as well as the layout of the whole shrine area, is highly symmetrical and does not deviate from the basic features of the ancient Chinese royal space. The main hall of the National Martyrs’ Shrine was lavishly designed to show its ‘royalness’. Its roof was decorated with yellow glazed tiles and its ridges with celestials and images of the ‘seven beasts’ (National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine of R.O.C., n.d.). Several modifications were also applied to the architectural details of the shrine to fashion its structure as the main venue for the ‘ROC’s’ ‘state religion’. Instead of using the characters for ‘fortune’, ‘prosperity’, and ‘longevity’ to decorate the tiles of the eaves,

Figure 3.3:  The sanctuary of the Martyrs’ Shrine. Source: Photo by the author in May 2019.

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windowpanes, and drip channels, Yao replaced them with the national totem of the ‘ROC’, the plum blossom. Another feature that distinguishes the National Martyrs’ Shrine from traditional Chinese royal architecture is the use of reinforced concrete structures. Only the windows, doors, and ceilings are made of wood. As with the Grand Hotel and other Chinese-style buildings that were completed during the same period, Chiang Kai-shek directly intervened in the overall visual image making of the National Martyrs’ Shrine. He even met the architect several times and visited the construction site to ‘make sure the result would faithfully reflect his vision of a national “sacred space”’ (Tsai 2015, 165). However, as the first fully completed Chinese war shrine on the highest national level in Taiwan, the National Martyrs’ Shrine distinguished itself from both its predecessor (the Gokoku Jinja) and other commemorative shrines built in mainland China. Japanese Shinto shrines typically comprise two halls for worship (the main hall and the hall of worship). The separation of these two halls represents the demarcation between the human world and the divine world. While the hall of worship is open to everyone, the main hall is only accessible to the shrine’s clergy. Moreover, there is no iconic figure of the main deity in the hall of worship (Tsai 2015, 159). In comparison, in line with the Taoist tradition and the style of traditional Chinese Buddhist temples, the hall of worship in Chinese commemorative shrines also serves as the main hall and houses the main deity. In the sanctuary of the National Martyrs’ Shrine, the major object of worship is ‘a general spirit tablet for honoring the martyrs as a whole’ (Yuanshan Zhonglieci, n.d.), which is placed in a niche altar coloured in gold and red. A portrait of Dr Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) is also placed on the right-hand side of the altar while the spirit tablet of Huang Di (the Yellow Emperor), the legendary figure venerated as the ancestor of the Chinese people, is placed on the left-hand side (Yuanshan Zhonglieci, n.d.). Individual (for fallen leaders, officials, officers, and soldiers) and collective memorial tablets (lingwei) are also enshrined in the civilian and military martyrs’ shrines.

Localizing the National Martyrs’ Shrine Since Taiwan’s democratization in the late 1980s, the commemorative martyrs’ shrines that were ‘transplanted’ onto the country have experienced an interesting process of ‘localization’. Although these martyrs’ shrines have played a central role in national spring and autumn commemorative rituals (chunji and qiuji) in Taiwan since the postwar years, the weakened legitimacy of the ‘ROC’ regime visà-vis ‘China’ as a whole and the re-evaluation of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan after the island’s political democratization have, at least for some people in Taiwan, transformed these shrines into unwelcome or forgotten symbols of the authoritarian past. This heritage, as in the case of other martyrs’ shrines in Taiwan, no longer evokes the intended emotion among most people, and some commemorative

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shrines have become venues for depoliticized tourism, thereby largely depriving them of their sacred aura. To accommodate itself in the new social context, today, the National Martyrs’ Shrine also features some ‘local colour’ that separates it from all other commemorative shrines built on the Mainland. First, while the main purpose of commemorative shrines on the Mainland was to memorialize military heroes who died during the battles with the Japanese in the Anti-Japanese War, memorial tablets in Taipei were also dedicated to those who were sacrificed in two other major periods in the history of the ‘ROC’ since its establishment in 1911: the ‘period of the nation’s building’ and the period of the anti-communism campaigns both on the Mainland and in Taiwan. The former included subsequent periods such as the punitive campaign against Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), the movement led by Dr Sun Yat-sen to defend the provisional constitution of the ‘ROC’, the Eastern Expedition, and the Northern Expedition. The latter included the encirclement campaigns against the communists, the suppression of nationwide communist rebellions, and the period of national recovery. Following the special instructions of the KMT, the National Martyrs’ Shrine is also a place for venerating Taiwanese who contributed to the anti-Japanese campaigns in two other periods (Tsai 2015, 87, 101).12 The first period covers the early Japanese colonial years after the defeat of Qing China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). Although the National Martyrs’ Shrine is seen as the sacred space of the ‘ROC’, the anti-Japanese Han martyrs in Taiwan, including Kan Tai-sai (1870–1900),13 Ke Tie (1876–1900), and Lin Shao-mao (1865–1902), are also honoured in this shrine. Meanwhile, Indigenous Taiwanese aborigines, most famously Mona Rudao (1879–1930), who led the Musha Uprising, the last major anti-Japanese campaign that resulted in a large number of Japanese and tribal casualties, and Hanaoka Ichirō (1908–1930), aka Dakis Nomin, an Indigenous Seediq who completed his higher education in a Japanese school and became the first Indigenous Taiwanese teacher in the Japanese colonization period, are also memorialized in the shrine. The second batch of ‘specially admitted’ spirits included those Taiwanese soldiers who enlisted by the Japanese army during the colonial period and who later came over from the Japanese side to the Chinese side between 1943 and 1945 on Hainan Island. Some of them participated in the later battles against the CCP (Tsai 2015, 102). The inclusion of these Taiwanese ‘anti-Japanese heroes’ indicates that the current government acknowledged the importance of recognizing Taiwan’s contributions to the making of the ‘ROC’ national myth, in an effort to strengthen Taiwanese attachment to the ‘ROC’ state.

12. The special instructions, issued in 1969, were the embodiments of Chiang Kai-shek’s own will. 13. Kan Tai-sai was an anti-Japanese leader during the early Japanese occupation of Taiwan.

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Conclusion The past and present of the National Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei allows us to explore some very crucial yet unresolved matters of urgency that have for a long time covered up war memories. From the perspective of the ‘ROC’ and KMT, these matters of urgency include rebuilding national legitimacy in the Mainland and Taiwan after World War II, the geographical and political division across the Taiwan Strait, ‘de-Japanization’, the emergence of a new narrative of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan, democratization, and the rise of localism. As the major rival of the KMT, the DPP has vehemently advocated a Taiwanese identity that is different from KMT-defined Chinese identity, handling political legacies left by the KMT authoritarianism and democratic liberalism in human rights issues. For those who lived in Taiwan from the Japanese colonial period up to the end of World War II, these matters of urgency were social, cultural, and political. They are also predominantly visual and spatial. First, in the early postwar period, the original objects of worship—war heroes and the emperor—were replaced by the ‘enemy’s’ counterparts under Japanese militarist imperialism. From Shinto shrines to martyrs’ shrines, the elimination or appropriation of existing architectural elements, such as torii, not only served as means of ‘correcting’ the shameful symbolism left by Taiwan’s former conquerors but also as an exercise of power by the newly arrived regime. Second, after martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987, Taiwanese society was still heavily burdened by the memories of the KMT’s military dictatorship, conflicts between mainland Chinese (waishengren) and Indigenous Taiwanese (benshengren), and rising nostalgia for the Japanese colonial period. Under such circumstances, the National Martyrs’ Shrine, which serves as a symbol of the unwanted undemocratic past and is localized to a certain extent by the inclusion of Taiwanese war heroes and local stories, occupies a dual position where it is both ‘externally’ Chinese and ‘internally’ (even if only partially) Taiwanese. While the main task of democratic Taiwan today is to practise ‘transitional justice’, which involves a series of measures that aim to redress the legacies of human rights abuses in the past and engage in ‘truth-seeking’ (or fact-finding) processes with regards to past violations and injustices (International Center for Transitional Justice, n.d.), those memorials and monuments left behind from the undemocratic past have become important physical and social spaces where a novel imagination of the community can be formed, negotiated, and reconciled. The difficulty of dealing with the National Martyrs’ Shrine (and other martyrs’ shrines in Taiwan) lies in the fact that this monument cannot be seen only as an object to be redressed in the genealogy of the dark history of Taiwan’s martial law period. According to Article 2 of the Promoting Transitional Justice Act announced in 2017 by the Executive Yuan, authoritarian symbols are to be removed, but sites where injustices were committed are to be preserved (Laws and Regulations Database of the ROC, n.d.). Still in use, martyrs’ shrines in Taiwan are not only part of the memory of the Anti-Japanese

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War in mainland China but also—similar to Japanese colonial history in Taiwan—a part of Taiwanese history. For today’s Taiwan, the National Martyrs’ Shrine is caught between being a sacred space for quasi-sovereignty and being a target of ‘correction’ in the process of transitional justice. In this matrix of personal and collective memories, political and diplomatic manoeuvres, and economic interests, Taiwan’s National Martyrs’ Shrine still maintains its solemn façade that tells a story of the birth of a nation from a perspective that is highly Sino-, male-, and Han-centric. Its rise and (partial) fall underscore the difficulty of articulating a modern vision of nationhood. However, such difficulty comprises the major course and discourse of ‘becoming Taiwanese’ and shows that the formation of a modern identity is never a fixed, given, and comfortable process, as the monument or its builders try to suggest.

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Laws and Regulations Database of the ROC. n.d. ‘Act on Promoting Transitional Justice’. Accessed March 24, 2021. https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode= A0030296. Li, Yu-chi. 2016. ‘Guojia “xinyang” de jieti: cong xinyingshenshe dao Tainan xian zhonglieci’ [The replacement of national ‘belief ’: From Hsinying Jinja to Tainan County Martyrs’ Shrine]. Master’s thesis, National Cheng Kung University Department of History. Accessed November 14, 2018. https://hdl.handle.net/11296/p2f9ew. Macdonald, Sharon. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and beyond. London and New York: Routledge. Matten, Marc Andre. 2011. ‘The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei: A Contested Place of Memory’. In Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity, edited by Marc Andre Matten, 51–89. Leiden: Brill. National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine of R.O.C. n.d. ‘An Introduction to the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine of R.O.C’. Accessed November 16, 2018. https://web. archive.org/web/20200812160937/http://afrc.mnd.gov.tw/faith_martyr/index.aspx. Nishizawa, Yasuhiko. 2014. ‘A Study of Japanese Colonial Architecture in East Asia’. In Constructing the Colonized Land: Entwined Perspectives of East Asia around WWII, edited by Izumi Kuroishi, 11–40. London and New York: Routledge. Pan, Lu. 2020. Image, Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Commemorative Artefacts in Greater China. Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan. Sung, Yu-chen Sharon, and Liang-yin Chen. 2013. ‘Taiwan wudedian de kongjian cengji zhidu’ [A study of the spatial hierarchy of martial arts halls in Taiwan]. Jianzhu kexue [Architecture science] 7: 21–36. Su, Shuo-bin. 2010. Kanbujian yu kandejian de Taibei [Seen and unseen in Taipei]. Taipei: Qunxue chuban. Tsai, Chin-tang. 2001. ‘Zhonglieci yanjiu: “guoshang shengyu” jianli de lishi yange’ [A study of martyrs’ shrines: The history of the establishment of ‘sacred spaces for the nation’s martyrs’]. Conference for the presentation of the results of the National Science Council’s research plans in Taiwan History, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica. Tsai, Chin-tang. 2010. ‘Taiwan de zhonglieci yu Riben de huguo shenshe/jingguo shenshe zhi bijiao yanjiu’ (A comparative study on Taiwan’s martyrs’ shrines versus Japan’s Gokoku shrines and Yasukuni shrines). Shida Taiwanshi xuebao [Journal of National Taiwan Normal University] 3: 3–22. Tsai, Chin-tang. 2015. Cong shenshe dao zhonglieci: Taiwan guojia zong side zhuanhuan [From Shinto shrine to martyrs’ shrine: Conversion of national rituals in Taiwan]. Taipei: Qunxue chuban. Wang, Yi-Wen, and Tim Heath. 2008. ‘Constructions of National Identity: A Tale of Twin Capital Building in Early Post-war Taiwan’. Taiwan in Comparative Perspective 2 (December): 21–46. Yonezawa, Takanori. 2017. Jinja no Kaibou zukan [Anatomical illustrations of Shinto shrines]. Translated by Jia’en Chen. Xinbei: Fengshu fang wenhua chubanshe. Yuanshan Zhonglieci [National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine of R.O.C.]. n.d. ‘Yao yeye gushi huadangnian’ [Yao Yuan-jhong on the design of the Taipei Martyrs’ Shrine]. Accessed November 14, 2018. http://library.taiwanschoolnet.org/cyberfair2006/huigogo/index2/ index2_3.html.

Part II Making Heritage out of Memories of Incarceration

4 Unsettling the Familiar Hong Kong’s Colonial Policing Heritage Lachlan B. Barber

Introduction Inside the former Central Police Station Compound in Hong Kong—now known as Tai Kwun (大館, ‘Big Station’)—tourists and locals take photos with restored historic buildings as a backdrop (author’s field notes, August 22, 2018). A small number of places to sit are mostly occupied. On the south side of the central courtyard, formerly a space for drills and ceremonies and later a parking lot, sits an imposing four-storey building with airy verandas. On the north side is a lower-slung building with outdoor eating areas that are empty. Inside, on the ground floor, tables set up like booths in a cha chaan teng (Hong Kong–style tea café) are filled with families. Staff members hand out postcards under wall-mounted posters depicting typical café food. Once written and addressed, they can be dropped off at nearby local businesses where they can be mailed, free of charge. The art on the postcards is a whimsical, nostalgic illustration of the historic places in the surrounding district in which the noise, high-rise buildings, and busy streets are replaced with recognizable people and places. The fortified wall surrounding Tai Kwun seems to dissolve both in the image and the activity that animates the imagination it represents. This is intentional; for many years the perimeter wall was a foreboding symbol of imperial power. Effort has been made to welcome people into a space from which they were long excluded. A growing number of government-owned buildings with historical uses related to policing, justice, and law and order dating from Hong Kong’s colonial past have been renovated and opened to the public as heritage sites with new uses. Several of these, including Tai Kwun, the former Marine Police Headquarters (renamed 1881 Heritage), and the former Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters (renamed PMQ), among others, have become popular tourist attractions. The question of how to repurpose these sites has been hotly debated, with widespread wariness of commercially oriented plans (Ku 2010). Little has been said, however, about the fact

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that so many of these buildings relate to the same colonial institution—the (Royal) Hong Kong Police Force.1 Recent events in Hong Kong prominently involving the Hong Kong Police Force encourage us to think about how the history of policing relates to its present, including the presence of a specific type of newly valorized landmark in the city’s landscapes and memoryscapes (Muzaini and Yeoh 2016). The comparatively large number of heritage buildings in Hong Kong associated with the history of policing also deserve scrutiny because of the importance of the ‘rule of law’ (discussed further below; see also Tsang 2001) to official and popular conceptions of Hong Kong’s distinctive identity or ethos. This chapter argues, following Macdonald (2010, 192), for a ‘continual unsettlement’ of the built heritage of colonial policing. This may involve querying whether and how this heritage is ‘difficult’, that is, how it is ‘awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming identity’ (Macdonald 2010, 1), and if so, how it can or should be encountered and remembered. It may also involve understanding it not as consigned to a long ago past but as still continuing in the present. But rather than encountering difficult, awkward, or painful memories through this heritage, visitors to Tai Kwun and similar sites are instead treated to something that is easy, perhaps even nostalgic. Interpretive materials present narratives about the site as the setting for the evolution of policing in relation to the historical development of Hong Kong. These appear against a carefully conserved and aesthetically pleasing backdrop that seamlessly integrates old and new and provides impressive spaces for education, culture (including exhibits and performances), and consumption. This chapter therefore seeks to interrogate this familiar and, in many ways, appealing heritage with a view to unsettling it and querying it in new ways. The remainder of the chapter consists of four parts. First, the heritage of colonial policing is situated with respect to conceptualizations of ‘difficult heritage’ and collective memory in Hong Kong. Next, the Hong Kong Police Force is contextualized as a force of colonization and an instrument of decolonization, specifically in relation to the transition from British to Chinese rule. Third, three study sites—Tai Kwun, 1881 Heritage, and PMQ—are briefly introduced with a historical-geographical discussion of their locations and spatial settings. Fourth, a brief analysis of three themes undergirding heritage discourses regarding the role of the police in colonial Hong Kong is presented: from crime deterrence to prisoner reform, symbols of ‘race’2 and ethnicity, and policing and the ‘rule of law’.

1. The Royal Hong Kong Police Force became the Hong Kong Police Force after the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the UK to China in 1997. It will be referred to throughout this chapter simply as the Hong Kong Police Force. 2. ‘Race’ appears in quotation marks in recognition of the general consensus that while racial categories or differences are socially constructed, they are a lived and often violent reality due to racialization and racism.

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Difficult Heritage Made Easy Sites of past war, torture, genocide, and internment are interwoven with stories nations tell about their pasts to cohere their futures (Macdonald 2010; Logan and Reeves 2008). Reflecting histories of territorial conflict and empire, processes of heritagization may play out across borders (Huang and Lee 2019a), even when they appear to be bound in place. While buildings used for policing in colonial contexts may not obviously qualify as examples of ‘difficult heritage’, they may nonetheless be associated with painful and shameful pasts. Included in Logan and Reeves’ (2008) classification of types of difficult heritage places are civil and political prisons. The Central Police Station Compound in Hong Kong includes a prison or gaol, along with a magistracy and other buildings, revealing the close connection between and overlapping functions of these institutions. Logan and Reeves (2008, 1) begin by noting that interest in difficult heritage, embodying memories of destruction and cruelty, has expanded in recent decades alongside the earlier emphasis on ‘great and beautiful’ heritage creations. Part of the motivation of the present chapter is to problematize this rather simplistic dichotomy between ‘difficult’ and ‘easy’ heritage, to show that many histories are ambiguous or awkward, contain difficult elements, and that the way they are interpreted and presented in the present can and should engage with this complexity in sometimes uncomfortable ways rather than foreclose it. Thus, following Macdonald (2010), difficult heritage is here understood as an evolving assemblage rather than a pre-existing analytical category. Hong Kong, like other places in East and Southeast Asia, has experienced a ‘memory boom’ in recent decades (Frost, Schumacher, and Vickers 2019; Schumacher 2015). It is important to recognize and query dominant memory constructs that underpin nation-building processes. How to live with and ‘know’ heritage that reflects difficult or ambiguous histories is a complex question in Hong Kong, a former colony that has, somewhat awkwardly, been learning to ‘belong’ to the nation to which it returned (Mathews, Ma, and Lui 2007). Many newly conserved heritage sites like Tai Kwun refer to Hong Kong’s specific experience of British rule. They reflect an official commitment to heritage and culture on the part of the state and allied actors—often prompted or inspired by civil society voices—but one that could be understood as largely symbolic or strategic. Scholars have suggested that the Hong Kong government, accompanied by developers, began to commit resources to heritage and culture initiatives for tourism development around the time of the 1997 handover (Barber 2014). Ironically, these efforts contributed to fostering a nostalgia for the colonial past at precisely the time that the postcolonial authorities were embarking on a programme of ‘national education’ (Chu 2007; Vickers 2011). Heritage sites that bear witness to the ‘Hong Kong story’ of growth and development include commonplace sites like public housing estates but also buildings related to colonial institutions such as the police. Chu’s interpretation of the evocation of collective memory through heritagization at early public housing

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estates emphasizes a disjuncture between the way the past is abstracted for the purposes of fostering nostalgic commemoration and how it may connect to the present in uncomfortable ways. Public housing estates provided much needed living space for immigrants from the Chinese mainland who would fuel Hong Kong’s industrial development in the postwar period. According to the official ‘Hong Kong story’ (as told, for example, in the permanent exhibition of the Hong Kong Museum of History),3 residents worked hard, saved money, and moved on to better lives. But this sanitized view overlooks the prevalence of inequality and poverty, exacerbated by the capitalist ideologies underpinning Hong Kong’s policies. Some of the city’s sites of policing heritage similarly sanitize and, in a sense, quarantine this complex history, severing or concealing its manifold connections to the present. Lee and Chan’s (2016) research on public remembrance of the events of June 4, 1989, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square provides insight into how people engage with past events which they may not have directly experienced, through processes of mnemonic socialization ranging from schooling and the media to the family. The resulting intergenerational transmission of collective memory, they argue, may involve processes of simplification and essentialization. In Chapter 5 of this volume, Desmond Hok-Man Sham analyses the public history of medical quarantine, a sometimes overlooked and often misrepresented spatial technology of colonialism in Singapore where St John’s Island was used as a quarantine facility, much like present-day facilities used to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Little about this history is discussed at the site today where the dominant popular historical narrative is one of racialization and colonial victimhood. Sham wonders how memories of the site might be productive of nation and community in ways other than through such stereotyped and oversimplified notions of victimhood. Similarly, the present chapter asks how heritage associated with a colonial institution in Hong Kong may be more complex than is typically acknowledged. Difficult heritage isn’t always obvious or valued, and the registers within which it is recognized may change with political and social influences (Macdonald 2010). Rather than attempting to document individual cases of heritage contestation or explain growing local interest in heritage in relation to identity and governance (Lu 2009; Chung 2011; Henderson 2008), the present chapter considers what several similar heritage sites reveal about shifting representations of the colonial past as public history. Specifically, it asks how processes of collective remembrance (and its corollary, forgetting) are played out at sites related to the history of colonial policing. The focus is mainly on three sites in central areas of Hong Kong selected because of their historical importance, significance in terms of tourism and leisure, complementary historical functions, and because they represent an evolution in conservation approaches. The Central Police Station Compound was a centre of imperial power as headquarters for Hong Kong’s land-based police. The Hollywood 3. Currently undergoing a major overhaul.

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Road Police Married Quarters, though much newer, were built in proximity to Central Police Station and reflect the postwar evolution of the Hong Kong Police Force as an instrument of political legitimacy and later an agent of decolonization. The Marine Police Headquarters complemented Central Police Station with its focus on activity on the harbour and surrounding waters. Analysing the treatment of policing in public history is especially important today as civil forces face unprecedented scrutiny, not only in Hong Kong, but elsewhere too. We may consider the extent to which the material fabric of our cities today symbolizes the authority and power invested in police by governments in the past. Police buildings in Hong Kong, especially in the early years of the colony, were designed to be authoritative and commanding presences in the landscape. Their conservation addresses this fact in part by emphasizing and enlarging openings (doors, gates, connections) and inviting the outside in. Contrasting the visibility and centrality of such heritage sites with public histories of marginalized and overlooked heritage places, like leper colonies that have been the focus of civil society movements in Taiwan and Malaysia (Wang 2020), encourages thinking through how power relations that characterized colonial rule and various institutions are embodied in monuments and anti-monuments. Data for this chapter were gathered through a variety of qualitative methods. Dominant historical narratives presented at the study sites were analysed alongside archival records, mainly Colonial Office papers held at Hong Kong’s Public Records Office (CO129), and postwar Hong Kong records of the Hong Kong government’s Prisons Department (HKRS125) and the Government Secretariat (HKRS16 and HKRS163). Fifteen interviews with individuals involved in the conservation of the sites, including conservation architects and consultants and retired police officers, provided insight into the historical details and conservation processes. Extensive site observations were also undertaken.

The Colonial Origins of Policing in Hong Kong Policing was integral to the exercise of colonial control and the consolidation of territory in the colony of Hong Kong during its phased expansion from the 1840s to the late 1890s. It remained important to both the maintenance of colonial rule and, conversely, decolonization until the handover. Following a chaotic beginning upon the founding of Hong Kong as a colony in 1841, a police force modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary was formed in 1844. Some scholars have pointed out the ways in which the military orientation of policing in Ireland by the British was different from that adopted in England where the notion of the citizen’s responsibility for upholding the law reflected Anglo-Saxon beliefs (Sinclair 2017, 4). In practice, models of policing in different British colonies, sharing in common the maintenance of rule by external powers over a local Indigenous population, involved mixing elements of the English emphasis on social stability and protection

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of propertied classes with the more coercive paramilitary system implemented in Ireland (Anderson and Killingray 1992). In Hong Kong the system involved personnel living in barracks who were commandeered as a territorial force, the use of arms, and the fortification of police stations. Ample space would be required to support policing of the streets, a court system to try those accused of breaking the law, and to imprison those convicted before the courts. The Central Police Station Compound would satisfy these needs. The waters surrounding Hong Kong were also of concern. Steamers plied routes between Guangzhou (Canton), Macau, and Hong Kong, offering space to passengers at cheap fares. Marine policing, as detailed further on, was established and expanded for similar reasons to land-based policing.4 Racial prejudice contributed to the idea that the growing transient male population posed a threat, for example by being prone to thievery, while the region more broadly was characterized by a sense of ‘lawlessness’ (Crisswell and Watson 1982; Yu and Liu 1994). In Tai Po, a hill was selected as the location of the first police station in the newly added New Territories in 1898. Like other locations selected for police stations, the high elevation and isolation of the site helped ensure its ‘good health’ and utility for surveillance purposes. This use of hilltops, however, came into direct conflict with the feng shui practices of villagers in Ping Shan, with long-lasting implications (Cheung 1999). The Tai Po station would also be the site from which the New Territories were administered. Unlike Hong Kong Island, which had a small population at the time of the establishment of the colony, the New Territories contained approximately eighty villages, each with a population of one hundred or more. Tai Po had been a market town for centuries and had numerous villages in close proximity. The establishment of the police station was marked by challenges from villagers, forcing colonial officials to flee to Hong Kong Island. They returned with additional force and the ensuing armed conflict became a six-day ‘war’ resulting in the deaths of dozens of Chinese residents (Hase 2008). Once a permanent police station was constructed, other infrastructure, such as a rail link and phone lines, soon followed. Both here, and on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon at earlier moments, policing infrastructure was a key ingredient in the making of colonial space. Historical studies emphasize the dysfunction and ineffectiveness of the Hong Kong Police Force in the first decades of its operation. Examining private policing in prewar Hong Kong, Sheilah Hamilton (2008, 141–43) has observed that the colonial government had to rely on private watchmen to guard its premises as a result of the inadequacy of the Hong Kong Police Force. In the 1860s, Chinese residents, dissatisfied with discriminatory policing, established the parallel District Watch Force (Miners 1990). The Hong Kong Police Force underwent reform at different 4. John Hennessy, Inspection of Police Forces, February 27, 1878, CO 129/181, Hong Kong Public Records Office, pp. 188–89.

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moments to strengthen its legitimacy and effectiveness. Broadly, the quasi-military orientation of the police evolved into a quasi-civil one, paralleling a broader evolution in colonial governance (Jones and Vagg 2017). The extent to which the paramilitary orientation of the police was maintained has been subject to some debate, with some arguing that it ended with anti-corruption reforms in the 1970s, at the time of the handover in 1997, or that it has continued to the present day (Deflem et al. 2008). Strong evidence supporting the last of these positions was on display in the police response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Looking back to an earlier episode, it could be argued that harsh tactics used to suppress anti-colonial riots in 1967 were not merely a response to a threat to the legitimacy of British rule but were in keeping with the institutional culture of the Hong Kong Police Force (Ho 2009). Although efforts were made in the early 1970s to ameliorate community relations by prosecuting police officers found to be engaged in bribery and corruption (leading to the establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, or ICAC), a civilian policing style was never fully implemented. Instead, Sinclair (2017, 185) suggests the Hong Kong Police Force continued to maintain and even strengthen its colonial practices in response to internal and external threats.

Questions after 1997 Under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration negotiated between Beijing and London in 1984, Hong Kong would be largely self-governing under the ‘one country, two systems’ configuration for a period of fifty years after 1997. The durability of this arrangement has become increasingly less certain in the post-handover period. Infrastructure projects including the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge and the Guangzhou–Shenzhen–Hong Kong Express Rail Link, growing cross-border mobility, stringent responses to political activism, and the sweeping National Security Law introduced in 2020 have led many to believe that the terms of the agreement have changed. The event known as the ‘fishball riot’ or ‘fishball revolution’ in Mong Kok in January 2016, coming less than two years after the Umbrella Protests of 2014 (during which the police had generally conducted themselves with restraint), was perhaps an indication of a shift in the ethos of local policing towards more commanding enforcement of public order. During Lunar New Year, unlicensed hawkers have long frequented areas of the city that attract many people drawn by the festive atmosphere. Under normal circumstances the number of such hawkers is small, but their presence balloons in the holiday period, in part due to more relaxed enforcement of hawker controls due to the smaller number of civil servants working. In 2016, however, the hawker enforcement officers cracked down on the presence of these small entrepreneurs. Young visitors to Mong Kok and others alerted through social media came to their defence and confrontations with police ensued. The police used

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force and tear gas to disperse protesters. This short episode foreshadowed the much more widespread unrest and the indiscriminate use of force by the police that would emerge in response to the Extradition Law Amendment Bill in 2019 (Chen and Barber 2020). Public discussion concerning the position of the police in Hong Kong society intensified in response to the ‘fishball riot’ and subsequent incidents. But it was precisely at this time that repurposed former police stations and police residential quarters were being opened up to the public as spaces of consumption, culture and creativity, and historical education. The relationship between the contemporary questioning of the role of the police and the heritagization of leftover colonial policing infrastructure requires unpacking.

Heritage Making in Spaces of Colonial Policing The intense interest in history and heritage in Hong Kong since the handover in 1997, albeit with earlier roots, has been made manifest in a variety of ways and has garnered extensive attention from scholars. Books, museum exhibits, television and radio programmes, and organizations and programmes speak to a collective fascination with local history (Chu 2007), as well as a growing number of historic buildings and spaces recognized for their heritage significance. The government’s policy and institutional framework for heritage was developed during this period, as part of a broader ‘cultural turn’ in governance, and a number of programmes and projects were initiated as a part of this. Cultural governance shaped by Hong Kong’s political economy, however, has proven incapable of meaningfully engaging with cultural politics (Chan and Lee 2017). Government initiatives for revitalizing publicly owned buildings include Conserving Central, a programme including eight sites in and around the city’s central business district, and the Revitalising Historic Buildings Through Partnership Scheme, which nominally responds to challenges to governance from civil society (Chung 2011). Buildings related to policing have been revitalized under both of these schemes. Tai Kwun and PMQ are part of Conserving Central, while 1881 Heritage, an earlier example, was conserved and redeveloped in a one-off deal with a property developer. Debates and concerns have surfaced, particularly around commercialization, the extent of redevelopment and new building (if any) permitted, how and whether to introduce uses that generate revenue to cover costs, and the involvement of members of the public in decision making. The history of the sites as spaces of colonial policing and in relation to the local meanings of policing and ‘law and order’ have not figured extensively in public discussions. The following sub-sections briefly recover some of this history as it relates to each of the three sites in question.

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Central Police Station Compound/Tai Kwun The former Central Police Station Compound is composed of a number of buildings and open spaces including Central Police Station, Victoria Gaol, Central Magistracy, the Barrack Block accommodation building, and a number of smaller buildings. The earliest date from the 1860s while the more recent were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s. Three of these structures were declared monuments under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance in 1995, hence receiving statutory protection from demolition. The reason for the proximity of the buildings in the compound may seem obvious—retired members of the Hong Kong Police Force interviewed for this project referred to ‘efficiency’ and ‘ease of operations’ in terms of security. The early Hong Kong Police Force was responsible for managing prisons, fire services, and other affairs. But more can be said about the importance of the compound in relation to the development of Hong Kong as a colony. Holdsworth and Munn (2020) chronicle the evolution of Hong Kong’s legal and penal system through the story of this space and the people connected to it, revealing that the construction and changes to the Central Police Station Compound over time reflect both the imperial framework created by the British authorities in London, as well as place-specific characteristics of Hong Kong. The location was on a hill above the water, providing surveillance capabilities. Surrounded by a fortified wall and guarded, the compound was constructed to withstand attack and potential social unrest. Along with other centres of colonial power, including Government House at Upper Albert Road, the ensemble created ‘the seat of British authority in Hong Kong’ (Jones and Vagg 2017, 131). The impetus to conserve the compound as a whole came with the growing emphasis on tourism and culture as a feature of economic restructuring beginning in the late 1990s. Central, as an international business district, was to be endowed with further attractions and functions to complement its service sector (Ku 2010). As early plans were announced, civil society groups concerned about the commercialization of the site formed a task force and lobbied for an alternative plan which would prioritize heritage values, open space, and cultural facilities rather than profit. They advocated following the guidelines of the Principles for the Conservation of Heritage Sites in China, a document developed on the basis of best practices in the Chinese context, in dialogue with various experts (Qian 2007). Agnes Ku (2010) has documented the capital-state-community conflict that subsequently unfolded. An expert assessment of the heritage value of the compound was presented in a Conservation Management Plan (CMP) developed by conservation architects Purcell Miller Tritton (2008). This document reviews the history of the site in its context, considers the significance of its elements at various registers, and establishes conservation principles to be followed. The plan refers to the site as the ‘representation of law and order’ (Purcell Miller Tritton 2008, 5). How the site

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would express this representation remained to be worked out after the adoption of the CMP. In a brief presented to the Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo) the adaptive reuse of the Central Police Station Compound as a centre for arts and culture was presented as a natural fit due to its location and the needs of artists (Development Bureau 2010). Its location in a neighbourhood ‘associated with the organic development of a wide range of arts activities, from the Fringe Club to the numerous galleries and shops along Hollywood Road’, made it ‘a natural hub for contemporary art’ (Development Bureau 2010, annex A). The suggestion that the development of the area surrounding the compound as an arts district has been ‘organic’, however, neglects how the area’s arts institutions fit into the ecology of Hong Kong’s art production scene. Art producers in fact mostly work far away, precariously housed in spaces which are both unaffordable and zoned for other purposes (Cartier 2008). The spaces in Central are mainly for the presentation and consumption of art, alongside other spaces of consumption (Barber 2018). The LegCo brief reveals that the focus and intent of the revitalization project was foremost the creation of a certain kind of space conducive to a variety of experiences, especially those of leisure and consumption. As for the treatment of the site’s history, interpretive materials would intentionally be spread throughout the compound to encourage exploration (conservation expert, interview with the author, May 26, 2021), rather than being housed in a single museum, as was originally proposed by some conservation advocates. Some spaces, including the cell blocks of A Hall in the Victoria Gaol, would be presented as authentically restored, rather than with new uses introduced. As a conservation project, the former compound, now Tai Kwun, is widely regarded as successful both locally and internationally, among experts and other commentators. According to a conservation expert who worked on the site (interview with the author, May 26, 2021), visitor numbers exceeded projections between its opening to the public in 2018 and the beginning of the protests in 2019 and the subsequent pandemic in 2020. In terms of expert recognition, it won the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Award of Excellence for Cultural Heritage Conservation in 2019. Tai Kwun is also viewed more favourably in the local media than other projects and considered by some to be an example of a positive achievement of civil society pressure towards the government (InMediaHK.net 2018).

The former Marine Police Headquarters/1881 Heritage The Hong Kong Marine Police Force, known as the Water Police Force before 1948, was established in 1846, two years after the creation of the Hong Kong Police Force. It was tasked with operations pertaining to illegal activities and threats in the waters surrounding Hong Kong, including piracy, smuggling, and illegal immigration. Operating out of a number of steam launches and with an expanding fleet of boats, the Marine Police were also responsible for search-and-rescue operations (performed

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on land by the fire brigade) and ensuring that seagoing vessels followed regulations. With expanding port functions, the government was mindful of the need for a compound to serve as the headquarters for the Marine Police Force. When expressing his opinion concerning the location of such a compound, Surveyor General John MacNeile Price stressed the need for the station to command an extensive view of the harbour for surveillance purposes.5 Kowloon, growing rapidly but lacking the same density of government infrastructure found on Hong Kong Island, was the chosen site and the Marine Police Headquarters building was constructed on the Tsim Sha Tsui peninsula waterfront in the early 1880s. The Marine Police Headquarters Compound was added to Hong Kong’s list of monuments with statutory protection in 1994. The main building is considered a fine example of subtropical Victorian architecture, incorporating renaissance features that create a light, airy environment to facilitate ventilation. The site also has a network of wartime tunnels constructed during the Japanese occupation, inaccessible to the public due to safety concerns since World War II. The Round House, separate from the main building, also has renaissance architectural features. The Kowloon Fire Station Compound (encompassing a main building and barracks block), which shares the same site, has a more utilitarian and less cohesive architectural style, marked by eclecticism including the incorporation of Chinese design features. The Marine Police Headquarters (MPH) was fully decommissioned in 1996,6 following years of change in the surrounding area, including the relocation of the Kowloon Railway Station (terminus of the Kowloon–Canton Railway) to Hung Hom, increasing tourism-focused development, and the construction of museums and cultural facilities along the waterfront. The fact that the building was no longer on the waterfront sealed its fate. The fire station buildings, in contrast, served various uses after the station closed in 1971, including as a post office facility, locker rooms for the Marine Police Force, and the site of an arts organization. A planning study of potential opportunities for the site as a whole was carried out in 2000. Based partly on recommendations from this document, the site was offered by government tender for conservation, restoration, and redevelopment in 2002. The tender specified that the site was to become a commercial facility focused on heritage tourism. The contract was awarded to CK Asset Holdings Limited, a subsidiary of the Cheung Kong Group, owned by Hong Kong’s richest person, Li Ka-shing. The result is a luxury, heritage-themed shopping mall and hotel which has earned Cheung Kong hundreds of millions of dollars in rental income and, not surprisingly, has been severely criticized. Character-defining elements were lost in the redevelopment process and the site is often cited as an example to be learned from. 5. J. M. Price, Observations on the Project for the New Water Police Barracks at Kowloon Point, November 18, 1881, CO129/196, National Archives, London. 6. Recognition as a heritage building came while the MPH was still in use.

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The former Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters/PMQ The third site discussed in this chapter is of much more recent vintage. The former Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters, originally destined to be sold for redevelopment, was transformed into PMQ, a mixed-use venue for art and design, in part as a result of research and pressure from community organizations (Barber 2018). Although dating from a much later period and having a different function, the Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters have a close relationship with the Central Police Station Compound. As Hong Kong’s population swelled with refugees from mainland China in the late 1940s and 1950s, a further-expanded police force was required. This was a period of accelerated localization of the force (Miners 1990) with expanded recruitment and training of Chinese residents of Hong Kong. However, the higher-ranking positions were still dominated by expatriates and local members were mainly destined to join the rank and file, with low pay, long hours, and many risks. Improving morale among local officers, many of whom lived in poor quality, overcrowded housing, became a government project guided by the belief that such living environments were not suitable for police.7 Officials cited the example of Singapore where substandard housing for police was a factor contributing to the outbreak and severity of riots in the 1960s.8 The location of the Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters on the site of the former Central School and in close proximity to the Central Police Station Compound was intentional. The site was owned by the government, and the location was convenient for the staff who would reside there while also providing a sense of security to family members of force personnel.9 Officers living there would also be able to respond quickly to emergencies in different parts of the city. In spite of its proximity to Central Police Station, it was a place not well-known to senior employees. When asked about the Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters, a retired expatriate officer (interview with the author, August 7, 2020) said that it was a place where rank and file officers lived, and that he hence had no reason to visit or know much about it during the time that he worked at Central Police Station. This illustrates the two-tiered organization of the force described by Ng (1999).

(Re)placing Difficult Memories Three challenging themes that are part of the dominant narrative of the evolution of the Hong Kong Police Force are treated in different ways at the study sites. The following discussion briefly reconsiders how these heritage landscapes evoke these 7. Arthur Maxwell, ‘The Five Year Plan: Married Quarters for Rank and File’, Housing of the Police Force, April 16, 1951, HKRS156-1-616, Hong Kong Public Records Office, Hong Kong. 8. Geoffrey Follows, ‘A Letter from the Financial Secretary to the Colonial Secretary’, Buildings—Housing for the Police Force, May 9, 1951, HKRS163-1-329, Hong Kong Public Records Office, Hong Kong. 9. Maxwell, ‘The Five Year Plan’, p. 2.

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histories to contribute to the story of Hong Kong and how these places might otherwise engage complex and difficult histories. Jones and Vagg (2017, 2) have argued that the orthodox history of police and criminal justice in Hong Kong is progressive, marked by a narrative of ‘ever-increasing integration, orderliness and stability’. It is this view, which is also supported by the dominant criminological accounts, that finds expression in narratives at the heritage sites. These themes are emplaced in interpretation materials and symbols that may be read in greater or lesser detail, interpreted in different ways including critically, or overlooked entirely.

From crime deterrence to prisoner reform The evolution from deterrence to reform in Hong Kong’s penal system is a central theme evoked by the Central Police Station Compound architecture and interpretive materials. This can be expanded upon by turning to archival materials. As argued by Huang and Lee (2019b), the heritage of punishment can be understood to reflect the intersection of colonialism and modernity. Victoria Gaol, now partially restored, was expanded in the late nineteenth century in a half-radial plan with blocks radiating out from a central watch tower. This design, inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, allowed surveillance from a central point. Additionally, ideas about rehabilitation and deterrence were reflected in aspects of the design that prevented prisoners from interacting. In the words of administrator of Hong Kong Sir William Henry Marsh, isolation would have ‘an excellent deterrent effect’ and foster introspection among inmates.10 A reformative direction was subsequently introduced. To some prison superintendents in the 1870s, prisoner labour was conceived simply as a means of contributing in a small way to the revenue of the Hong Kong government. The benefit to those doing the work was not considered. Perhaps for this reason minimal space was reserved for workshops dedicated to the training of prisoners. In Victoria Gaol, inmates who participated in an array of industrial work—ranging from tailoring, shoemaking, matmaking, chair- and basketmaking, and carpentry—had to carry out their duties either in narrow and constrained verandas, dark halls, or ordinary cells as a result of inadequate space in the mid-1880s.11 However, more rehabilitative considerations were taken into account in Hong Kong’s prison management from the mid-nineteenth century. To facilitate the reform aimed at equipping prisoners with a remunerative trade to pursue after the completion of their sentences, the prison authorities urged the Hong Kong government to provide more space in Victoria Gaol for setting up suitable industrial

10. William Marsh, ‘A Letter from William Marsh, Administrator of Hong Kong, to Earl Granville’, Report on Victoria Gaol for 1885, May 28, 1886, CO129/226, National Archives, London, p. 9. 11. Official Record of Proceedings, 1891.12.04, Hong Kong Legislative Council, 1891, Hansard Database, Hong Kong Legislative Council, Hong Kong; ‘Report of the Superintendent of Victoria Gaol for 1888’, Annual Report on Victoria Gaol, 1888, January 21, 1889, CO129/242, National Archives, London, p. 225.

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workshops.12 The transition from deterrence through isolation to reform of prisoners, representing the modernization of Hong Kong’s prison system, is treated in interpretive materials at Tai Kwun, and the experience of seeing the spaces (cells) where prisoners lived is a popular attraction.

Symbols of ‘race’ and ethnicity As an agent of colonization, the Hong Kong Police Force, like other parts of the colonial administration and society more broadly, operated on the basis of the racial hierarchies and segregation upon which colonialism depended. Part of the work of the earliest police after the creation of the colony was to enforce racist regulations intended to monitor and control the Chinese population, including requiring identity cards, night passes, and lanterns. From the 1840s to 1945, the administration dictated that most police officers must be recruited from overseas. In other British colonies, officers were recruited from within the colony but often from other regions (Gaylord and Traver 1995). This was not the method pursued in Hong Kong, and instead the force was strengthened with Sikh recruits from India. These men remained mostly at the lower ranks while the high-level positions were occupied by Europeans. Gaylord and Traver (1995) suggest that the outcome of these approaches was a lack of trust of the police as a colonial institution. After the Japanese occupation, localization was actively pursued; but still, by 1961, 60 per cent of the senior staff were expatriates, and recruitment of Europeans to the force ended only in 1994. The power relations forged through the organizational context of the police force proved durable, and racial hierarchies lived on in workplace identities (Leonard 2010). At the Central Police Station Compound, barracks were erected on the site of the old prison because of the need to create a drill ground. The drill ground was a space for practices related to the operation of the police force, including corporal punishment of prisoners in the early days, but it was also a symbolic or ceremonial space used for parades and medal presentations. Newspaper reports from the early twentieth century suggest that the drill grounds played an important role in ceremonies designed to foster consciousness of imperial unity (Daily Press 1921). Events would bring together members of the Hong Kong Police Force from different ethnicities. Even after the 1970s it was occasionally used for ceremonies, such as a British military retirement tradition known as ‘beating retreat’ which included the symbolic passage through and closure of a gate leading to the city (retired police inspector, interview with the author, August 27, 2020). While some have cautioned against investing too much in the symbolic qualities of landscape and buildings at the expense of embodied and lived experience (Lees 2001), ‘race’ and ethnicity can

12. ‘Official Record of Proceedings, 1891.12.04, Hong Kong Legislative Council’.

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be located among the symbolic meanings of this ceremonial space, which is visible and accessible as a public space in the Tai Kwun complex. The relationship between racial categories and the distribution of power in the early years of the colony are visible in photos on display in Tai Kwun. Members of the Hong Kong Police Force are separated into different racial groups. The descriptions of these photos do not explain this arrangement for contemporary visitors in much detail. An interactive display in the same room shows representative dishes of different styles of cuisine available in the staff canteen associated with the dominant ethnic groups among staff members. The three major ethnic groups wore differently coloured uniforms and hats until the 1930s at which point modern, standardized uniforms were introduced (with the proviso that Sikh members could continue to wear the turbans that were part of their traditional uniform). A bilingual interviewee of mixed European and Chinese heritage, who worked as an inspector at the Central Police Station Compound, recalled using mainly English when working with subordinates to retain an air of authority (retired senior member of the Hong Kong Police Force, interview with the author, August 24, 2020).

Policing and the ‘rule of law’ One of the most important events in the history of Hong Kong were the anticolonial riots of 1967. The Cultural Revolution was underway in mainland China and various communist-affiliated groups in Hong Kong considered this an ideal moment to seek to overthrow colonial rule. Details of the major events can be read elsewhere (Cheung 2009). The relevant point here is that although historians are in general agreement regarding the significance of the uprising, they differ in their interpretation of the response of the police. Lawrence Ho (2009) has outlined the way these interpretations map onto disparate political allegiances reflected in newspaper reporting. For some, the police used inappropriate levels of force on young, unarmed protesters. For others, the response was measured and proportional. The image of the police improved after this event, and the administration also took the opportunity to introduce greater levels of community-based policing, along with other forms of soft governance appropriate to late-colonial rule. Presenting an interpretation that differs from Ho’s in its focus on the law, Jones (2015) argues that the legal system was strengthened in the 1970s, in response to the threats posed by anti-colonial movements in the previous years, and again in the 1990s in the lead up to the handover. These moves were made without implementing democratic reforms but instead using the ‘rule of law’ to contribute to the continuing legitimacy of colonial governance. The ‘rule of law’ encompasses aspects of the legal system in Hong Kong, including common law, an independent judiciary, the presumption of innocence, and the principle of equality before the law. Its features also include the protection of freedom of expression and provisions for freedom of assembly. The ‘rule of law’ came to be a defining feature of Hong Kong

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identity (Sin 2006), even referred to as a local ‘ideology’ on the Hong Kong government website (HKSAR Government, n.d.). It has been suggested that aspects of the legal system do not account for the Chinese cultural context of Hong Kong (Man and Wai 1998), but the context has been shaped over many years in part by the legal system. The Hong Kong Police Force, especially since the 1970s, has worked within the systems shaped by the ‘rule of law’. These systems are now changing (Torode and Pomfret 2020). The ‘rule of law’ is central to the history of policing and law and order in Hong Kong and is part of the ambiguous heritage that may productively be unsettled at the sites explored in this chapter.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the growing collection of heritage buildings and sites tied to Hong Kong’s history of colonial policing and related institutions deserve more and different kinds of attention than they have been given to date. Collectively, they represent an important feature of the territory’s colonial past, testifying to the early exercise of force to secure the space of the colony, and its changes over time to maintain legitimacy. Historical narratives featured in displays at heritage sites related to colonial policing touch upon some of the points raised here, but they do so in the course of narrating an uplifting story of improvement intertwined with Hong Kong’s development into one of Asia’s model ‘tiger’ economies. An important omission is the fact that the paramilitary orientation of the police, designed in large part to enable repression of internal dissent, has persisted to present. This point is obscured in the shifting roles of the police in the late-colonial years as an institution that contributed to ensuring the continued legitimacy of colonial governance and its role in decolonization. The heritage of colonial policing should be understood as a kind of difficult heritage, perhaps more appropriately an ‘awkward’ heritage, particularly when specific problematic moments or currents in the history of the police and its work are highlighted. These include racist and violent modes of policing and punishment in the early years of the colony and corruption and misconduct in the years before the reforms of the 1970s. The argument could be made, however, that some of the most fraught and traumatic experiences are in Hong Kong’s postcolonial present rather than its past, particularly in the policing response to the protest movement of 2019 (Purbrick 2019), which could be understood to be an instance of the militarization of everyday life reverberating with experiences elsewhere in Asia (Uyangoya 2005). As a result of reforms aimed at image improvement and building greater legitimacy, from the 1970s to the mid-2010s the Hong Kong Police Force was generally trusted and admired. It is this institution that is reflected in the sites discussed in this chapter. These places collectively represent a current of colonial history that is more legible when they are considered together, as interrelated and integral parts

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of colonial rule. The stories told at these sites, though they acknowledge difficult and problematic moments, present a narrative of improvement culminating with the fortified space of Central Police Station Compound becoming accessible as a cultural heritage conservation landmark. Should other stories be told? The dots connecting these sites—surveillance and control, policing and governance, racialization and ethnic hierarchies, and the ‘rule of law’—should be understood as part of Hong Kong’s present as well as its past. The institutions here narrated as a historical legacy—as a ‘representation of law and order’ (Purcell Miller Tritton 2008)—are still operating, some behind fortified walls.

Acknowledgements This chapter draws on research supported by a General Research Fund (GRF) grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. I am grateful for the research assistance provided by Dr Peter Law Kwok Fai and Kelvin Wu Ka Wai. I thank the interviewees for sharing their time and perspectives. Earlier drafts benefited from suggestions from anonymous reviewers and the editors, especially Edward Vickers, and other contributors to this volume. I, the author, am solely responsible for the arguments and contents of the chapter.

References Archival sources Hansard Database. Hong Kong Legislative Council, Hong Kong. Hong Kong Record Series. Hong Kong Public Records Office, Hong Kong. Records of the Colonial Office, Commonwealth and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices, Empire Marketing Board, and Related Bodies. The National Archives, London, United Kingdom (digital records consulted at the Hong Kong Public Records Office, Hong Kong).

Other works Anderson, David M., and David Killingray. 1992. Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism, and the Police, 1917–65. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barber, Lachlan B. 2014. ‘(Re)making Heritage Policy in Hong Kong: A Relational Politics of Global Knowledge and Local Innovation’. Urban Studies 51 (6): 1179–95. https://doi. org/10.1177/0042098013495576. Barber, Lachlan B. 2018. ‘Capitalizing on Culture in Flagship Heritage Initiatives: Transforming Hong Kong’s Police Married Quarters into “PMQ”’. City, Culture and Society 21: Article ID 100275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2018.09.002. Cartier, Carolyn. 2008. ‘Culture and the City: Hong Kong, 1997–2007’. China Review 8 (1): 59–83.

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Chan, Yuk Wah, and Vivian P. Y. Lee. 2017. ‘Postcolonial Cultural Governance: A Study of Heritage Management in Post-1997 Hong Kong’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23 (3): 275–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2016.1269238. Chen, Hung-Ying, and Lachlan B. Barber. 2020. ‘CityPsyche—Hong Kong’. City 24 (1/2): 220–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2020.1739431. Cheung, Gary Ka-wai. 2009. Hong Kong’s Watershed: The 1967 Riots. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Cheung, Sidney C. H. 1999. ‘The Meanings of a Heritage Trail in Hong Kong’. Annals of Tourism Research 26 (3): 570–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(99)00006-7. Chu, Cecilia L. 2007. ‘Heritage of Disappearance? Shekkipmei and Collective Memory(s) in Post-handover Hong Kong’. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 18 (2): 43–55. Chung, Him. 2011. ‘Heritage Conservation and the Search for a New Governing Approach in Hong Kong’. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 29 (6): 975–89. https://doi.org/10.1068/c1041. Crisswell, Colin, and Mike Watson. 1982. The Royal Hong Kong Police, 1841–1945. Hong Kong: MacMillan. Daily Press (Hong Kong). 1921. ‘Presentation of Police Medals: Ceremony at the Central Police Station’. July 9. Deflem, Mathieu, Richard Featherstone, Yunqing Li, and Suzanne Sutphin. 2008. ‘Policing the Pearl: Historical Transformations of Law Enforcement in Hong Kong’. International Journal of Police Science & Management 10 (3): 349–56. https://doi.org/10.1350/ ijps.2008.10.3.90. Development Bureau. 2010. ‘Legislative Council Brief: Conservation and Revitalisation of the Central Police Station Compound (The Jockey Club’s Revised Design)’. File no.: DEVB(CR)(W) 1-150/76. https://www.heritage.gov.hk/en/doc/LegCoBrieffor CPS2010_10_11II.pdf. Frost, Mark R., Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers. 2019. ‘Locating Asia’s War Memory Boom: A New Temporal and Geopolitical Perspective’. In Remembering Asia’s World War Two, edited by Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, 1–24. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367111335-101. Gaylord, Mark S., and Harold Traver. 1995. ‘Colonial Policing and the Demise of British Rule in Hong Kong’. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 1 (23): 23–43. https://doi. org/10.1006/ijsl.1995.0002. Hamilton, Sheilah E. 2008. Watching over Hong Kong: Private Policing 1841–1941. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Hase, Patrick H. 2008. The Six-Day War of 1899: Hong Kong in the Age of Imperialism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Henderson, Joan. 2008. ‘Conserving Hong Kong’s Heritage: The Case of Queen’s Pier’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 14 (6): 540–54. HKSAR Government. n.d. ‘The Rule of Law’. Accessed June 17, 2021. https://www.info.gov. hk/info/sar5/elaw_1.htm. Ho, Lawrence K. K. 2009. ‘Policing the 1967 Riots in Hong Kong: Strategies, Rationales and Implications’. PhD dissertation, University of Hong Kong. https://repository.eduhk.hk/ en/publications/policing-the-1967-riots-in-british-colonial-hong-kong-3.

Lachlan B. Barber 101 Holdsworth, May, and Christopher Munn. 2020. Crime, Justice and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong: Central Police Station, Central Magistracy and Victoria Gaol. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Huang, Shu-Mei, and Hyun Kyung Lee. 2019a. ‘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. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1475410. Huang, Shu-Mei, and Hyun Kyung Lee. 2019b. Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia. London: Routledge. InMediaHK.net. 2018. ‘Zai Da Guan kanjian gongmin shehui de chengjiu’ 在大館看見公 民社會的成就 [See the achievement of civil society in Tai Kwun]. June 6. http://www. inmediahk.net/node/1057955. Jones, Carol. 2015. Lost in China? Law, Culture and Identity in Post-1997 Hong Kong. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Carol, and Jon Vagg. 2017. Criminal Justice in Hong Kong. Milton Park: Taylor and Francis. Ku, Agnes Shuk-mei. 2010. ‘Making Heritage in Hong Kong: A Case Study of the Central Police Station Compound’. The China Quarterly 202: 381–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0305741010000299. Lee, Francis L. F., and Joseph Man Chan. 2016. ‘Collective Memory Mobilization and Tiananmen Commemoration in Hong Kong’. Media, Culture & Society 38 (7): 997–1014. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716635864. Lees, L. 2001. ‘Towards a Critical Geography of Architecture: The Case of an Ersatz Colosseum’. Ecumene 8 (1): 51–86. Leonard, Pauline. 2010. ‘Work, Identity and Change? Post/Colonial Encounters in Hong Kong’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36 (8): 1247–63. https://doi. org/10.1080/13691831003687691. Logan, William, and Keir Reeves, eds. 2008. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’. London: Routledge. Lu, Tracey L. D. 2009. ‘Heritage Conservation in Post-colonial Hong Kong’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 15 (2): 258. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250902890969. Macdonald, Sharon. 2010. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Man, S. W., & Wai, C. Y. 1998. ‘Whose Rule of Law? Rethinking Post-colonial Legal Culture in Hong Kong’. Social & Legal Studies 7 (2): 147–169. Mathews, Gordon, Eric Ma, and Tai-lok Lui. 2007. Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation. London: Routledge. Miners, Norman. 1990. ‘The Localization of the Hong Kong Police Force, 1842–1947’. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 18 (3): 296–315. https://doi. org/10.1080/03086539008582820. Muzaini, Hamzah, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2016. Contested Memoryscapes: The Politics of Second World War Commemoration in Singapore. London: Routledge. Ng, Chi Wa. 1999. ‘Xianggang jingcha zhidu de jianli he zaoqi fazhan’ 香港警察制度的建立 和早期發展 [Establishment and early development of the police system in Hong Kong]. PhD dissertation, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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Purbrick, Martin. 2019. ‘A Report of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests’. Asian Affairs 50 (4): 465–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/03068374.2019.1672397. Purcell Miller Tritton. 2008. ‘The Old Central Police Station and Victoria Prison Hong Kong: Conservation Management Plan’. The Jockey Club, Hong Kong. https://www.heritage. gov.hk/en/online/press2008/cmp.pdf. Qian, Fengqi. 2007. ‘China’s Burra Charter: The Formation and Implementation of the China Principles’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 13 (3): 255–64. https://doi. org/10.1080/13527250701228213. Schumacher, Daniel. 2015. ‘Asia’s “Boom” of Difficult Memories: Remembering World War Two across East and Southeast Asia’. History Compass 13 (11): 560–77. https://doi. org/10.1111/hic3.12282. Sin, Wai Man. 2006. ‘Law, Autonomy and Politics: The Changing Socio-political Roles of Law in Postcolonial Hong Kong’. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 34 (1): 64–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsl.2005.11.001. Sinclair, Georgina. 2017. At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame, 1945–80. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Torode, G., and J. Pomfret. 2020. ‘Hong Kong Judges Battle Beijing over Rule of Law as Pandemic Chills Protests’. Reuters, April 14. Tsang, Steve. 2001. Judicial Independence and the Rule of Law in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Uyangoya, Jayadeva. 2005. Militarising State, Society and Culture in Asia: Critical Perspectives. Hong Kong: Arena Books. Vickers, Edward. 2011. ‘Learning to Love the Motherland: “National Education” in Postretrocession Hong Kong’. In Designing History in East Asian Textbooks, edited by Gotelind Müller, 85–116. London and New York: Routledge. Wang, Shu-Yi. 2020. ‘A Social Approach to Preserve Difficult Heritage under Neoliberalism—a Leprosy Settlement in Taiwan and Beyond’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 26 (5): 454–68. Yu Shengwu, and Liu Cunkuan. 1994. Shijiu shiji de Xianggang 十九世紀的香港 [Nineteenthcentury Hong Kong]. Hong Kong: Qilin shuye.

5 Beyond a Racialized Representation of Colonial Quarantine Recollecting the Many Pasts of St John’s Island, Singapore Desmond Hok-Man Sham

The COVID-19 pandemic has revived the interest in quarantine, a worldwideadopted measure to tackle the disease. ‘Quarantine’ refers to the spatial segregation and restriction of the movement of those people (suspected to be) exposed to infection (Cetron et al. 2004; Peckham 2016; Yip 2012). In the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed practices similar to maritime quarantine in the past, including ‘keeping the disease at bay’ and using offshore islands as institutionalized quarantine facilities. In Singapore, an outdoor education camp on Pulau Ubin, an island off the northeast of Singapore Island, was chosen to be a quarantine facility (Cheow 2020). Some returnees were housed in luxury hotels on Sentosa, a military base turned resort island (Mokhtar and Mookerjee 2020). Historically, the colonial government designated another island south of Singapore Island, St John’s Island (Pulau Sekijang Bendera in Malay), as the territory’s principal quarantine station. Similar to many of Singapore’s offshore islands, St John’s Island1 is often branded as a destination for ecotourism and as a ‘rustic’ ‘getaway’ (Fang 2016; Zaccheus and Ee 2013; Ng 2018). Historically, together with Pulau Jerejak off Penang, St John’s Island was designated as a quarantine station, or lazaretto, mainly for migrants to as well as returning Hajj pilgrims of the Straits Settlements and wider British Malaya. St John’s quarantine station was once coined the largest quarantine station in the British Empire. Later, the colonial and postcolonial governments also used the island to intern prisoners of war (POWs) and political detainees, for drug rehabilitation, and to accommodate Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. The quarantine station was formally closed in 1976. Some of the quarantine station’s foundations and structures are still there today, and some dormitories are currently used as holiday chalets. This chapter repositions St John’s Island in the context of the commemoration of quarantine. In some settler colonies, former quarantine stations such as New 1. St John’s Island is now connected via a causeway with Lazarus Island (Pulau Sekijang Pelepah) and Seringat Island (Pulau Renget).

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Figure 5.1:  Location of St John’s Island and Lazarus Island in Singapore. They are now connected by reclamation. Historically, they were separate islands, but the colonial government understood them as one island group. In the colonial records, St John’s Island and Lazarus Island were also called West and East St John’s Island, or St John’s Island No. 2 and No. 1, respectively. Map by the author, adapted from ©MapTiler ©Open Street Map.

York’s Ellis Island, San Francisco’s Angel Island, and Sydney’s North Head have been (partially) preserved and transformed from ‘places of pain and shame’ into museums, sites of commemoration, or destinations of (‘dark’) tourism (Logan and Reeves 2009; Desforges and Maddern 2004; Bashford et al. 2016; Bashford 2016). Yet, in Singapore, the history and experience of quarantine is virtually non-existent in the official narrative of the country and in mainstream public memory, except a few mentions on the island’s trail markings and on some guided tours. Unlike how the Singaporean postcolonial state appropriates war memories and related sites for nation building, the memory of quarantine is generally untouched in Singapore’s official narrative, even though there are remaining quarantine structures (Blackburn and Hack 2012). That being said, an underlying memory of being quarantined on St John’s Island (known as Kî-chiun-san 棋樟山/淇漳山 [pinyin: Qizhangshan] by Hokkien speakers), or colloquially kìm Ku-sū 禁龜嶼 (pinyin: jin Guiyu; ‘detained at Tortoise Island’),2 is found in both oral history conducted in the 1980s and popular 2. Kusu Island (Pulau Kusu) is another island near St John’s Island. Quarantine did not take place on Kusu per se. Yet the process of quarantine on St John’s was (and somehow has still been) colloquially referred to as kìm Ku-sū (Yu 2019).

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history written in Chinese and published in recent years. Though recorded in different periods of time, these oral and popular histories in Chinese often racialize the quarantine experience as a shared experience of ‘Chinese’ suffering (Ho 2013; Loo 2018; Yu 2019), with little mention of other ethnic groups’ experiences. It was true that many ethnic Chinese migrants were subjected to poor quarantine experiences. It was also true that the Chinese consuls general and local Chinese elites in Singapore played important roles in improving the quarantine situation (Wong 2009). However, I argue that quarantine in Singapore was not a racialized practice per se that singled out the Chinese; class rather than race often determined the different treatments in the quarantine process. This class-based differentiation in treatment, unfortunately, is still found in twenty-first-century disease control. To represent quarantine on St John’s Island as a racialized suffering and humiliation is, at best, unfair, and overlooks other ethnic groups’ experiences locally. Even worse, transnationally, China easily manipulates the racialized representation to reinforce their nationalistic narrative of humiliation and victimhood (Edwards 2019). To rescue the memory of the island from racialized politics (see the editors’ introduction to this volume), it is necessary to better understand St John’s Island’s operational logic by looking beyond quarantine. Through archival materials, old newspapers, and other available materials, this chapter recollects the many pasts of St John’s Island.3 I will illustrate how both the colonial and postcolonial states have been using the island to incarcerate various ‘problem populations’, similar to prisons and internment camps (see also Chapters 4 and 6 in this volume).

Positioning Singapore’s Quarantine Island in the Global Context of Commemoration By the late nineteenth century, many places had adopted various quarantine measures for goods and/or people. Yet quarantine was not adopted in a universal manner (Bashford 2016; Yip 2012). The modern history of quarantine often intertwined with the history of migration. As a place of segregation, confinement, and containment, quarantine facilities were set up to regulate the movements of people and goods, particularly the former. Arriving populations were regarded as potential ‘problem populations’ and were ‘subjected to and subjectified by treatments that spanned correction, care and control’ when in isolation (Strange and Bashford 2003, 1). For the quarantined, islands were often chosen as sites ‘for reception into a society as well as target[s] for expulsion from it’ (Tunbridge 2005, 22) because of their locations (Mountz 2011); in the case of St John’s Island, it was chosen for its distance from Singapore Island and the town proper. Samantha Muller et al. (2009, 782) suggest that quarantine practices ‘are a key way in which borders are constructed as 3. Stories of former residents of St John’s and nearby islands have been recorded and documented in the Island Nation project, accessible at: http://islandnation.sg/.

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exclusionary markers’, in defining inclusion and exclusion of a community, which often reinforces particular sets of perception and prejudices. In settler societies such as Australia and the US, quarantine allowed the imagination of a ‘clean’ and ‘white’ settlement. It policed a border determining internal and external, clean and dirty, often conflated with race. Accordingly, the ‘clean’ and ‘white’ settlers/settlement needed to be protected from the ‘contamination’ of infectious diseases brought by ‘inferior’ and ‘filthy’ Asiatic races (Bashford 1998, Dolmage 2011; Markel and Stern 2002; Muller et al. 2009). Due to their similarity in terms of isolation, quarantine sites are easily transformed from sites of preventive measures to facilities of punishment (prisons, penal colonies) or ‘benevolent’ protective asylum (sanatoria, leprosy colonies), or the other way around (Bashford 2016; Gibby 2018; Pro 2017; Strange and Bashford 2003). In the contemporary commemoration of quarantine and heritagization of decommissioned quarantine facilities, exemplified by settler societies such as Australia and the US, histories and experiences of migration and detention are common themes. The sites where immigrants were once detained and even buried become the places to commemorate the history of migration and rectify past injustice, be it through either official commemoration or bottom-up appropriation of the preserved sites (Bashford et al. 2016; Desforges and Maddern 2004). Scholars have also recognized that the preserved sites of former quarantine facilities allow visitors to discover untold stories and diversify the narratives of the sites themselves, for instance, through inscriptions on the remaining structures or grave markers or oral history collections (Bashford and Hobbins 2015). The modern nation-state of Singapore has been accustomed to reappropriating difficult memories and heritage. The Fall of Singapore and the Japanese occupation have been pressed into a narrative of self-reliance and mobilized for nation building. War-related sites are also heritagized to ensure remembrance (Blackburn and Hack 2012; Muzaini and Yeoh 2016). Similarly, the ‘racial riots’ in 1964 are transmitted by the state as a reminder of the importance of racial harmony and tolerance in Singapore (Cheng 2001). Yet despite Singapore’s immigration history, quarantine experiences do not enter into the official narrative. There is a lack of official commemoration of quarantine or any attempts to heritagize the former quarantine station on St John’s Island. Yet while the St John’s Island quarantine station is not heritagized, neither does the government deliberately leave the site in a state of disrepair to demonstrate a ‘triumph’ over a ‘tragic chapter’ in its history (Leineweber 2009, 234). Unlike how other former quarantine stations have been mobilized to create a platform of inter-minority solidarity (Bashford et al. 2016) or to arouse empathy towards refugees and asylum seekers in the present (Nethery 2009), the underlying racialized representation of the St John’s Island quarantine station reinforces a sense of Chinese victimhood and exceptionalism rather than creating possibilities for interracial solidarity and the rectification of past injustice. The racialized representation of quarantine in Singapore does not contribute much

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to understanding if there is a continuation of colonial prejudice in the postcolonial era either.

St John’s Island as a Quarantine Station As colonial port cities, the Straits Settlements’ prosperity relied on the contributions and migratory flows of different ethnic groups (Sham 2017). The colonial government in the Straits Settlements/Singapore was not interested in building a white settler colony but was much concerned about the possibility of epidemic in the region. They were afraid that migrants and travellers circulating in the region and returning Hajj pilgrims might carry and spread contagious diseases. Thus, potentially infected ships and passengers were quarantined on offshore islands of Singapore (St John’s Island) and Penang (Pulau Jerejak). The St John’s Island quarantine station was opened in 1874, one year after a severe cholera outbreak in Singapore, allegedly imported from Bangkok (Ng 2018; Straits Observer 1875). The colonial authority chose St John’s Island and nearby Lazarus Island as the sites for quarantine stations because they were isolated and ‘outside the limit of the port’ (Straits Times Overland Journal 1879). It was also claimed that the two islands could respectively house the sick and those under observation. In the long run, St John’s Island would eventually be fully developed into a quarantine island with multiple camps and other facilities to screen and accommodate more than 6,000 people. It was used to quarantine those suspected of being infected or exposed to contagious diseases including smallpox, cholera, chickenpox, measles, leprosy, and beriberi (which was believed to be contagious at the time). Meanwhile, Lazarus Island would be the burial ground for those who did not survive the quarantine (Nanyang Siang Pau 1924; Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1914; Straits Times 1935). Yet, back in 1874, the lazaretto on St John’s Island was barely completed in time to accommodate passengers from an infected ship that had departed from the Chinese port city of Swatow (Shantou) (Ng 2018). Despite early scepticism of the quarantine station’s usefulness, in the long run, many incoming ships were inspected or quarantined there before entering the port of Singapore (Straits Observer 1875; Straits Times Overland Journal 1879). The quarantine station on St John’s Island screened immigrants mainly from China and India and Muslim pilgrims returning from Hajj. European, Siamese, and Japanese passengers were also quarantined there. Occasionally, people from Singapore Island were sent to quarantine there. Initially, different wards were set up for Europeans and non-Europeans, but in the long run, class, as indicated by the class of an individual’s travel, rather than race, determined treatment in the quarantine (Ng 2018). This class-based differentiation of treatment was also rooted in the Straits Settlements’ legislation. The legal definition of a ‘Chinese immigrant’ did not refer to any person migrated from China. Instead, the determination was class based, explicitly referring to someone brought from China and ‘not being the first

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or second class passengers’ (Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1894). Passengers travelling on first- and second-class tickets, even though they travelled from an infected port, were often subjected to faster screening. Many of them were free to leave after inspection and vaccination (Nanyang Siang Pau 1935a, 1935b). If quarantine was required, they were often housed in better accommodation: a room with a bed, desk, lamp, seat, and wardrobe (Nanyang Siang Pau 1938a, 1939b). One record of a luxurious quarantine arrangement comes from January 1939. The Siamese king was quarantined on St John’s Island as he was travelling on a ship infected with smallpox. Unlike ordinary folks, he stayed at the medical officer’s official residence and could use the swimming pool (Nanyang Siang Pau 1939a). In contrast, passengers on the lower decks were often subjected to long quarantines, taking anywhere from a few days up to even a week, usually in crowded and humiliating conditions. New arrivals were collectively sprayed with disinfectants. Newspaper articles from the 1920s and 1930s and later oral history accounts from both the Chinese and Indian communities in Singapore recorded the poor conditions of migrants and their quarantine experiences: poorly constructed jetties, a lack of lampposts along the path between the jetty and the quarantine station, limited water supply, and overcrowded dormitories and disinfection facilities, among other hygiene issues (Nanyang Siang Pau 1927).4 As many Chinese immigrants (sinkeh) were in steerage and subjected to extended quarantine processes, both local Chinese elites and Chinese consuls general inspected the quarantine facilities. They also petitioned to the colonial government to improve the conditions. The conditions were gradually improved by 1940 (Nanyang Siang Pau 1940a). Unfortunately, in the immediate post–World War II years, complaints of the quarantine station’s poor conditions, made by the quarantined communities and foreign consulates, re-emerged (Nanyang Siang Pau 1947a, 1947b, 1947c).5 Likewise, in his oral history account of the ‘bad impression’ he had of St John’s Island quarantine station, Saravana Perumal, a Tamil migrant from Sri Lanka, narrated that he and his fellow passengers were ‘locked up’ in a crowded camp, infested with centipedes and cockroaches.6 Despite all the criticisms, the St John’s Island and Pulau Jerejak quarantine stations contributed significantly to preventing major infectious disease from reaching British Malaya. The colonial government even regarded the St John’s Island quarantine station with pride, as a success of the colony and the empire. A model and annotated photographs of the quarantine station, then the largest in the British 4. ‘Interviews of Saravana Perumal’, interview by Daniel Chew, 1983, accession number 000335, Communities of Singapore (Part 2), Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore; ‘Interview with Teo Choon Hong’, interview by Tan Beng Luan, 1983, accession number 000328, Japanese Occupation of Singapore, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. 5. When St John’s Island was once again used as a quarantine station after World War II, there were other residents living on the island. 6. ‘Interviews of Saravana Perumal’, p. 95.

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Empire, were displayed at the Malay Pavilion of the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 after a short period of display locally at a department store in Singapore (Nanyang Siang Pau 1924; Straits Times 1924). The Lancet noted how the quarantine station helped ‘to localize epidemics likely to be spread by sea-borne traffic’ (‘British Empire Exhibition’ 1924, 1022). Due to the quarantine system, British Malaya was generally free from serious outbreaks of disease even as the rest of East Asia was facing serious epidemics (Nanyang Siang Pau 1936). In contrast to Chineselanguage newspapers’ repeating of stories of the questionable conditions and deaths in Singapore quarantine facilities, English-language newspapers published articles praising the quarantine station. Besides the achievements in public health, these articles also implied that the ‘immigrants’ in the quarantine were well treated. The author of a 1926 article praised the quarantine system in Singapore as ‘an achievement of which every resident in this country [Britain] may be proud’, and as one which kept the colony ‘practically free from’ smallpox and cholera. The author even suggested that the colony’s port health authority could ‘teach our American friends some lessons in the matters of good manners, consideration of strangers, and simple commonsense’, implying that the people in the quarantine were well treated (Singapore Free Press 1926). Similarly, another article published in the Straits Times in 1935 praised the St John’s Island quarantine station as ‘a miniature world of beauty’. The author even suggested that a medical officer had referred to St John’s Island as ‘Singapore’s natural health resort’ (Our Shipping Correspondent 1935). In addition to its scientific success, the colonialist description of the island’s ‘beauty’ generally referred to its natural environment, which was quite often far from the experience of the poorer quarantined immigrants. The author attempted to create an image of a humane, benevolent, and pleasant quarantine for the better off, English-speaking communities, who were unlikely to have travelled in steerage and thus were unlikely to have been quarantined in the island’s crowded dormitories. By understanding the differentiation in treatment in the St John’s Island quarantine station in terms of class, it is also possible to locate how disease control in twenty-first-century Singapore has been uncannily similar to the colonial practice. During the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, low-wage foreign workers were subjected to a mandatory fourteen-day quarantine in an isolated location, while foreign professionals (‘expats’) were asked to undertake a ten-day voluntary (home) quarantine (Teo, Yeoh, and Ong 2005). During the COVID-19 pandemic, while Singaporean returnees and returning professional ‘expats’ from overseas were quarantined in luxury resort hotels (Mokhtar and Mookerjee 2020), low-wage migrant workers were confined in overcrowded dormitories, which became hotbeds for infection (Sim and Kok 2020). Such examples indicate that while there is no longer a maritime quarantine station on St John’s Island, colonial class-based quarantine practices have found a way to sustain themselves in Singapore today.

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The Racialization of Victimhood and Humiliation As discussed earlier, class played a significant role in determining how people were treated in the St John’s Island quarantine station. As many immigrants from China arrived at Singapore on lower decks or in steerage, many were subjected to extended quarantines and housed in dormitories with poor conditions. It is understandable that the quarantined people would feel that the system was oppressive, inhumane, and humiliating, and show distrust in the medical reasons for their containment. It is also undeniable that there were some cases conflating quarantine regulation and race-based immigration restriction, due to a connection ‘between Chinese movement and disease anxieties’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bashford 2020), both within and beyond British Malaya. The Prevention of Disease Ordinance, 1894, for instance, enacted a class-based restriction on arrivals of the ‘Chinese immigrants’ or ‘Chinese coolies’ brought by ‘Chinese immigrant ships’ from China, French Indochina, Borneo, and Siam, due to the outbreak of infectious disease in Hong Kong and some parts of China (Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1894; Straits Times 1894). According to the report of the Chinese ambassador to London, after the legislation, Chinese males and females arriving at Singapore were ordered to strip themselves for medical examination during the quarantine.7 After the petition of the Chinese consul general in Singapore, the colonial government ordered that passengers arriving from epidemic ports would no longer be required to do so (Kwa and Kua 2019; Wong 2009). In this specific case, in which class-specific ‘Chinese immigrants’ were specifically targeted, it was reasonable for Chinese intellectuals and officials to criticize the colonial humiliation towards the Chinese. Yet, it is also important to point out that in Hong Kong and ports in China there were frequent outbreaks of infectious disease (Ee 1961). Thus, it is ill-defined as to whether such measures were predominantly targeting the diseases or the race when the geographies of outbreaks aligned as such, especially because Singapore had a comparatively laissez-faire policy towards Chinese immigration under normal circumstances (Bashford 2020; Ee 1961). Yet, the general quarantine requirements that Chinese travellers faced, especially those in steerage, would further reinforce the impression of racialized victimhood and humiliation. However, there were circumstances in which poor treatment and particularly outrageous cases of mistreatment in the quarantine station were weaponized to make a case for racialized victimhood, suffering, and humiliation, and even for different versions of Chinese nationalism, both then and now, from within Singapore and from China. In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were a few accusations of Chinese women suffering sexual harassment and assault at the quarantine station. In one case, a Sikh police officer was convicted and sentenced for assaulting a Chinese girl, but later his conviction was quashed on appeal. In the judicial process, 7. It is unclear about the origin of this legal power. I am unable to find any description from the said ordinance.

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an unnamed Chinese newspaper was accused of searching out sensations and outrages related to the quarantine station (Lat Pau 1906a, 1906b; Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1906; Straits Times 1906). After the incident, some people manipulated the situation to call for Chinese towkays to dismiss and not to employ Sikh (‘Bengali’) employees. Even the General Chinese Trade Affairs Association (GCTAA, now the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry) made a statement that their guards were Turkish, not ‘Bengali’ (Lat Pau 1906c). Local Chinese elites attempted to pacify the situation. The GCTAA distanced itself from the call for a boycott and declared that they would fully support the colonial government’s measures to improve the quarantine station’s conditions (Lat Pau 1906d). Members of the Singapore Chinese Advisory Board published a statement to oppose the racial boycott and condemned the rumours. They also reminded the Chinese population that, as foreigners, they should not discriminate against British subjects (Indians) on British land. Meanwhile, they also negotiated with the colonial authority to inspect the quarantine station and proposed to employ Chinese-speaking staff on the island for better communication with Chinese immigrants (Song 1923). Throughout the history of St John’s Island quarantine station, local Chinese elites performed the role of pacifying Chinese discontent so as to avoid any escalation of incidents and rumours related to the quarantine station, especially when this appeared to be headed in the direction of racial victimhood or nationalism. Besides inspecting the general condition of the quarantine station, they also clarified misunderstandings and rumours related to the quarantine station. For instance, Ching Kee Sun 曾紀辰 clarified that the inspection measures for leprosy were not Chinese exclusive but performed across different races. He also clarified that the rumour that male doctors were examining naked female passengers was inaccurate (Nanyang Siang Pau 1938b, 1940c). As Wong Sin Kiong (2009) remarks, there were political tensions among the colonial government, local Chinese elites, and Chinese consuls general. The colonial government would rather let local Chinese elites, their conventional collaborators (Law 2009), rather than the Chinese consul general be credited among the Chinese population. In other words, by actively pacifying the situation, local Chinese elites were preventing other political forces from politicizing the poor conditions in the quarantine station. Although the Singapore state-sponsored oral history project (the Oral History Centre at the National Archives of Singapore) did not commission the collection of the memory of quarantine per se, memories and stories of St John’s Island quarantine station were touched upon by interviewees across different races in their oral history accounts commissioned for other projects. Some interviewees were either those who had been quarantined on St John’s Island or personnel related to the quarantine station. In oral history accounts by both migrants from China and India, interviewees recounted that poor migrants travelling on bunks and decks were subjected to extended quarantines on St John’s Island but not better off, first- and

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second-class passengers.8 While many of them described their experiences and emotional feelings,9 some took a racialized approach. Speaking in Hokkien, prominent businessman Ng Aik Huan recalled ‘the history of blood and tears of Chinese immigration to Singapore’. Ng criticized the humiliating quarantine process as an abuse to the Chinese: In name, it was about hygiene. In reality, it was to abuse us Chinese nationals [Tiong-kok-lâng / Zhongguo ren 中國人]. In particular, to abuse the ethnic Chinese [Hôa-jîn / huaren 華人]. Because China did not have diplomacy or politics. . . . Overseas Chinese [Hôa-kiâu  /  huaqiao 華僑] were like orphans living under another’s roof, without parents to whom to complain.10

A more obvious narrative of racialized suffering and humiliation can be found in popular history writings. In these writings, authors often imply or create an impression that quarantine on St John’s Island was a ‘Chinese’ experience, with little mention that other races were also quarantined there and underwent similar sufferings (e.g., Ho 2013; Lee 2017; Leung 1987; Loo 2018; Yu 2019). They often neglect that quarantine measures also took place in Chinese ports before embarkation (Chung 2014). The circulation of popular history of a racialized quarantine experience ignores the experiences of other races in the quarantine station, which might not have been any better than those of the Chinese, as narrated in the oral history accounts by migrants from India. The racialized representation of quarantine, perhaps unsurprisingly, also comes from the contemporary Chinese state. The People’s Republic of China is no stranger to ‘victimhood nationalism’, i.e., building a strong sense of national solidarity through the position of victimhood, which often turns into a competition over which nation has suffered most (Lim 2010, 2011). War memories have been enshrined into a narrative of national humiliation and manipulated to justify the party-state’s nationalistic agenda (Wang 2008). Recently, China has further attempted to exploit past injustices faced by ethnic Chinese outside China for its own benefit (Edwards 2019; Shih 2011). In short, China is more than willing to transnationally weaponize Southeast Asian Chinese ‘victimhood’ to justify its own victimhood nationalism.

8. ‘Interview with Jaswant Singh Gill (Lieutenant-Colonel) (Retired)’, interview by Jason Lim, 2001, accession number 002532, The Public Service, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore; ‘Interview with Maria Ng Boon Kheng’, interview by Ang Siew Ghim, 1985, accession number 000525, Women through the Years: Economic & Family Lives, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. 9. See, for example: ‘Interview with Ng Lee Kar’, interview by Choo Beng Hiang, 1982, accession number 000165, Chinese Dialect Groups, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore; ‘Interview with Heng Siew Hiok’, interview by Ang Siew Ghim, 1984, accession Number 000442, Chinese Dialect Groups, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore; ‘Interview with Jaswant Singh Gill’; ‘Interviews of Saravana Perumal’. 10. ‘Interview with Ng Aik Huan’, interview by Tan Ban Huat and Tan Beng Luan, 1981, accession number 000035, Japanese Occupation of Singapore, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, pp. 3–4. Author’s translation.

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The St John’s Island quarantine station is mentioned in South of the Ocean (Xia Nanyang 下南洋), a documentary series on Chinese migration to Southeast Asia (the ‘Nanyang’) broadcast on state-controlled China Central Television (CCTV). The quarantine station is presented as part of the hardship and suffering of ethnic Chinese who migrated to Southeast Asia (Zhou and Zhu 2013). In episode 3, blending photos of the St John’s Island quarantine station’s remaining structures with animated illustrations, the narrator describes the disinfection process in detail, emphasising disinfection, sickness, and death: ‘They were driven to a shed, and showered with sulphur water. Whoever had a fever would be brought away. Cholera and malaria patients were cramped in a prison-like room. On a daily basis, they brought in new patients and brought out the death.’ After two interviews on the quarantine and vaccination experiences, the narrator continues, ‘Quarantine on St John’s Island was not medical welfare as we understand today. The result is a crude judgment of permission or rejection to enter. Those who survived would receive a landing permit, but this is not the end. This is the beginning of new suffering.’11 The documentary creates an impression for the audience, many of them in China, that quarantine was an exclusively Chinese experience. It also exaggerates the horror and death. Overall, the narrative is that the story of Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia was full of pain, humiliation, and horror, of which the suffering in the quarantine was merely one aspect. Through the documentary series, the racialized connection of Southeast Asian Chinese and modern China is emphasized. The trauma and suffering of Southeast Asian Chinese are understood in racialized terms. This racialized notion of common Chinese suffering reinforces China’s claim on victimhood nationalism and diminishes spaces for local nuance to be heard (Edwards 2019). When ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia racialize difficult memories of pain and shame, contemporary China takes it as a further example of the suffering and humiliation of ‘our nation’ and ‘our people’, which further fuels China’s narrative of victimhood nationalism. The localness of Southeast Asia becomes merely a backdrop.

St John’s Island as a Site of Isolation and Screening Rather than singling out the quarantine station and Chinese immigrants, bringing in the other compatible pasts of St John’s Island helps us to better understand its operational logic. Developing from Strange and Bashford (2003) and Tunbridge (2005), I argue that St John’s Island was a site of isolation where ‘problem populations’ were confined and ‘subjected to and subjectified by treatment that spanned correction, care and control’ (Strange and Bashford 2003, 1) so as to determine inclusion or exclusion. If the memory of St John’s Island is considered difficult, it 11. Zhou Bing 周兵 and Zhu Jie 祝捷, dirs. Xia Nanyang 下南洋 [South of the ocean] (television series), 2013, episode 3. Quotations are based on the author’s own transcription of the broadcast.

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is probably not only the poor condition of the quarantine but also that the island was a site to isolate and screen various kinds of ‘problem populations’ to determine whether they would be included or excluded. St John’s Island has also been used as a POW camp, a prison for political detainees, a drug rehabilitation centre, and a refugee camp over a period spanning colonial Singapore and its independence as a nation-state. The case of St John’s Island is complicated by the fact that there were other residents living side by side with these facilities from time to time. In other words, it gradually transformed from an isolation site per se to a site for a more specific, confined form of isolation. After the outbreak of World War II and before the Japanese occupation, German, Italian, Russian, and, later, Japanese civilians were transferred to internment on St John’s Island, either behind the quarantine station or at some of the barracks established for quarantine purpose (Nanyang Siang Pau 1939c, 1940b; Ng 2018). By interning civilian POWs side by side with people exposed to infectious disease, the British colonial government effectively regarded both as ‘problem populations’ that could be confined and isolated side by side, even though the POWs were not exposed to infectious disease. The difference was that people exposed to disease would be released when they were no longer regarded as disease carriers, while the enemies would only be ‘corrected’ after the war was over. After Japan occupied Singapore, the civilian POWs were released. Ironically, compatible with the Chinese racialized representation of suffering in the quarantine, the Japanese propaganda also weaponized the ‘inhumane’ ‘horror’ stories of POWs’ internment on St John’s Island as ‘evidence’ of the enemy’s cruelty. Syonan shimbun, a Japanese propaganda newspaper, published reports of Japanese civilians interned by the British which stated that the Japanese civilian internees on St John’s Island were given maggot-filled and ‘half-rotten salted fish’ that was ‘barely sufficient to sustain life’ (Kaite 1942). After World War II, despite a noticeable number of local residents on St John’s Island, the quarantine station continued to operate. Some parts were transformed for prison use. After the British colonial government declared an ‘Emergency’ in Malaya and Singapore in 1948, many anti-colonists, radicals, leftists, and those accused of being ‘communists’ were imprisoned there as political prisoners (Aljunied 2012; Singapore Free Press 1948). Parts of the quarantine station were converted into a prison stationed with armed guards (Straits Times 1948). St John’s Island’s equivalent in Penang, Pulau Jerejak, also underwent a similar transformation. Many detainees on St John’s Island were transferred from other prisons on Singapore Island. Detainees were also transferred between places in British Malaya (Aljunied 2012; Gibby 2018). One can argue that in viewing St John’s Island as a place to exile dissidents, the colonial government was treating St John’s Island as the British once had Singapore where British India exiled their convicts, or Australia where Britain banished their undesired subjects (Pieris 2009; Tunbridge 2005). The detainees on St John’s Island during the ‘Emergency’ included left-wing students,

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trade unionists, and journalists. Some became important figures in the later ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) (Aljunied 2012).12 During Operation Coldstore in 1963, many arrestees were also detained on St John’s Island (Straits Times 1963). Imprisonment and detention on islands were not uncommon in the region at that time. Pulau Jerejak was transformed into a high-security prison after 1969 (Gibby 2018). A failed experiment of transforming an offshore island, Pulau Senang, into a penal settlement took place in the late 1950s and 1960s (Josey 2020). As an island of detention for ‘problem populations’, political dissidents or ‘communists’ were separated from the major population and confined in isolation for screening. They would face either a further expulsion or ‘treatments’ and ‘corrections’ before they would once again be allowed back into society. Another prison-like use of St John’s Island, yet once again with a medical turn, was as an opium treatment centre (and later general drug rehabilitation centre) which opened in the 1950s (Leong, Poh, and Gandevia 1970). The centre was a facility of both imprisonment and treatment. After receiving primary treatment in prison hospitals on Singapore Island, internees were transferred to St John’s Island for further treatment and rehabilitation. St John’s Island was chosen in particular because it was a ‘quiet and restful’ place isolated from Singapore Island, ‘away from it all’ (Straits Times 1953). Through confinement on an offshore island, the centre not only aimed at weaning the internees off their addictions but also training them with skills for their future reintegration into society. They were assigned and instructed in trades and encouraged to participate in various recreational activities. Through the ‘rehabilitation and re-education’ scheme, medical doctors hoped that internees would learn how to deal with their problems and reintegrate into society without drugs (Glatt and Koon 1961; Perumal 1983). In short, the ‘problem population’ was confined and isolated so that medical treatment and rehabilitation could take place. The expectation here was that they would once again be integrated into society, although the effectiveness remained a question (Perumal 1983; Reutens and Wang 1976). In the 1970s, another wave of migrants was screened on St John’s Island. This time, Singapore had little intention of integrating them after their isolation there. Following the final stage of the Second Indochina War, refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fled to other Southeast Asian countries acting as a ‘first asylum’. Between May and October 1975, St John’s Island was used to temporarily accommodate the Vietnamese refugees.13 For the Singaporean government, the country was small and had limited capacity to receive refugees. Thus, Singapore capped the 12. ‘Interview with Chengara Veetil Devan Nair’, interview by Audrey Lee-Koh Mei Chen and Tan Kay Chee, 1981, accession number 000049, Political History of Singapore, 1945–1965, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore; ‘Interview with Sidney Woodhull’, interview by How Seng Lim, 1985, accession number 000572, Political History of Singapore, 1945–1965, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. 13. In 1978, Singapore opened another Vietnamese refugee camp in a former naval base in Sembawang in northern Singapore (Yuen 1990).

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number of refugees that they would temporarily accommodate while asylum was sought for them in other countries (Frost 1980; New York Times 1978; Yuen 1990). In the late 1990s, a similar plan took place on St John’s Island (by then an island mainly for recreational use) in anticipation of potential refugees from Indonesia after the turmoil in 1998. The Singaporean government planned to house the potential refugees in the houses on St John’s Island and constructed a row of new toilets. Although the exodus of Indonesians did not happen, the newly constructed toilets remained as a marker that St John’s Island was once again chosen as the site to screen another wave of potential ‘problem populations’. That said, many holidaying island-hoppers do not know why these structures were built.

Conclusion Due to the decline of seaborne mass immigration and the improving hygiene conditions of ships, there were calls for reviewing the necessity of quarantine in the early 1970s (Nanyang Siang Pau 1971). Amid the increasing popularity of offshore islands as getaway destinations for Singaporeans living on Singapore Island, the government planned to develop St John’s Island and nearby islands for tourism and recreational use (Sin Chew Jit Poh 1975, 1976; Straits Times 1976a, 1976b). The quarantine station and other detention facilities on St John’s Island were eventually closed in 1976, while the villagers of St John’s, Lazarus, and Seringat islands were relocated to Singapore Island between 1976 and 1977. Even though St John’s Island and the nearby islands were not developed as a resort as the 1970s and 1980s plans had proposed, the now connected islands are still a popular destination for weekend getaways and yacht parties. They are also the location for a marine laboratory. Nevertheless, the history of the islands is disconnected from their current use, apart from texts on a few information boards and the ongoing use of some remaining structures of the former quarantine station for recreational camping. As illustrated in this chapter, unlike some settler societies, Singapore does not incorporate its quarantine history into its official nation-building narrative, and former quarantine sites have not been heritagized into sites of commemoration. While acknowledging the quarantine station’s contribution to disease control, there was certainly injustice in the colonial quarantine system in Singapore. The classbased differentiation of treatment in the colonial quarantine station on St John’s Island was definitely an injustice that needs to be addressed, especially when, unfortunately, there are uncanny similarities found in the twenty-first-century disease control in Singapore. Yet the racialization of class-based injustice as a form of suffering and humiliation particular to ethnic Chinese, as represented in the undercurrents of popular history, is unproductive. At the local level, it ignores the similarly poor situations faced by other ethnic groups and does not help to rectify past wrongdoings. At the transnational level, it provides room for the Chinese state’s narrative of victimhood nationalism, which turns Singapore and Southeast Asia

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into merely a backdrop and the ethnic Chinese living there into a pawn of China’s political interests. By bringing in other isolation and detention uses beyond quarantine, I visualize the colonial logic of confining ‘problem populations’ to determine the inclusion and exclusion. The many pasts of the St John’s Island actually have a regional context and regional comparisons. Recent development plans for Pulau Jerejak, Penang’s counterpart to St John’s Island, triggered a preservation movement which uncovered the island’s multiple layers of untold pasts from the colonial to the postcolonial eras, as was the case for St John’s Island (Gibby 2018; Por 2017). Meanwhile, the oral history accounts and other historical materials related to the many pasts of St John’s Island are available and some of the structures still remain on the island. Thus, it is possible and desirable for future reflections on the St John’s Island stories to go beyond a racialized representation. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, a more critical understanding of these stories can be very relevant for people looking to better understand quarantine, migration, and the politics of isolation and confinement.

Acknowledgements The research is supported by a Heritage Research Grant (HRG), National Heritage Board in Singapore (Project Title: ‘Mapping the Southern Islands’ Heritage Landscapes of Singapore: St John’s Island, Lazarus Island and Seringat Island’, PI: Hamzah Muzaini, HRG-016), and the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan. The chapter is developed from the HRG collaboration with Hamzah Muzaini, Creighton Connolly, Sonia Lam-Knott, and Rita Padawangi. I would like to thank them for their support and insightful discussions. I am also grateful for Grace Chong’s assistance in data collection, and Edward Boyle, Shu-mei Huang, and the anonymous reviewers’ comments on the chapter’s earlier drafts.

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Loo Say-chong 呂世聰. 2018. ‘Jinguiyu: yige shanggan de jianyi daicheng’ 禁龜嶼：一個傷 感的檢疫代稱 [Kìm Ku-sū: A sorrowful name of quarantine]. Lianhe Zaobao 聯合早報, November 29. Markel, Howard, and Alexandra Minna Stern. 2002. ‘The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society’. The Milbank Quarterly 80 (4): 757–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.00030. Mokhtar, Faris, and Ishika Mookerjee. 2020. ‘In Singapore, Quarantine Comes with Sea View, Room Service’. Bloomberg, March 28. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2020-03-28/in-singapore-quarantine-comes-with-a-sea-view-and-roomservice. Mountz, Alison. 2011. ‘The Enforcement Archipelago: Detention, Haunting, and Asylum on Islands’. Political Geography 30 (3): 118–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.01.005. Muller, Samantha, Emma R. Power, Sandra Suchet-Pearson, Sarah Wright, and Kate Lloyd. 2009. ‘“Quarantine matters!”: Quotidian Relationships Around Quarantine in Australia’s Northern Borderlands’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 41 (4): 780–95. https://doi.org/10.1068/a40196. Muzaini, Hamzah, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2016. Contested Memoryscapes: The Politics of Second World War Commemoration in Singapore. London: Routledge. Nanyang Siang Pau 南洋商報. 1924. ‘Xinjiapo guzhi chuanzhi jianyisuo zhi moxing yu kanzhe qing congsu xingwu jiaobi shizhi’ 新加坡孤峙船隻檢疫所之模型欲看者請從速 幸勿交臂失之 [Check out the model of Singapore’s quarantine soon before it’s too late]. February 27. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1927. ‘Guanyu Qizhangshan fangyisuo gailiang daiyu zhi laiwang wenjian ji gailiang yijianshu’ 關於棋樟山防疫所改良待遇之來往文件暨改良意見書 [Petition to improve St John’s Island quarantine station]. April 24. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1935a. ‘Zuijin yiyue songfu Qizhangshan zhi huaren dake jing da yiwan ren fengpinglun dacang ke qianyu qianri bei song fu gai shan’ 最近一月送赴棋樟山之 華人搭客竟達一萬人豐平輪大艙客千餘前日被送赴該山 [Nearly 10,000 Chinese passengers were quarantined on St John’s Island last month. 1,000 passengers were sent to St John’s Island two days ago]. April 19. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1935b. ‘Anshun: Jinma: liang lun dacang ke jun songfu Qizhangshan yin liang lun faxian you tianhua dacang ke zonggong erqian babai yishi san ren’ 安 順：金馬：兩輪大艙客均送赴棋樟山因兩輪發現有天花大艙客總共二千八百一十三 人 [2,813 passengers from two ships are quarantined on St John’s Island due to smallpox

outbreak]. June 8. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1936. ‘Yuandong ge di junyou yizheng fasheng Malaiya duneng xingmian’ 遠東各地均有疫症發生馬來亞獨能倖免 [Infectious diseases break out throughout Far East except Malaya]. April 14. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1938a. ‘Zeng Jichen Lin Wentian Xie Rongxi deng canguan Qizhangshan jianyisuo shang xingqi juliu gaishan tongbao da siqian ren Ceng jun deng ceng tichu ying gaishan zhichu shudian’ 曾紀辰林文田謝榮西等參觀棋樟山檢疫所上星期居留 該山同胞達四千人曾君等曾提出應改善之處數點 [Ching Kee Sun and his companions recommended to improve St John’s Island quarantine station after their inspection—4,000 compatriots were quarantined there last week]. March 7.

Desmond Hok-Man Sham 121 Nanyang Siang Pau. 1938b. ‘Zeng Jichen dui xinke deng’an shou luoti jianyan shi zaizuo xiangxi zhi jieshi’ 曾紀辰對新客登岸受裸體檢驗事再作詳細之解釋 [Ching Kee Sun clarifies the inspection procedure]. July 23. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1939a. ‘Xianluo youhuang di Xing zhide zanju Qizhangshan yin tonglun yi chengke huan tianhuazheng buneng poli zhun bi deng’an’ 暹羅幼皇抵星只得暫居棋 樟山因同輪一乘客患天花症不能破例准彼登岸 [Siamese king is to be accommodated on St John’s Island due to a fellow passenger infected with smallpox]. January 16. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1939b. ‘Gao zonglingshi Zeng Jichen Lin Jindian deng zuo shicha Qizhangshan jiliusuo huanjing youmei shebei meinian zai gaijin zhong jiliusuo zhong ren dui shicha zhe biaoshi mi shao you lie’ 高總領事曾紀辰林金殿等昨視察棋樟山羈 留所環境優美設備每年在改進中羈留所中人對視察者表示米少油劣 [St John’s Island quarantine station inspection: scenic environment, improving facilities. People complain about poor quantity and quality of food]. June 21. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1939c. ‘Qizhangshan yi Deren dieshang song zhongyang yiyuan zhenzhi’ 棋樟山一德人跌傷送中央醫院診治 [A German fell on St John’s Island and was sent to hospital]. November 3. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1940a. ‘Nanlai lüke shiwei weitu zhi Qizhangshan gexiang shebei gaigeshuduo’ 南來旅客視爲畏途之‘棋樟山’各項設備改革殊多 [Many facilities on St John’s Island have been improved]. May 27. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1940b. ‘Diqiao zai juliusuo shenghuo po shushi qinyou jiashu mei zhou ke tanfang yi ci’ 敵僑在拘留所生活頗舒適親友家屬每週可探訪一次 [Enemy civilians have comfortable lives in detention camps. Their families and friends can visit them once a week]. September 9. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1940c. ‘Zeng Jichen yu jizhe cheng Qizhangshan funü luoti jianyan buque’ 曾紀辰語記者稱棋樟山婦女裸體檢驗不確 [Ching Kee Sun tells reporter that the naked inspection on St John’s Island is a rumour]. December 26. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1947a. ‘Qizhangshan jianyisuo shebei guoyu jianlou shoujianzhe chujing canku’ 棋樟山檢疫所設備過於簡陋受檢者處境慘苦 [St John’s Island quarantine station is of poor condition and people suffer]. July 10. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1947b. ‘Shi penglai shengdi shi qiaoke jinqu xianqi Qizhangshan tiemu’ 是蓬萊勝地是僑客禁區掀啟棋樟山鐵幕 [Unveiling the iron curtain of St John’s Island: Scenic site or restricted area?]. August 7. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1947c. ‘Wu zonglingshi shicha Qizhangshan hou jiang xiang dangju tichu gaishan’ 伍總領事視察棋樟山後將向當局提出改善 [General-Consulate Wu inspects St John’s Island and proposes improvement advice]. August 8. Nanyang Siang Pau. 1971. ‘Huaren lüyun xiehui yaoqiu fei Qizhangshan jianyi cuoshi weisheng bu biaoshi jiang yuyi jiantao’ 華人旅運協會要求廢棋樟山檢疫措施衛生部表 示將予以檢討 [Tourism Trade Association proposes to abolish St John’s Island quarantine station. Health Ministry agrees to review]. February 27. Nethery, Amy. 2009. ‘“A Modern-Day Concentration Camp”: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres’. In Does History Matter? Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand, edited by Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan, 65–80. Canberra: ANU E Press. New York Times. 1978. ‘Singapore, Already Crowded, Further Tightens Stringent Policy Restricting Refugees from Indochina’. November 12.

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6 The Prison Gate as Leftist Heritage? Political Indifference and the Pursuit of ‘Healthy Nationalism’ in Japan Tomoko Ako

Japan’s war remembrance has been stimulated in part by the restructuring of the regional and global political economy since the end of the Cold War. As Asia has gained growing global prominence, Japan’s war memories, such as those relating to Hiroshima and Okinawa, have increasingly circulated transnationally, invoked in the cause of preventing a nuclear conflict or opposing indiscriminate attacks on citizens around the world (Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama 2001). Commemorative activities have undergone a process of ‘heritagization’, becoming increasingly dependent on material objects and built environments, as the number of war survivors has decreased year by year (Frost and Vickers 2021). The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of war-related museums in the form of ‘peace’ museums and memorials collecting and exhibiting items from the wartime period (Smith 2002). Local communities and non-governmental groups became more active in preserving memories of their specific experiences, creating more spaces for vernacular memories, often in tension with official histories (Senso Iseki Hozon Zenkoku Netto Waku, 2004).1 The 1990s represented a high point for openness and public reflection on the wartime past in Japan, as the end of the Cold War and the bursting of the ‘Bubble Economy’ challenged the authority of the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and many embraced the hope of lasting reconciliation with a democratizing South Korea and with China. However, since the late 1990s and early 2000s, the fragmentation of the Japanese left, growing nationalism in South Korea and China, and a nationalist backlash from rightists within a resurgent LDP have created a context far less propitious for the commemoration of ‘difficult heritage’. Meanwhile, 1. Activists, scholars, and citizens organized the Japanese Network to Protect War-Related Sites (Senso Iseki Hozon Zenkoku Netto Waku) in 1997. The network has arranged a variety of activities to record memories of war in modern Japanese history, preserve war ruins as historical sites and cultural assets, and promote communication and consultation between groups and individuals who contribute to the realization of peace. See more in Senso Iseki Hozon Zenkoku Netto Waku (n.d.).

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the Japanese public, which in the 1990s harboured largely favourable views of their Chinese and Korean neighbours, has significantly soured on the cause of reconciliation. Fear of a rising China, and resentment against Koreans and Chinese portrayed in the Japanese media as possessed by inveterate, irrational anti-Japanese prejudice, has, in its turn, fuelled nationalist resentment against Korea and China among many Japanese, and stronger resistance to calls for reconciliation or reflection on Japan’s role in an increasingly remote conflict. This context is crucial for understanding the story I tell in this chapter. The public memory-making process in contemporary Japan has been characterized by struggles and compromises to preserve or restore local built heritage. Those seeking to preserve built heritage of any sort in Japan often face a daunting task, and this is especially so in cases where political and commercial vested interests are ranged against preservation, and where the building in question holds little appeal for local elites. War-related heritage is the object of particular sensitivity, but various sites have been preserved (at least partially) for varying reasons. Sites of Japanese wartime victimhood, most notably relating to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have been sanctified in the postwar public consciousness. However, even in these instances, preservation of built remains has been partial and selective. While the iconic ‘Genbaku Dome’ in Hiroshima survived to be inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the 1990s (despite the desire of many local elites in the postwar years to demolish it), the remains of Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral, which stood at the epicentre of the bombing there, were dismantled in 1958 and a new cathedral erected in their place. As Ran Zwigenberg and Tomoe Otsuki have shown, the contrasting fates of the atomic ruins in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were determined by the complex interaction of Cold War diplomacy, national politics, and conflicting local interests in the context of concerted efforts to reinvent postwar Japan as a beacon of pacifism and exemplar of the peaceful deployment of advanced technology (Zwigenberg 2015; Otsuki 2015). Enshrining pacifism at the heart of a reconfigured postwar national identity was strongly tied to commemoration of Japanese victimhood, epitomized by the atomic bombings. At the same time, both Japan’s political leaders and American officials were keen that the focus of any commemoration be war as a generalized evil, with the public discouraged from reflecting on questions of responsibility— Japanese or American—for civilian suffering. In the interests of postwar ‘stability’ and the repositioning of Japan and America as Cold War allies, considerations of perpetratorhood in relation to wartime loss and destruction were effectively suppressed (see also Chapter 10 in this volume). Some relics of the infrastructure of the militarized wartime regime have nonetheless survived. Jung-Sun Han argues that conserving the Ichigayadai Building in Tokyo (the wartime headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army) and the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex in Nagano engages a politics of shame related to memories of suffering caused by the Japanese state in the

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recent past (Han 2012).2 However, precisely because of their ‘shameful’ associations, engagement at these sites with the more difficult aspects of Japan’s wartime past has often been profoundly ambivalent. The Matsushiro Complex, only ever partially open to visitors, was viewed as an embarrassment and left off tourist maps when Nagano was preparing to host the 1998 Winter Olympics. More recently, the role of Korean forced labour in constructing the complex has been a focus of controversy, with Japanese nationalists pressing for erasure of references to this. For its part, the Ichigayadai Building has, since the early 2000s, regained its military role, serving as the headquarters of Japan’s Defense Agency. Together with its connection to the postwar Tokyo War Crimes Trial and its role as the location of the ritual suicide in 1970 of the famous novelist Yukio Mishima, this gives the site a powerful if complex significance for contemporary ultra-nationalists. Still more significance is attached by such elements to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, the focal point during the war of the imperial cult of State Shinto, and today the site of controversial rites commemorating Japan’s war dead (including convicted war criminals). This chapter deals with efforts to preserve a much less well-known example of built heritage connected to the wartime past: the main gate of the Nakano Prison (formerly called the Toyotama Prison). This is generally viewed as a manifestation of negative or shameful heritage and, as we shall see, is regarded with suspicion or hostility by many locals as a ‘leftist’ building. The majority of residents living near this site in Nakano, a suburban area in the vicinity of central Tokyo, belong to the comfortable middle class and generally endorse the status quo; many are instinctively averse to any hint of political controversy. Many political prisoners were held in the Nakano Prison after the Security Act was enacted in 1925, effectively marking an end to the relative openness of the period known as ‘Taisho Democracy’. That is why the gate, the sole trace of the original buildings following the dismantling of the prison in 1983, is commonly regarded as a ‘leftist’ building. On the other hand, a number of architects and local activists have issued strong calls for the gate to be preserved as a ‘Gate of Peace’. Taking an ethnographic approach as a participant-observer, I conducted my research not only as an academic but also as a local resident and a parent of a pupil attending the elementary school scheduled to move to the site where the gate is located, and here I explore in more depth why local resistance to the preservation of the gate as a cultural property has been so strong, and the widespread indifference to this site.

A Wall May Be Built at the ‘Gate of Peace’ In January 2018, I first learned that a prison gate remains at the site to which my son’s public elementary school was due to be relocated. This structure is the main 2. The Matsushiro Complex refers to the underground shelters and tunnels built by foreign forced labour in preparation for moving the Imperial General Headquarters of Ichigaya to inner Japan.

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gate of the old Nakano Prison built in 1915. Before and during the war, the prison held many political and ideological criminals, including the proletarian literary writer Takiji Kobayashi, Marxist economist Hajime Kawakami, the anarchist Sakae Osugi, and the Buddhist teacher and activist Josei Toda. The philosopher Kiyoshi Miki died in the prison on September 26, 1945, just after the end of the war, due to worsening scabies he had contracted during his incarceration. It is said that the GHQ (General Headquarters) of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers abolished the Security Act immediately following Miki’s unusually tragic death. GHQ subsequently requisitioned the site and used it as a US Army prison during the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952). It then returned to use as a conventional prison, until its closure in 1983, in the context of growing pressure from local residents for relocation of what was increasingly seen as a blight on this gentrifying neighbourhood (Shakai Undoshi Teki ni Kiroku Suru Kai, 1986). The site of Nakano Prison was subsequently reconfigured as a ‘Peace Forest Park’ and the location of a correctional training centre, with only the main gate of the old prison remaining at the corner of the site. The gate is constructed of brick and is said to be a masterpiece of modernist architecture from the Taisho period (1912–1926); it is the only extant building designed by Keiji Goto, an architect dubbed a ‘young genius’ by his contemporaries. As a result, when the prison was closed, there were demands that the gate at least should be preserved due to its architectural importance. When a decision was taken several years ago to move the correctional training centre to Akishima city, the Peace Forest Elementary School (PFES), attended by my son, was scheduled for relocation to this site in order to cope with a growth in student numbers due to recent real estate development in the neighbourhood. However, the relocation of the correctional facility was postponed because rare birds were found at the planned new site in Akishima, and the construction of new buildings for the elementary school was suspended. Due to the rapid increase of students, the playground of the elementary school had become too small, and there were insufficient classrooms. The parents’ and teachers’ association (PTA) of the elementary school formed a special committee and pressed the Nakano Ward authorities to start construction of the new school buildings as soon as possible. However, in the process of negotiation the existence of the ‘prison gate’ was hardly discussed, and it seemed that many assumed it would be demolished. Since 2018, I have been working hard to help to coordinate a campaign to preserve the prison gate. Confronting loud opposition, I have attempted to highlight this structure’s value as a cultural property and as a resource for teaching young people about local and national history. The prison gate was indeed originally slated for preservation. However, the design of the new school buildings eventually presented by Nakano Ward, while retaining the gate, would leave it entirely concealed behind the four-storey school building, making it impossible for elementary school children and citizens to see

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it on a daily basis. Architects and citizens working to preserve the gate urged the authorities to withdraw the proposal. Those who want to preserve and utilize the gate have long called it the ‘Gate of Peace’ in recognition of the suffering related to war and political repression to which it has stood witness. I am currently a member of the citizens group ‘Club for Thinking about the Gate of Peace’ (CGP, Heiwa no Mon wo Kangaeru Kai 平和の 門を考える会), organized by architects and citizens living in the Nakano area. The chairperson of the CGP, Masaru Maeno, an emeritus professor at Tokyo University of the Arts, is the person who led the movement to conserve the Tokyo Station building and the Ueno Sogakudo Concert Hall.

The Absence of Children’s Voices in Designing New Elementary School Buildings On February 1, 2019, Naoto Sakai, the mayor of Tokyo’s Nakano Ward, declared at a press conference that the ward planned to acquire the land of the correctional training centre from the Ministry of Finance and use it as the new site for the PFES. Regarding the preservation of the gate, he said that Nakano Ward would make a comprehensive judgement based on opinions gathered from the Board of Education, parents, the Nakano Ward Assembly, as well as assessments of its cultural value and of cost implications. The ward government made it clear that it expected the gate would be formally designated as a cultural property of Nakano and Tokyo. Following the decision of the ward, members of the CGP had a lively discussion about how to use the main gate at the new elementary school site. According to Professor Seizo Uchida of Kanagawa University, another member of the CGP, the architecture of the Gate of Peace had been influenced by the Amsterdam School in the Netherlands. The Amsterdam School uses distorted curves and handmade design that emphasize human emotions and personality in contrast to geometric modernist design that uses sharp lines. The Gate of Peace has the appearance of a pretty house in a picture book (see Figure 6.1). At first glance, few would imagine it had been a prison gate. In Japan, during the Meiji era, Western-style prisons were constructed with the declared aim of treating prisoners in a more humanitarian manner, while Japanese features were added to their architectural design (Botsman 2005); Huang and Lee (2019) have shown that the urge to portray Japanese carceral practice as ‘humane’, ‘enlightened’, and ‘modern’ also extended to colonies such as Taiwan and Korea. Within Japan itself, the most famous of these modern prisons are the so-called ‘Five Prisons of the Meiji Period’ at Chiba, Nagasaki, Kanazawa, Kagoshima, and Nara. The architect Keijiro Yamashita studied in Europe and subsequently participated in the design of most of these prisons. The Nara Juvenile Prison, in use until 2017,

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Figure 6.1:  The main gate of Nakano Prison. Photo by author, 2016.

became an important cultural property of the country and is scheduled for renovation as a hotel (Ryo 2016).3 Keiji Goto, who designed Nakano Prison, graduated from the University of Tokyo and became an engineering officer for the Ministry of Justice. While following Yamashita’s design, Goto adopted a new construction method using reinforced concrete and closely supervised all aspects of the construction process. Goto died at the age of thirty-five, earning him the sobriquet of the ‘young genius architect’. According to Nakano Ward’s original plan, the gate was to be open to the public only on school holidays following completion of the new PFES. Members of CGP argued that if an open space were set up around the gate, it would be possible to use it for organizing a regular market selling special products made by local artists and farmers. We would be able to plan various events, such as mini concerts, comedy performances, seminars, and symposiums about local history. We have seen interesting events staged at numerous old brick buildings of this type in Japan and elsewhere. Adequate lighting at night could illuminate the beautiful brick design of the gate. In this way, the value of the building as a community resource could be fully realized. However, the design proposal distributed at the public hearings on January 31 and February 11, 2019, showed a four-storey school building enclosing the entire gate (see Figure 6.2). There was much opposition to this plan at the meeting, but the director of the School Education Division of Nakano Ward repeatedly insisted that

3. On October 22, 2016, the Nara Juvenile Prison was designated as an important cultural property of the country, the only one that remains out of the ‘Five Prisons of the Meiji Period’. This prison was built in Nara in 1891 and was known for its unique and thorough rehabilitation through education.

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Figure 6.2:  The design proposal of the PFES in which a four-storey school building turns its back to the gate and encloses the entire gate. Photo by author, 2019.

the outline of the key concept could not be changed. She said, ‘Thank you for your opinions and consideration. We will go further and try to make minor adjustments.’ In the proposed design, the south side of the main gate directly abuts a school building. In response to a question raised by a participant, ‘Is there a window on the side of the gate? Can we see the gate from the window of the school building?’, the director of the School Education Division said, ‘We plan to add a window, but there are various opinions. So we will consider making it invisible by taking measures such as using frosted glass.’ Other officials in charge of cultural assets rushed to elaborate, ‘We will try to make the gate and the school coexist instead of keeping the gate hidden.’ Nevertheless, the director’s statement about this window clearly indicated that they would not show the gate to children. The north side of the main gate faces a passage managed by the Sewerage Bureau, but the gate is inaccessible from this passage. Furthermore, the Director of the School Education Division said that the school should not be visible from the Sewerage Bureau passage side ‘to consider the privacy of the children’. In response to this, several participants protested, ‘Is the current PFES invisible from the outside? No! Passers-by can see the children exercising and playing. Why should the new school grounds be completely invisible from the outside? Do you have to build a tall wall around the school as President

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Trump has attempted to do around the border between the United States and Mexico?’ These remarks were greeted with bitter laughs from others at the meeting. It was decided to keep the beautiful building in view of its importance in the history of modern Japanese architecture. However, if the gate is entirely overshadowed and enclosed by the school building, what is the significance of preserving it? Fences are due to be installed around the gate because of what the authorities say are safety considerations. But the effect of this will be to restrict both access and visibility, rendering the gate’s preservation all but meaningless. It must be noted that those of us who took an active interest in this matter were a small minority. Although there are nearly seven hundred students at the PFES, only seven parents participated in the public meeting on January 31, and twenty attended the following meeting on February 11. It was clear that raising awareness of and interest in the gate among other parents and local residents would be necessary if we were to succeed in pressuring the local authorities to significantly alter their plans. In the school district of the PFES, there are large residential complexes for national government officials and their families, and their children attend the elementary school. Japanese politics has long been dominated by conservative parties led by the LDP, and government officials have worked with them for many years and tend to be conservative in both thought and habits. In addition to the prison, Nakano district was formerly the location of various facilities related to Japanese militarism, such as the Nakano Army School, which was the primary training centre for military intelligence operations by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The site of the Nakano Army School is now a park with a lawn surrounded by restaurants and cafés, leaving almost nothing to remind us of the site’s former function. A small signboard on the edge of the park shows old photos and provides a brief description of the Army School’s history. Although recent movies and books on the Nakano Army School have revealed previously little-known aspects of this institution’s wartime role,4 acknowledgement of its legacy has been effectively erased from the streets of Nakano. Members of CGP are proposing an alternative design that connects the school area and the open area with a bridge; this would allow visitors to move back and forth between the playground and the courtyard. But it remains to be seen whether Nakano Ward will prove willing to consider such a proposal from local citizens; so far, the signs do not seem promising. My son, who came to the discussion meeting on February 11, had declared beforehand, ‘I want to express my opinion!’, but in the end he didn’t ask any questions. At that time, he was eight years old and in the second grade of elementary school. I 4. The elite youth officers from the Nakano Army School organized young boys as ‘government corps’ and taught them the skills of ‘secret warfare’ to infiltrate American lines in the Battle of Okinawa. The film Spy War of Okinawa (Okinawa Supai Senshi) released in 2018 is based on interviews with survivors of the war who have finally decided to talk about their experiences, more than seventy years on. See the homepage of Spy War History of Okinawa at: http://www.spy-senshi.com/.

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wondered whether he was still too young to understand the details of the history of the gate. His explanation about the prison was simple: ‘People who opposed the war were thrown in.’ I responded to him by saying, ‘It’s not that simple’, and thought that I should give him more chance to learn about it later. However, on the next day of the discussion session, when I was preparing breakfast, my son suddenly asked me, ‘Why do they use frosted glass windows in the new school building?’ I did not know how I should explain it to him. The intention of the ward government seemed clear. The use of frosted glass in the school building could only be explained by a desire to prevent children from seeing the gate, but no adults cared to explain why the gate should not be visible through the window. Children were completely excluded from the discussion about the gate and the new school buildings, while adults were saying, ‘We want to build a school that puts children first!’ The assumption, at least on the part of local officials, seemed to be that the gate represented a difficult or disturbing past from which children ought to be shielded rather than an opportunity for learning about and discussing important historical issues.

A Citizens’ Movement and the Democratic Process As our next step, CGP members sent a request letter to the private contractor which created the design plan requesting an opportunity for consultation with parents and local citizens and highlighting problems with the design. We also pointed out that the Nakano Ward authorities conducted no competitive bidding process to solicit design proposals. About a week after submitting the request form to the private contractor, staff members of the Division of Cultural Properties of Nakano Ward offered to arrange a meeting with us. In this meeting, CGP members once again requested the right to review the design plan, but the officials explained that after considering various opinions they had decided that this plan was the best, particularly from the perspective of child safety and privacy. The officials also seemed to be worried that members of the conservative parties on the ward assembly might oppose any further modification of the design. In the same meeting, the director of the Division of Cultural Properties pointed out the possibility of children climbing up to the gate and the risk of children being photographed by someone from outside pretending to look at the gate. However, CGP members argued that such risks would not be eliminated even if the gate was placed behind the school building. Given that there are many other buildings in the school, is it necessary to assume that children will climb the gate? Many more debates followed involving concerns such as bricks coming loose from the structure in the event of an earthquake; the gate, however, will be reinforced to be earthquake resistant. In fact, the approved design envisages a mini public library and a ‘Plaza for Kids’ on the premises of the new PFES to serve the school’s neighbours. Rather than

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hiding the gate behind the school building, low fences outside the gate could be installed so that the scenery is not destroyed and the gate is made visible as a local cultural site. CGP members argued that the school building should be redesigned in such a way that community activities can be organized in an open space around the gate. As many questions and ideas arose during the meeting, CGP members subsequently prepared a document setting out their proposals and delivered it to the ward office. The nature of the decision-making process leading to the plan to enclose the prison gate within a four-storey school building was entirely opaque to those of us involved in the CGP. But our experience of bureaucratic obfuscation is far from unusual. What we observed here resonates with Koichiro Kokubun’s observation in another case—Japanese local governments are in general profoundly resistant to direct public participation in decision making (Kokubun 2013).

‘Preservation by Relocation’ without Notification On April 21, 2019, a ward assembly election was conducted. Three LDP veterans, who strongly opposed preserving the gate, lost their seats, although there is no indication that their stance on the matter of the prison gate had any effect on their re-election prospects. What were the implications of this for the dispute over the Nakano Prison gate? According to the ward’s original schedule, the key design concept of the new school buildings should already have been confirmed, but when I met with officers in the Children’s Educational Facilities Division on June 18, 2019, they said that the key concept remained a ‘draft’. Once the key concept is confirmed as a ‘plan’, the creation of detailed blueprints begins, making further changes impossible. Since the key concept had not been confirmed at this point, CGP members asked if it was possible to consider the design we had proposed. In collaboration with other organizations, the CGP organized various events, such as lectures and tours to inspect related buildings. On June 2, 2019, we invited Reiko Tomita, the architect who designed Kasahara Elementary School in Miyashiro, Saitama prefecture, known as the ‘barefoot school’, to give a lecture on school building that emphasizes ‘memory of the land’. Around thirty people including three Nakano Ward Assembly members attended a tour of Kasahara Elementary School on July 6. On February 5, 2020, we hosted a further lecture by Shu-Mei Huang (co-editor of this volume). Huang discussed the importance of creating a space that reflects the diverse experiences and emotions of various citizens, referring to the case of Chiayi Prison, a colonial-era structure in Taiwan which is now used as a museum. We thus continued to work steadily on our campaign, but there were no publicly noticeable movements regarding the construction of the PFES or the main gate of the Nakano Prison. However, it seems that various studies or consultations were

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being conducted by local officials behind closed doors. Probably because of strong opposition from conservatives to preserving the gate on the premises of the elementary school, the architectural report on the main gate of Nakano Prison, which was announced on November 11, elaborated on the possibility of relocation across many pages. In other words, officials were now considering moving the gate to the very end of the site that the ward is aiming to acquire, placing it outside the grounds of the elementary school (Nakano Ward Assembly, 2019). It seems that the ward government had already examined a plan to develop a small park where the gate is preserved. The budget for the relocation was estimated at about 500 million yen. Opinions were divided on this new development among members of the CGP. Some favoured on-site preservation as the best way to retain its integrity. Some considered the relocation proposal, taking into account that it would not be possible for citizens to fully utilize the gate if it ended up surrounded by fences or a school building. Many parents of the elementary school students are more interested in improving the educational environment rather than preserving cultural property. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 and the worsening economy fuelled growing opposition from local politicians to the idea of using valuable taxation revenue to preserve the gate.

Nakano Prison: A History of ‘Political Criminals’ At this point, I should perhaps say something more about my own reasons for involving myself in this matter. I am the mother of a son who attends the PFES and also a university professor researching social change in contemporary China. In recent years, I have conducted interviews with Chinese human rights lawyers, intellectuals, and activists who have been persecuted due to the increased control of speech and thought in China today. Thus, I found myself suddenly hit by the fact that the Nakano Prison was a place where similar forms of repression had occurred here in Japan before 1945, and right in the district where I live. As a researcher focusing on Chinese studies, and especially on the constraints affecting civil society in China, I realized in recent years that I was not paying enough attention to civil society in my own country. In the wartime and prewar past, Japan suppressed freedom of speech with at least the same severity as China is now doing, and many ‘political criminals’ were the target of suppression. Most people in Japan today do not reflect on these ‘difficult’ aspects of our national past, so war-related historical buildings can enrich our values and deepen our thinking. In January 2018, at the PTA meeting of the PFES, a member of the school’s PTA who was in negotiations with divisions of the ward government in charge of the construction of new school buildings said, ‘The main gate of the Nakano Prison is a dangerous building, so I would like to ask the ward government to remove it as soon as possible’. I am ashamed to confess that I didn’t know much about the Nakano

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Prison when this PTA member spoke. This was also the point at which I first heard that the main gate remained at the planned relocation site of the elementary school. Japanese school PTAs are typically not organizations that democratically discuss school matters; rather, their function is to help support and coordinate school and community activities (Iwatake, 2017).5 The PTA of the PFES was no exception, and at regular meetings, proceedings featured almost no ‘discussion’. One day, in a PTA meeting conducted in such a stiflingly formal atmosphere, I decided to stand up and ask several questions: ‘What does the prison gate mean? Why is it regarded as dangerous? Shouldn’t the question of whether or not to remove it be a matter of discussion within the school?’ The air became frozen for a moment, and the school principal commented, ‘I understand your feelings, but we cannot delay the construction of new school buildings’. Nobody else tried to speak after he had made his stance clear. When I started to look into the history of Nakano Prison, I realized that this was a site in my own Tokyo neighbourhood where political prisoners had been indefinitely detained and subjected to ‘thought reform’ and ‘re-education through labour’ in the pre-1945 period. In other words, practices of oppressive authoritarianism with which I had become familiar through my work on contemporary Chinese civil society activism were also associated with the Tokyo locality where I live. At the end of 1982, one year before the demolition of the prison, the Group to Record the History of Social Movements Related to the Toyotama (Nakano) Prison (Shakai Undoshi Teki ni Kiroku Suru Kai) was established to gather the voices of those who spent years in the prison, and eventually the book Showa History from within the Prison was published in 1986. Tetsuo Ozawa, who was the coordinator of the group, is a former member of the Nakano Ward Assembly (belonging to the Japanese Communist Party) and is also currently active in the CGP. The rich sources analysed in this book reveal that many of the prisoners imprisoned were communists, anarchists, and labour activists (not necessarily ideologically motivated). There were also religious leaders as well as those who were said to be ‘leftists’. Another little-known aspect of the prison’s history relates to the presence there of a ‘preventive detention centre’. The first article of the Security Law enacted in 1925 defined ‘criminals’ as follows: those who 1) sought to change the national polity (overthrow the emperor system); 2) denied the private property system (i.e., the capitalist system); 3) denied the national polity, or organized any association (i.e., religious groups) whose purpose was to disseminate ideas that blaspheme the dignity of Shinto shrines or the imperial family. The first two items were directed 5. Since the 1920s, the Ministry of Education has aimed to install PTAs in each elementary school to promote home education. Parents are almost forcibly signed up. Iwatake indicates that there is a historical context for the current approach to organizing and controlling PTAs that dates back before the occupation period to the authoritarian prewar and wartime era when the Mothers’ Association (Haha no Kai 母の会) and the Great Japan Federation of Women’s Associations (Dainihon Rengo Fujinkai 大日本連合婦人会：連婦) were established (in 1930).

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at the Japanese Communist Party and its members and supporters, and the third potentially covered all religious groups and believers in religious doctrines except for Shinto. In the case of preventive detention, if a person who had been punished for a crime and sentenced to prison was considered liable to commit a crime after completion of the sentence, he or she could be kept in preventive detention. Also, if a person had been sentenced, but the execution of that sentence had been postponed and the individual put on probation under the Thought Offense Probation Act, he or she could also be kept in preventive detention. The duration of preventive detention was two years and could be renewed by the authorities if deemed necessary. In other words, preventive detention had the purpose of allowing for indefinite incarceration of communists and religious leaders whose ‘criminal acts’ could not be defined and of ‘converting’ them to ‘emperor worshipers’ (Shakai Undoshi Teki ni Kiroku Suru Kai 1986, 169–70). In the detention centre, in order to make the detainees aware of ‘the true meaning of the national polity’, the director was to be addressed as ‘father’, the staff as ‘brothers’, and the detainee had to advocate for ‘familism’ without a ‘mother’. ‘Familism’ here denotes the patriarchal vision advocated by the imperial state. ‘Guidance’ and ‘training’ (to make a good mind and body) were organized. The inmates were encouraged to practice Japanese-style etiquette, calligraphy, archery, and kendo, to write Japanese poetry such as tanka and haiku, and to promote ‘repentance’ through immersion in Japanese tradition. Inmates were not formally designated as prisoners but were forced to labour for eight hours a day as a form of ‘training’. Participation in such labour contributed to the earning of credits required for graduation certification at the detention centre (Shakai Undoshi Teki ni Kiroku Suru Kai 1986, 177–78). Unless certified as compliant by a ‘father’ or ‘older brother’, custody of the detainee (the ‘younger brother’) was renewed every two years and he was not allowed to leave the preventive detention centre. Like Chinese re-education camps today, Japan’s preventive detention centres combined intense surveillance of inmates with indoctrination and a harsh labour regime. Detainees were made to understand that they would die in captivity unless they conformed. Yoshiro Nakamura, the first director of the preventive detention centre, recalled that it was ‘the most severe repression of thought in the world’ (Shakai Undoshi Teki ni Kiroku Suru Kai 1986, 183).

Allergic Reactions to ‘Peace’ in Contemporary Japan Today, Japanese society still witnesses struggles between left and right, with disagreement over how the legacy of state repression and militarism should be remembered and evaluated constituting a key dividing line. Many people seek to avoid involvement in such conflicts, professing a lack of interest in politics. While Japan (unlike China) no longer conducts programmes to suppress political deviancy through thought reform, such as that conducted at the preventive detention centre

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in Nakano Prison before 1945, an aversion to public political argument remains deeply ingrained in Japanese society. When a member of the CGP spoke about the ‘Gate of Peace’ at a town meeting in 2018, a person who opposed the preservation and use of the gate yelled out loud, saying, ‘It’s not the Gate of Peace!’ He was a secretary to an LDP parliamentarian and was formerly the PTA chairman of the PFES. About six months earlier, I had asked this person, ‘Why do you object to the preservation of the gate?’ In response, he raised a physical problem, saying ‘the size of the elementary school would be smaller’ and then added, ‘I don’t need that kind of leftist building’. I was so shocked at this outburst that I just stood there open-mouthed. In postwar Japan, social movements were actively conducted in connection with opposition to the Japan-US Security Treaty, protests against pollution, opposition to the Vietnam War, and criticism of the policies of the Japanese and US governments towards Okinawa. Many of the people who took anti-government or anti-American positions identified as left or ‘new left’, and they were in strong conflict with the conservatives. During the 1960s–1970s movement of protest against the US-Japan Security Treaty, divisions among left-wing intellectuals, violent incidents, and factional rivalries led gradually to a decline in public support. Conservatives claimed it was the left-wingers who were seeking to brainwash youth with ideas of communism and radical liberalism, thus throwing Japanese society into confusion. Many of the ‘social movement generation’ do not want their children to be at the mercy of social movements, and younger generations influenced by commercialism and competitive individualism tend to be indifferent to politics and cannot be aroused in any way. The latter have come to be known as the ‘shirake generation’, meaning the ‘apathetic generation’ (Ichikawa 2003). As a result of the frustration or suppression of successive postwar social movements and of the comforts and distractions of an affluent and intensely consumerist society, politics have become largely ‘taboo’ in contemporary Japan. I have repeatedly talked casually to parents of my son’s friends about the gate, but no one is willing actively to participate in the activities of the CGP. Few parents will volunteer information about which political parties they support or the nature of their religious beliefs, but sometimes the topic of the gate reveals their political or religious position. When some realized that I did not take the same particular political or religious position as them, they drifted away from me. I regard myself as belonging to the left or centre-left, but have refrained from joining any political party so that I can put myself in a position to hear a variety of different voices. I was just trying to find value in passing on memories of history from various perspectives to the next generation. On the other hand, many people tried to avoid the CGP because they regarded it as connected with members of the Japanese Communist Party and related left-leaning organizations. Certainly, current and former Japanese Communist Party members of the ward assembly had enthusiastically helped us collect information and participated in seminars and lectures

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organized by the CGP, but the CGP had attempted to conduct exchanges and consult with members of various political parties. After all, is it necessary to react so sensitively to the term ‘peace’? Some conservatives hate to use the word ‘peace’ because of an allergy to the postwar ‘Peace Constitution’ and discomfort at the recognition of history that advocates ‘peace’. The ‘Peace Forest Park’ occupies the former site of Nakano Prison, and in the southwest corner of the park is the PFES. Indeed, there are many facilities all over Japan with names that incorporate the word ‘peace’. This reflects how central the idea of pacifism has become to postwar conceptions of national identity—to the frustration of some conservatives, including many within the LDP leadership, who aspire to drop the ‘peace clause’ from Japan’s postwar constitution to enable Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to operate as a fully ‘normal’ military establishment. The name ‘Peace Forest Park’ had been chosen through an open call for suggestions (Mainichi shimbun 1985). Kazuo Ide, a citizen of Nakano who named the park, said, ‘I knew that there were political prisoners here. We should not forget their agony and anguish. Also, Nakano Ward has declared itself a non-nuclear city, so I thought the main theme of the ward is peace’. Ide chose the name ‘Peace Forest’ as reflective of a simple and straightforward idea of looking from a dark past to a bright future. And yet, ‘peace’ has today become a source of controversy in Japan rather than a matter of consensus, as it was in the 1980s.

Why Can Children Not Speak? At the Nakano Ward Assembly plenary session held from late June to early July 2019, Satomi Urano of the Japanese Communist Party said that voices of citizens should be solicited more actively regarding the preservation and utilization of the gate. Takashi Hiyama of the Constitutional Democratic Party indicated that, considering the history of Japan as a modern, law-abiding country since the Meiji Restoration, the gate carried an important symbolic meaning and likewise emphasized its historical value. He asked several questions about how to use the gate in an environment that ensured its openness to the public. On the other hand, an independent council member, Junko Inagaki, asked the superintendent of the Board of Education questions that reflected her scepticism regarding the gate’s value as a cultural property. The superintendent answered her, ‘It is better not to preserve the gate to improve the school environment.’ I did not understand whether the superintendent was saying that it was easier to design the school without the gate, or that the gate would have a bad effect on education in the school. Her statements were vague. On July 2, Inagaki reported on Facebook that she had asked questions in the Nakano Ward Assembly, saying, ‘Adults’ convenience should not impair the educational environment for children, who cannot speak.’ I commented as follows and continued to interact with Inagaki several times.

Tomoko Ako 139 Ako: My son goes to the PFES. I don’t really understand why you say a child cannot speak. I wonder if adults aren’t trying to deny children the chance to speak. In Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden (which I have visited), children are free to discuss controversial social issues and history. There are various ways to teach even small children, and I think it would be good if adults could provide children with various materials for thinking about issues, rather than imposing ideas on them. In a sense, the decision not to preserve the gate in the new school site imposes a view denying the gate’s historical value. In Sweden, it is considered that there is no such thing as neutrality on ethical matters. Of course, adults have an impact on their children, which is something I also have to worry about. So as for the gate, I tell my child, ‘Your mother thinks it’s better to preserve it, and that it’s okay for it to be in the elementary school, but there are various other ways of thinking about it.’ Children are children, and they can use their imagination to figure out what to do with the gate and may come up with interesting ideas that will surprise adults. Inagaki: Thank you, Tomoko Ako. Children can give various ideas and opinions, but they cannot judge and take responsibility. I think it’s more about adults’ roles and responsibilities that children can’t take on, rather than impressing adults’ opinions on children. And of course, adults have various opinions and ways of thinking, but it is the ward mayor and ward assembly members chosen through the election that finally gather them and take responsibility for the future of the children.

I was upset after exchanging opinions with her several times. Regarding the debate over the gate, Inagaki said that children could not take responsibility and that it was the elected mayor and ward assembly members who should make decisions. Is that a valid argument? What vision of education does it imply? Will children growing up without knowing the history of their school become adults ready to take responsibility for the future of their homeland and the international community? We rely on the wisdom and lessons inherited from our ancestors which have helped us overcome difficulties to pave the way. Our present is built on the past. Together with members of the CGP, I have repeatedly written letters to the PFES and the Nakano Ward Board of Education proposing to hold volunteer study sessions about the history of the area, including Nakano Prison. When it comes to the prison’s history, it may be difficult especially for younger children to understand it comprehensively, and some may be frightened or disturbed by the stories associated with the site. As Sharon Macdonald points out, in acknowledging that some forms of heritage concern the ‘destructive and cruel side of history’, ‘difficult heritage’ can set up dilemmas, such as between different sectors of a society or between commercial and other interests (Macdonald 2009). That’s why we wanted to first organize a public discussion for interested parents and locals to think together about how children could or should learn war-related history. However, until now, our request has not been accepted. Although I did not receive any written response, the school principal and a member of the ward assembly who acted as an intermediaries with the Board of Education offered an excuse: ‘In light of restrictions on

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“political” activities on school premises, the Board of Education does not allow such a gathering at the school.’

Conclusion The movement to preserve the main gate of Nakano Prison as a meaningful focus of collective memory has faced obstacles from those who perceive it to be ‘difficult’ or shameful heritage. Nakano Prison is located in a district near the centre of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Most of the relatively prosperous local residents are reluctant to challenge the status quo and many tend to avoid issues which are controversial in local—or national—politics. Nakano Ward has generally been reluctant to attempt radical educational reforms, and the attitude of the Board of Education is generally conventional. For example, when it comes to decisions over using online education to tackle problems related to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers of my acquaintance who are keen to reform education in Nakano told me, ‘Whatever you do, you have to wait for the instruction of “higher-ups”, such as the school principal and members of the Board of Education. So, it is difficult for us to act independently’. In such an environment, promoting the idea of utilizing ‘dark’ heritage positively for educational purposes is almost impossible. While many locals are merely apathetic concerning the matter of the prison gate, others, including members of the ward assembly and the PTA chairman, actively oppose the preservation of what they have dubbed a ‘leftist’ building on the grounds of the elementary school. They evince a strong tendency to ‘avoid [or suppress] the left’, reflecting longstanding fears of student radicalism dating back to the 1960s and earlier. Since the end of the Cold War, the phenomena of ‘avoiding the left’, as well as the advances made by nationalist populism, have resulted in a loss of morale and momentum among former socialist/communist intellectuals. Erosion of moral norms and intensifying social atomization due to the weakening of intermediate groups in modern society has made more lonely, alienated individuals increasingly susceptible to nationalistic rhetoric. Conservatives have resorted to nationalism in order to rebuild a new sense of publicness and communality. Intellectuals associated with Japan’s contemporary populist-nationalist movement envision the nation as an ethnoculturally monolithic collectivity, setting a framework of ‘individuals’ versus ‘nation’ or a choice between ‘me-ism’ (individualism) and nationalism (Oguma and Ueno 2003). The mounting anxieties and uncertainties of the post–Bubble Economy era, as Japanese find their position in East Asia supplanted by a commercially dominant and militarily threatening China, and as economic stagnation and growing inequality at home present elected officials and policymakers with intractable choices, seem to have accentuated a popular desire to retreat from confrontation with the ‘difficulty’ or complexity of the past or the present. As in other prosperous societies facing the prospect of unsettling change in the early twenty-first century, Japanese have proven susceptible

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to the appeal of a right-wing nationalist populism that affirms their self-worth, while blaming problems or contradictions on malevolent outsiders. Perhaps this context goes some way to explaining the apathy or resistance displayed by many parents as well as educational officials in debates over the preservation of the Nakano Prison gate. A collapse of publicness, dissatisfaction with politics, impatience with economic decline, and anxiety about everyday life and the future seem to suffocate both the desire and the capacity to engage in reasoned, open debate. Instead, calls for a ‘healthy nationalism’ which actively embraces distortion of the past in the interests of buttressing national pride, casts a pall of darkness over modern Japanese society. Unless this dark cloud disperses, the prospects of Japanese society engaging more honestly with its difficult past will remain bleak.

References Botsman, Dani. 2005. Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frost, Mark R., and Edward Vickers. 2021. ‘Introduction: The “Comfort Women” as Public History—Scholarship, Advocacy and the Commemorative Impulse’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 3: Article ID 5555. Fujitani, T., Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds. 2001. Perilous Memories: The AsiaPacific War(s), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Han, Jung-Sun N. 2012. ‘Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance and WarRelated Sites in Contemporary Japan’. Journal of Contemporary Asia 42 (3): 493–513. Huang, Shu-Mei, and Hyun Kyung Lee. 2019. Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia. Abingdon: Routledge. Ichikawa Koichi 市川孝一. 2003. ‘Wakamonoron no keifu—wakamono ha do katararetaka’ 若者論の系譜――若者はどう語られたかー [The genealogy of youth—how young people were described]. Ningenkagaku Kenkyu 人間科学研究 [Bulletin of human science] 25: 123–30. Iwatake Mikako 岩竹美加子. 2017. PTA to iu kokka sochi PTA という国家装置 [National device called PTA]. Tokyo: Seikyusha. Kokubun Koichiro 国分功一郎. 2013. Kitaru beki minshu shugi 来るべき民主主義 [Democracy to come]. Tokyo: Gentosha. Macdonald, Sharon. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Mainichi Shimbun (Tokyo version). 1985. ‘Heiwa no mori koen to kettei’ 平和の森公園と決 定 [Name of park decided—Peace Forest Park]. January 24. Nakano Ward Assembly. 2019. Kyu nakano keimusho seimon ni kakaru gakujutsu chosa kekka ni tsuite 旧中野刑務所正門にかかる学術調査結果について [About the results of academic research on the main gate of the former Nakano Prison]. November 11. https:// kugikai-nakano.jp/shiryou/19111811170.pdf. Oguma Eiji 小熊英二 and Ueno Yoko 上野陽子. 2003. Iyashi no nashonarizumu: kusanone hoshu undo no jissho kenkyu ＜癒し＞のナショナリズム：草の根保守運動の実証研

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Tokyo: Keio University Press. Otsuki, Tomoe. 2015. ‘The Politics of Reconstruction and Reconciliation in U.S.-Japan Relations—Dismantling the Atomic Bomb Ruins of Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13 (32), no. 2: Article ID 4356. Ryo Michiko 寮美智子. 2016. Utsukushii keimusho meiji no meirenga kenchiku nara shonen keimusho 美しい刑務所 明治の名煉瓦建築 奈良少年刑務所 [Beautiful prison: Nara Juvenile Prison, a famous brick building of the Meiji era]. Fukuoka: Nishinippon shuppansha. Senso Iseki Hozon Zenkoku Netto Waku 戦争遺跡保存全国ネットワーク [The Japanese network to protect war-related sites]. 2004. Nihon no senso iseki 日本の戦争遺跡 [Warrelated sites in Japan]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Senso Iseki Hozon Zenkoku Netto Waku. n.d. Homepage. Accessed September 8, 2020. https://sensekinet.jimdofree.com/. Shakai Undoshi Teki ni Kiroku Suru Kai 社会運動史的に記録する会 [Group to record the history of social movements related to the Toyotama (Nakano) Prison]. 1986. Gokuchu no showashi: Toyotama keimusho 獄中の昭和史：豊多摩刑務所 [Showa history from within the prison: Toyotama Prison]. Tokyo: Aoki shoten. Smith, Kerry. 2002. ‘The Showa Hall: Memorializing Japan’s War at Home’. The Public Historian 24 (4): 35–64. Zwigenberg, Ran. 2015. Hiroshima: The Birth of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7 Organic Heritage Diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific Region Reconciliatory Landscapes Anoma Pieris

Japan’s Asia-Pacific War ‘deathscapes’ (Maddrell and Sidaway 2010)—spaces related to collective trauma and remembrance—take many forms, including both military and civilian memorials, among which the most prominent for the national culture of commemoration are the urban peace memorial parks at Nagasaki and Hiroshima: multilayered landscapes created in city spaces razed by atomic bombing, the latter famously designed by architect Kenzo Tange. As brilliantly analysed by Lisa Yoneyama (1999), the manner in which the ruined Genbaku Dome or the reconstructed Shima Hospital inscribed the traumas of atomic bombing on the memorial landscape was hotly debated between the public and city authorities. The peace parks introduced Western-style civic plazas and lawn spaces into the congested morphology of the Japanese city, in a spatial language directed towards a global audience and distinct from the ornamental gardens found in palaces or shrines. At Nagasaki, in contrast, scattered ruins of the fragments of buildings form an unwieldy composite nested in the urban fabric. Because of the enormity of the tragedies they represent, both of these landscapes offer modalities for representing civilian trauma. Historically well-established memorial traditions, such as military memorials and cemeteries organized to represent national service and sacrifice, are less able to capture the human dimension of social suffering. When compared with these formal practices of memory making, pacifist memorial landscapes composed of dissonant residues of ‘difficult’ histories appear as anomalies. They are distinct from the imposition of a militarized or pacifist schema on a commemorative space. The two examples studied in this chapter—subnational Asia-Pacific War memorial sites in Naoetsu, Joetsu city, Niigata prefecture, Japan; and Cowra, New South Wales, Australia—are linked by mutual memorialization practices around tragic events: a fatal breakout by Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) at Cowra POW Camp and the deaths of Australian POWs in a ‘dispatched camp’ (that is, a factory camp) at Naoetsu, but they are articulated quite differently from

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each other and from the national commemorative landscapes described above.1 The community custodians of these spaces have invented, over time and through accumulated organic and transnational practices, settings for telling these stories without seeking to represent a unified ‘national’ narrative. The materialities of these spaces are likewise organic; less dependent on monuments and more on the placement of trees, shrubs, and other flora, more specifically flora gifted by former enemy nations; and their care and cultivation. Strategies used include ‘incorporating practices’, where memory is embodied in movement through a garden, and sculptures scattered in a commemorative landscape evoking discrete aspects of a broader narrative (Connerton 1989, 79). In both of these examples, the various stakeholder groups for the difficult histories being narrated are not directly connected to them but have inherited them through residency in localities where incarceration camps and the associated atrocities/tragedies took place. Unlike the colonial Central Police Station Compound in Hong Kong and the St John’s Island quarantine station in Singapore, discussed by other authors in this collection (see Chapters 4 and 5), these POW camps were of short duration with few, if any, physical traces remaining and are framed by the imperial histories of military oppression during the Asia-Pacific War. There is greater alignment with Tomoko Ako’s study describing efforts made by local communities to prevent the suppression of difficult histories related to an incarceration site (see Chapter 6). But because of the focus on gardens (not artefacts) as memorymaking practices, a different range of issues surfaces at these sites. An aim of this chapter is to unravel some of the entanglements of war, incarceration, and atomic annihilation that underscore Asia-Pacific War memories as invoked through landscape strategies at Cowra and Naoetsu and the roles various stakeholders play in addressing them as exemplifying what this chapter identifies as ‘organic heritage diplomacy’. The interest for architectural history is the way that garden spaces, and in particular flora, are deployed. The Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park and the Cowra Japanese Garden can be similarly characterized as located in regional towns, remote from national commemorative discourses, and networked into the history of the Asia-Pacific War mainly due to their stories of high POW casualties. Cowra is a small rural farming town in New South Wales, Australia, north of Canberra, near Young, which hosted a military training camp during the war and, alongside it, a POW camp for Japanese and Italian prisoners. Naoetsu is an industrial town in Niigata, Japan, currently in the Joetsu prefecture around 300 kilometres northwest of Tokyo, where Allied POWs were made to work in industrial factories. Their commemorative strategies have proven to be symbiotic despite their physical distance from each other because of their mutual difficulties in dealing with the local conditions and actions 1. The topic discussed here is introduced in Pieris and Horiuchi (2022) and in Horiuchi and Pieris (2007).

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surrounding POW deaths. This chapter begins with an overview of the complexities of transnational military memorialization followed by an examination of the two case studies during and after the war.

Military Memorialization The military counterpart of the aforementioned peace parks, made internationally notorious because of the enshrinement of convicted war criminals, is the Shinto Yasukuni Shrine, a war memorial described by Akiko Takenaka (2015) as one of many sites where death is used to promote militaristic nationalism as opposed to peace. Chidorigafuchi Cemetery and other memorial sites to the ‘unknown soldier’ form a parallel constellation of military cemeteries, pairing spaces for the spirits and bodies of the dead in a manner repeated all over the world. Every Australian capital city, correspondingly, has a memorial to the two world wars placed prominently in parklands and the significance of the Australian War Memorial is emphasized in its placement on an axis to Parliament House. Metropolitan cemeteries include separate sections for military graves. Described by Ken Inglis (2008) as ‘sacred places’, memorials as well as cemeteries and gardens of remembrance of different sizes are similarly dispersed throughout Australia, in cities as well as every hometown from whence soldiers were recruited. However, Australian physical war heritage is typically displaced outside the continent due to the nation’s participation as an ally of Britain or the US in conflicts in Europe and Asia and away from national territory. As Waterton and Dittmer (2016, 61) have noted, in writing on the so-called ‘Anzac legend’ (by which the Australian and Allied Forces’ military defeat at Gallipoli has been institutionalized as national memory), the transnationalism that is ever present in these various encounters is ‘eclipsed by a vehement form of national selfrepresentation’. The many POW commemorative sites in Southeast Asia are marked by tensions arising from imperial alliances, national rhetoric, and lack of control over displaced heritage. Internally, national representations are likewise fragmented by the experiences of Indigenous soldiers and minorities. Similar transformations are evident in Asia and, indeed, within Japan. Mark Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers (2019, 2) argue that following a half century of internal unrest caused by decolonization, the Cold War, and nation building, ‘the boundaries of Asian war remembrance have increasingly transcended those of the nation-state’, becoming multi-vocal in character and including a range of stakeholders beyond national governments. These boundaries have also been reconfigured in response to broader geopolitical shifts influencing the creation of national memories or truth and reconciliation efforts in each country (Frost, Schumacher, and Vickers 2019, 5). Within Japan, they argue, war remembrance and reconciliation has been part of an internal struggle between right-wing and leftwing politics (7). The authors also describe how transnational and organic forms of reconciliatory activism offer dynamic interpretations of war memory, in turn

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impacted by the needs and expectations of the several audiences for these spaces both locally and globally. Books like Patrick Finney’s Remembering the Second World War (2018) and Twomey and Koh’s The Pacific War (2015) are comparative anthologies that engage with different intersectional and transnational perspectives that include studies on Australasian as well as Asian cultures of remembrance. They complement the efforts of critical cultural studies in interrogating national memory. Increasingly, anthologies are not organized by country but explore other dimensions of the aforementioned multi-vocality. But these stories and their related tensions rarely surface at official military sites. The pre-eminent deathscape for Allied military commemoration in Japan is the Yokohama War Cemetery, created by the Australian War Graves group, for Commonwealth servicemen who died as POWs or while with the Commonwealth Occupying Forces in Japan. The Yokohama Cremation Memorial houses an urn with the ashes of 335 POWs. The cemetery’s presence in Japan attaches the disturbing history of death during wartime incarceration to the field of national memory, albeit at its very margin in the case of both countries, because, as Joan Beaumont (2018, 166–67) notes, ‘at neither the national nor the sub-national level did it assume a central place in practices of remembrance of the Second World War’ comparable to other POW sites throughout Southeast Asia directly associated with captivity, such as, she notes, Hellfire Pass on the Thai–Burma Railway, Changi Prison in Singapore, and the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea. Beaumont identifies several reasons for the flagging interest in the cemetery, apart from official and diplomatic engagements, including the distance for Australian war veterans and their families, both culturally and physically; resentment of Japan due to their mistreatment of prisoners; and the lack of significance of Yokohama for the Australian narrative of the war. The largest number of Australians interred there had been captured in Ambon and imprisoned on Hainan Island. These factors, in her view, influenced the general ambivalence towards the site. Unable to comment on the Japanese reception of the site, she nevertheless captures its politics, describing it as a ‘physical footprint of the victorious powers’ imposed on the city’s residents after Japan’s defeat (Beaumont 2018, 167). Beaumont notes that members of the Prisoner of War Research Network Japan have conducted tours of the space in recent decades but that it is mainly used as a recreational space. Although there are annual ceremonies and diplomatic exchanges, the site lacks the historical associations and community recognition that might make it a dynamic reconciliatory space.

Commemorative Landscapes at Naoetsu and Cowra When compared with ‘national’ memorial sites whose custodians are part of the political or military establishment, the subnational commemorative landscapes

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in Naoetsu and Cowra have evolved organically through the actions of concerned local residents over time. This organic development is grounded, as in the major sites, in human and/or physical remains related to extraordinary deaths in wartime POW camps. Their interconnected ‘memory politics’ have led to the self-conscious invention of reconciliatory landscapes sustained through organic forms of heritage diplomacy that, while occurring at the subnational level, are instigated and sustained by transnational relationships circumventing the metropolitan cultures of memorialization entirely. Whereas formal memorials and cemeteries have institutionalized national memories of the war, other dissonant spaces like these sit awkwardly in relation to them. Landscape interventions, in these cases, offer a mode of reconciliation more difficult to maintain and more reliant on community efforts but better able to navigate and circumvent the tensions that static physical memorials provoke. Unlike at Yokohama, where the historical link between the site and the experiences of the POWs buried there is weak, these two examples discuss scenarios where the commemorative spaces are physically connected to the former sites of the POW camps in which the interred soldiers met their deaths. As mentioned in the introduction, the custodians of these sites are not the aggrieved parties. Their responsibility is inherited due to living in the locality. They have mobilized the residual materialities of POW camp environments and invented strategies to create and sustain memorial landscapes on these sites or adjacent spaces, linking and reviving prison camp experiences through them. Their actions are significant because POW camp heritage is rarely preserved in Japan or elsewhere in Asia. In Australia, sites associated with wartime internment and incarceration are neglected or have returned to prewar functions, often under private ownership. These communities’ remarkable creation and maintenance of these sites is possible because of transnational friendships. The linking of subnational with transnational memorialization while circumventing centralized national memorial cultures is common to both sites.

Transnational Heritage-Making Practices The manner in which heritage making has proceeded in these sites is different from the kinds of transboundary, intercultural, or transnational heritage-making scenarios that have challenged bounded nation-state-led heritage designations spearheaded by Europeanization and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. These invented spaces are formalized through organic heritage-making practices that are subnational, highly changeable, and dependent on local communities, but are mutually sustained and made meaningful by their transnational reception. These landscapes have not been written about by critical heritage studies scholars, even though the highly regarded anthology Places of Pain and Shame (Logan and Reeves 2009) includes a chapter on the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery (Kobayashi and Ziino 2009). The Cowra breakout is analysed by Steve Bullard in Blankets on the

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Wire (Bullard and Tamura 2006) a bilingual publication of the transnational JapanAustralia Project. Its focus is on the reasons why the POWs’ escape attempt led to casualties. There are numerous local histories, memoirs, and popular accounts of the breakout, including by Japanese writers (Apthorpe 2008; Asada 1972). Australian historians like Christina Twomey (2007), Beaumont (2018), and others (Beaumont, Grant, and Pegram 2015; Beaumont, Martinuzzi O’Brien, and Trinca 2008) have written extensively on Australian POWs under the Japanese in Asia and more recently of wartime internment in Australia. However, until Sarah Kovner’s recent book Prisoners of Empire (2020) offered comparative insights into POW camps in Korea and Japan, no broad history of the wartime camps centred on East Asia that describes the physical facilities and camp regimes has been attempted previously. Many of these sites are intimately connected through the movement of POW labourers from staging camps in Singapore, Java, or the Philippines to other parts of Asia. Sixty Australian POWs who died at Naoetsu were sent there as part of ‘C Force’ from Singapore. The Japanese POWs held in Australia were captured during battles in or near New Guinea and were held mainly on behalf of the US. Their personal experiences in memoirs and local and popular histories reflect the findings in war crimes trials that emphasize the brutality of the Japanese. The story of Naoetsu is dominated by the voices of the surviving POWs. When faced with a comparable lack of reflection on wartime incarceration policies by governments in Japan and Australia, local efforts at reconciliation that elide national politics appear to negotiate contestation differently to many of the examples cited in these books. Transnational collaborations by remorseful citizens and former POWs beginning from the 1960s have historicized these former camp sites as denationalized/demilitarized spaces so as to engender transnational reconciliation and greater empathetic recovery. Their respective governments’ deferral of responsibility for the tragedies that took place in these spaces, which will be discussed shortly, has in many ways released these spaces from mandated national interest, enabling local communities to purpose-build interpretive landscapes without interference from their respective authorities. Although important remembrance ceremonies are held annually at these sites, they have not been drawn into their respective national fields of commemorative museums and war memorials that are important destinations for high school students and ‘grey tourists’. Their relatively muted presence on the sidelines of national memory has sustained their openness to intimate transnational exchanges and reciprocal adaptations when compared with significant national sites. Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) describe atrocities as actions and events that are deliberately ruthless and especially shocking. Their concern is with the ‘use of the heritage of atrocity as it is apparent in relic artefacts, buildings, sites and place associations, and the dissonance issues such uses raise’ (95). They also advise that changed political/economic circumstances may bring about reinterpretations of

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atrocities, reversing public perceptions of them (112). ‘Creative locational manipulation’, either on a site or elsewhere, may bring a particular interpretation to light. These strategies are significant where the sites themselves are inaccessible, have no surviving artefacts, or are rural/pastoral spaces that do not evoke the events of the past (113). In the two cases discussed in this chapter, the remote locations of the memorial sites have determined the use of landscaping strategies, shifting attention from formal ceremonial commemoration to an informal range of activities we might associate with garden spaces. Members of the local historical societies have exchanged stories and accommodated plant species representing the countries of their former enemies and travel between these sites annually. Species of trees from the nation with which reconciliation is sought become participants and spectators, embodying their respective nations’ national character, substituting for human visitors unable to make the journey, and together produce an immersive environmental context that provokes ethical reflection on why they have been introduced in that manner in that space. Movement through these spaces becomes part of the strategy of memory making through embodiment and association—the incorporating practices that Connerton describes (1989, 79). The use of landscape practices for commemoration, when compared to inscribed texts or photography, have the advantages of ambiguity—of treading the fine line between memory and forgetting, and between healing and opening wounds. However, there is always a risk of anaesthetizing trauma through an overly picturesque response and thereby deferring responsibility. This may happen if the landscapes are not corroborated by other kinds of evidence, like memorials, museums, cemeteries, or events that activate their dissonant heritage. Landscaping strategies can also allude to imperial design formations that, though read as ‘cultural’, retain traces of the violence that shaped them. Nevertheless, parks and gardens are often the most successful means for defusing uncomfortable pasts while alerting us to the presence of those pasts through their visual incongruity. Cowra assembles a cluster of spaces within a ‘peace precinct’, whereas Naoetsu assembles a number of memorial features within a bounded site. Both sites have experienced similar levels of erasure, as both POW camps were dismantled after the war ended. I have chosen to describe these heritage-making processes as ‘organic’ because they have accumulated over time in an organic manner, as a multilayered practice, encompassing the inevitable dissonances created by the proximity of different narrative threads and exposure to environmental conditions that continually destabilize them. While we may argue that even military memorials are environmentally sensitive, the commemorative sites and stakeholder groups described here don’t have the authority and support of national or international organizations that may sustain their landscapes during periods of crisis, and so an added dimension of organic heritage making is its exceeding vulnerability to change.

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The Cowra and Naoetsu POW Camps Naoetsu POW Camp (December 7, 1942–September 2, 1945), also known as Tokyo-04 Branch Camp, on the banks of the Hokura River was one of 130 camps across Japan in which 32,418 Allied POWs were held from 1942 (POW Research Network, n.d.). Tokyo-04 Branch Camp was a ‘dispatch camp’, a camp associated with industry, in which POWs lived in a corrugated-iron salt warehouse used as a company dormitory by the Shin-etsu Chemical Co. Ltd., one of many such spaces requisitioned to house factory labour for corporations concerned with ship building, mining, iron and steel production, construction, and transportation for military industry. POW labourers fell under the purview of the factory security and were supervised by factory foremen, placing them in a range of different environments and under good and bad labour regimes (Dundie 1994, 18). Accommodation at Naoetsu was an unlined, barn-like structure, 120 feet by 60 feet in size and 40 feet high at the gable (North China Marines, n.d.), with a central corridor flanked by two tiers of sleeping platforms. It was located in a three-acre site surrounded by a ten-foot wooden fence topped with barbed wire. The 698 POWs who crowded into the warehouse (338 American, 231 Australian, 90 British, and 39 Dutch) included US marines, US Army and Navy personnel, and American civilian tradesmen (North China Marines, n.d.). Among the POWs at Naoetsu was the Olympic athlete Louis Zemperini whose biography Unbroken (Hillenbrand 2012) offers the following account: Each day the enlisted POWs waded through the snow, to labour in a steel mill, a chemical factory, the port’s coal and salt barges, or a site at which they broke rocks for mineral extraction. The work was extraordinarily arduous and often dangerous, and shifts went on day and night, some for eighteen hours. . . . Each morning and night, Louis saw the enlisted men rambling in from their slave shifts, some completely obscured by coal soot, some so exhausted they had to be carried into the barracks. (Hillenbrand 2012, 280)

Their employment was in contravention of the 1929 Geneva Convention, under which POWs could be asked to work but not for the war industry (ICRC 1998, articles 9 and 21). While Japan had signed the convention, it had not ratified it. After their defeat at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki issued explicit instructions to camp commandants on the treatment of POWs, determining that the Japanese military and Japanese companies would use POWs to meet critical manpower shortages in industry (Kovner 2020, 56). The paths of POW labourers had taken many of them from their homelands to Asia where they were captured and put to work and then sent to Japan. In Japan they moved from port cities saturated with military industries to other dispersed localities. At Naoetsu they travelled daily to farmlands, to the waterfront, and across the river that bisected the city. These movements, often in extreme weather, gave

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them a keen sense of their surroundings. Place memories formed across these many scenarios, deepened by experiential traumas, remained a resilient trope. The camp became infamous because of the deaths of sixty Australian POWs sent there from Singapore due to exposure and ill treatment by the guards. Two out of seven military guards and six out of eight civilian guards were convicted and sentenced to death by hanging at the Yokohama War Crimes Trials held after the war (Lyon 2000, 52–54, 61–63). The facilities at Naoetsu were very different from Cowra, which was a purposebuilt POW camp (June 1941–January 1947), one of eighteen such large camps and several smaller ones distributed across Australia’s southeast and west. Many of these camps were on remote rural sites far away from populous cities, surrounded by barbed wire and sentry towers with searchlights. They were intended for civilian internees arrested in Australia, and overseas internees and POWs gathered from various locations in Europe, North Africa, and the Asia-Pacific and held on behalf of Britain and the US, respectively. Camp 12 at Cowra was the first dodecagonshaped enclosure to be introduced into Australia, its unusual shape quartered by an internal road called ‘broadway’ and a perpendicular fire break called ‘no-man’s land’. Each of the four compounds of Camp 12 accommodated one thousand POWS. They were guarded by two Australian Military Force battalions and surrounded by six guard towers. Camp accommodation at Cowra was P1 and C1 Army huts similar to those used for Australian troops in the nearby military training camp, with some variations in dimension to accommodate mess huts, recreation huts, or washrooms. The 60 feet by 18 feet timber-framed structures, clad in corrugated iron for both roof and walls, could be rapidly erected using domestic construction methods and as easily dismantled for repurposing (Miller 2007). Their radial arrangement inside the Cowra camp gave the guards in the sentry towers a panoptic overview of the camp, the perimeter, and the surrounding countryside that stretched endlessly beyond the three surrounding layers of barbed-wire fencing. Unlike at Naoetsu, Japanese POWs were not permitted outside the camp, as Australians distrusted the enemy soldiers, due to wartime propaganda but also racial prejudices augmented by the nation’s restrictive immigration policies. Asians were not permitted to migrate or settle in Australia,2 making it a very white and largely anglophone country. However, given that the barbed-wire fences surrounding the camp were porous, they had an uninterrupted view of the countryside. Given the careful selection of sites lacking distinctive landmarks that might orient prisoners allowing them to identify their locations, the POWs had no sense of whether their escape could be effective.

2. The White Australia policy introduced a series of restrictive acts aimed at maintaining a population predominantly of British descent.

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At the time of the incident that sealed Cowra’s infamy, the camp was occupied by Japanese soldiers and officers, Italians, Taiwanese, and Koreans. A group of Indonesian seamen and Javanese political dissidents and their families were also held there for a period as political prisoners for the Dutch government in New Guinea, mixing POWs with internees. The Cowra breakout, an escape attempted by 1,104 Japanese POWs on August 5, 1944, saw 359 escapes, 108 injured, and 235 fatalities (including four Australian guards). The reasons for the escape attempt were the proposed separation of noncommissioned officers from other ranks and their removal, due to overcrowding, to another camp in New South Wales (Bullard 2006). The disgruntled prisoners were led by an influential minority to stage a mass breakout. As this occurred in the dark, during the early hours of the morning, after setting fire to their huts, chaos and mayhem ensued. Fumbling in the darkness lit by flickering flames, the sentries beset by attacking escapees fired a Vickers machine gun with devastating effect. In post-mortems on the events of that day, it was apparent that decades of selfsegregation in Japan until the Meiji Restoration and in Australia under the ‘White Australia Policy’ had created an environment of mutual opacity that provoked the misunderstandings and hostilities that contributed to the tragedy.

Human Remains Both of the camps discussed in this chapter were associated with high numbers of casualties caused variously by open hostility, fear, cultural opacity, and misunderstanding. Both were the subject of official inquiries, at the Yokohama War Crimes Trials for the Naoetsu guards and at a military court of inquiry for Cowra. Blame was laid squarely on the Japanese military’s attitudes to surrender and imprisonment which saw surrendering to and captivity as a sign of weakness, as emphasized in the infamous ‘Senjinkun’ (Imperial Japanese Army Field Service Code), issued in January 1941 (Toland 1970, 512). Whereas at Naoetsu this manifested in the abuse of authority by the camp guards, at Cowra the shame and dishonour associated with captivity in part energized the breakout. The guards’ reactions to and the violence directed towards them by escaping prisoners caused an avoidable tragedy. In the latter case, four of the guards, who had failed to read the level of anxiety in their prisoner group, paid the price with their lives and are memorialized with a monument in Cowra town. All of these scenarios provided opportunities for reflection and later for remorse on the part of the Japanese former POWs and the residents of Cowra and Naoetsu. More importantly, the deaths of POWs in a foreign land, and their comrades’ inability to repatriate their bodies, embedded a reconciliatory landscape in the host towns for the camps. Each had to conceive of a way of representing an aspect of dissonant heritage. A few courageous individuals started this process.

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In Japan, while the ashes of deceased and subsequently cremated POWs were typically scattered in the ocean, Enri Fujito, a Buddhist monk at the nearby Kakushin-ji Temple who befriended the POWs at Naoetsu, was permitted to collect and preserve the remains of those who had died (Peace Memorial Park and Museum brochure, n.d.). Memorialized at the temple garden, their ashes would be interred later at the Yokohama War Cemetery after the war. The scheme for creating the Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park occurred decades later as an expression of remorse by Shoichi Ishizuka, who had been treated well as a prisoner of the Allied forces in Vietnam. He sought to make amends for the way Allied POWs had been treated in his hometown. He and a group of concerned citizens faced the challenge of commemorating the POWs alongside the camp guards, many of whose families live in the town. Because of the national sentiment of the time and complex responses to Japan’s wartime legacy—its imperial role in the Asia-Pacific, the harsh treatment of prisoners of war, attitudes to war heroes and their wartime atrocities, and the suffering of Japanese civilians due to fire bombing and atomic bombing—the commemorative landscape was saturated with dissonant responses to Japan’s culpability. At a national level, the fact that the sites of many POW camps had belonged to private corporations meant that they were not available for memorialization, and in many examples, as in Naoetsu, the site had been decommissioned and had returned to private ownership. At Cowra, soon after the breakout, the deceased POWs were buried in a portion of the Cowra cemetery, and their graves were cared for by members of the local Returned Services League, who honoured their adversaries by tending their graves. The Cowra war dead who had fought in the Pacific appeared on the district’s honour roll. The mutual recognition of courage and loss became the starting point for a new dialogue of peace making. In the 1960s the Japanese government was ready to accept that soldiers had been captured and held in Cowra; as a result, the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery was designed and built in 1964, alongside the cemetery for Australian servicemen who had died while in training. Other Japanese civilian internees and prisoners who had died during the war were also buried at the cemetery, which was designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Yura who was teaching at Melbourne University at the time. Australian animosity towards Japan was still simmering during the 1960s, given the extent of the atrocities uncovered by the war crimes tribunals and their public dissemination in the media. However, as the Asia-Pacific region became divided by Cold War alliances, and the US saw Japan as a foothold for their role in the Korean War, attitudes began to change. More significantly, as Japan regained its industrial prowess and emerged as a global force in the 1970s, economic ties were strengthened between the two countries. By then, however, the physical camp at Cowra, like at Naoetsu, had been dismantled, its buildings auctioned off, and the land reverted to private and state agricultural

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use. Long before this space was recovered, a different commemorative landscape with an eye to improving tourism was conceived. In the above two examples, human remains proved significant for sustaining dissonant heritage where the physical landscape had changed too much for heritage recovery. The Naoetsu camp site had been normalized as an urban property while the Cowra Camp had reverted to a pastoral setting. The lack of physical remains can be attributed to the high demand for building materials after the war.

Garden Creation as a Commemorative Practice There is little archival material related to ephemeral spaces like POW camp gardens and farms. Far more is recorded of such spaces created by internees rather than by POWs, perhaps because they became settings for simulating family life and were used in official propaganda. This is particularly true of Japanese-American incarceration in the US during World War II when Japanese immigrants and US citizens of Japanese ancestry were placed in camps. As many of them were farmers and gardeners, they were adept in creating internment gardens, often utilizing traditional Japanese tropes. As noted by Kenneth Helphand in his book Defiant Gardens (2006, 9), the creation of gardens in forbidding landscapes, in difficult topography, without soil or water, are particularly expressive of the people and circumstances in which they are created. Comparable practices of garden creation were not evident in wartime Naoetsu, although we know that the POW officers were asked to work on a farm. At Cowra, the Japanese POWs were moved out after the escape attempt and sent to camps in Hay and later to Tatura, but photographs from July 1944 show a ‘well-kept’ vegetable garden outside the mess building in the Japanese section of the camp and another of prisoners working on larger vegetable plots.3 At other camps in Australia, like Camp 14 in Loveday and Moorook, a wood camp, the gardens are more complex, Camp 14 including a small decorative bridge and a Shinto shrine. The creation of gardens sets the stage for a different landscape practice in the creation and maintenance of cemeteries. Often commenced during incarceration as small graveyards associated with POW camps, they extend temporally beyond camp dissolution to the postwar interregnum, defiantly sustaining residual features of a disappearing history. The enduring sacrality of human remains prevents their removal, unlike the buildings and other features of the former camp. Sometimes, as at Naoetsu, ashes are removed and interred elsewhere in an effort at consolidating a foreign nation’s human remains. The cemetery pre-empts the remembrance

3. Cowra, NSW, 1944-07-01. A Well-Kept Vegetable Garden outside the Mess Buildings of the Japanese Section of the 12th Prisoner of War Camp, July 1, 1944, accession no. 067190, Second World War, 1939–1945, Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C19371; Cowra, NSW. 1944-07-01. Japanese Prisoners of War Working in One of the Vegetable Gardens, July 1, 1944, accession no. 067191, Second World War, 1939–1945, Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C286870.

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garden as a memorial landscape. Sharing ground with enemy soldiers who cannot be repatriated complicates the foci of memory politics.

Entangled Memoryscapes I first visited Naoetsu on a blustery October morning in 2014 on the recommendation of Lawrance Ryan, a member of the Cowra local council and the Cowra Breakout Association, a community organization active in maintaining wartime heritage sites. I was met by a welcoming committee led by Yoshikazu Kondo, the president of the Japan-Australia Friendship Society, formed through association with and involvement of several Cowra residents, who was delighted to learn that I, like him, was an architect. The wind was too sharp and bitterly cold to take photographs of the Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park, whose location on the banks of the Hokura River provisionally simulated the climatic extremes faced by POWs. Winter would see several metres of snow. Among the society members who gathered to greet us was Yoko, the wife of Shoichi Ishizuka, who spoke of many visits to Cowra and close ties. Subsequently, when visiting Cowra for a commemorative event in 2016, I met with a party from Naoetsu, including Yoshi Kondo. The origins of the Naoetsu peace park date from 1978 when communications with former Australian POWs prompted visits, local interest, and commemorative services involving the Cowra-Japan Society, which had been established for the Cowra Japanese Garden project discussed below.4 A former POW in Naoetsu, Frank Hole, planted three eucalyptus seedlings in front of the Joetsu City Hall. A plaque commemorating the POW dead was gifted to the city, awaiting a suitable site for its display. This was the beginning of a protracted process to recover the site from private ownership, overcome resistance, win over the families of guards and the greater community, and raise funds for the proposed park. These efforts were made difficult by the national silence over the treatment of POWs or their deaths in Japan. The connection between Cowra and Naoetsu has another dimension which is important to recognize. Many recruits from the Riverina region in which Cowra is situated fought in the Pacific theatre of war and were among the 8,000 dead from over 22,000 Australian captives of the Japanese. The former POW who first communicated with a school principal from Naoetsu initiating the exchange that prompted future collaborations between these nationally insignificant small towns, Theo Lee was one among the around 300 Australians who had come to Naoetsu from Singapore. The journeys of POWs linked the different geographies, generating strands of memory which in turn were interwoven through interactions of local

4. The event was attended by Father Tony Glynn of the Nara Tomigaoka Catholic Church and Tony Mooney, advisor to the Cowra Japanese Garden and director of the cultural centre at the time.

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communities with former POWs, even though there is no substantial link between Cowra and Naoetsu. At Cowra, memorial efforts preceded those at Naoetsu, first through the creation of the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery, which required diplomatic exchanges and joint participation in related remembrance ceremonies, most notably on August 6 each year. Later, during the 1970s, Don Kibbler, president of the Cowra Tourism Development Corporation, came up with the ingenious proposal to reinvigorate this association through the development of a Japanese garden in the town. As he observed in an interview in November 2016,5 the idea for the garden emerged quite unconsciously and soon took on a momentum of its own. The main issue was funding and support, which Kibbler lobbied for, carting around a generic model for a Japanese garden in the back of his station wagon to demonstrate the possibilities. The project would be implemented in two stages from 1971 to 1978 and from 1985 to 1986. The designer for the Cowra Japanese Garden was selected by competition and the winning entry was by Takeshi (‘Ken’) Nakajima, a renowned landscape designer with similar gardens in Houston, San Diego, Moscow, and Montreal (Cowra Japanese Garden and Cutural Centre, n.d.). His conception of the landscape as a piece of Japan where spirits of deceased POWs may find release gave the established kaiyū shiki—Edo-period strolling garden—an added purpose as a displaced segment of national territory. In fact, the creation of such spaces for forms of cultural diplomacy was already evident in the twentieth century, but they were typically received as Orientalized landscapes to be consumed by Western tourists. Underlying the garden’s aesthetic beauty and consequent attraction to visitors was its deeper historical relevance due to the story of the breakout and the design of the cemetery. Writing on the garden’s design, Olga Blacha (2015, 154) notes that Nakajima’s choices to keep the existing canopy intact and use local plant species were congruent with environmental thinking on maintaining place authenticity. He selected an undulating site at Binni Creek Road for its several rocky outcrops, features that had given the town its name (‘Cowra’ in Wiradjuri means ‘rocks’). The highest point in the garden, facing northwest towards Tokyo, has two granite rocks representing guardian deities (152, 158). In his skilful crafting of a miniature landscape with hills and valleys and streams gushing down to the lakeshore, Nakajima recast the setting as a piece of Japan (Figure 7.1). The uniqueness of the Cowra Japanese Garden, however, is the way in which the unruly eucalypts and scrubs have been refashioned for this landscape. The pavilions for the Tea House, Cultural Centre, Arbour, Edo Cottage, and Pottery House maintain the traditional character of such building types and were designed by Takeo Adachi and Tatsushi Aono and then adapted to 5. Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi, interview with Don Kibbler and Tony Mooney, November 19, 2016, at Cowra.

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Figure 7.1:  Cowra Japanese Garden. Photo by the author, 2012.

comply with Australian professional standards by John Pierre Favre and Andrew Gidney (160). Both landscape design and building practices converted the garden into a hybrid and transnational space. Far from seeing these measures as a compromise, Nakajima elected to have his ashes scattered in the garden when he died. The Cowra Japanese Garden’s dissonance is largely due to its incongruity in inserting a piece of the Japanese homeland into Australian soil. Because its creation and continuation are dependent on local tourism revenue, the audience for this garden has different expectations of it, similar to many Orientalized garden spaces across Australia, with no anticipation of a darker history. Indeed, because it is not on the former POW camp site and makes no explicit reference to that story, its significance has to be learned by connecting it to a constellation of memorial spaces within the larger Cowra Peace Precinct. This includes the war cemetery, the memorial to the four deceased guards, a ‘peace bell’, and the former POW camp site. The latter space is under development since its recovery by the local council and subsequent national heritage listing in 2001. An early intervention was the erection of a sentry tower located at the street entrance to the property from which the story of the breakout was related in a motion-sensitive audio recording. In every visit that I have made to Cowra since 2012, including with architectural students exploring the design of an interpretive centre for the site, we have witnessed the landscape management plan unfold. Pathways around the camp, excavation of gardens created by Italian POWs, and the design of storyboards have animated the largely empty

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site. The only remaining original structure in the area is a battery room built by Italian POWs in a distinctively northern-Italian stone masonry technique. As a key feature in a constellation of sites, the former POW camp holds less significance than the Cowra Japanese Garden, due to the spectacular aesthetic beauty of the former and the effort expended in maintaining it. Their connection must be learned by visiting the exhibit at the Cowra Information Centre at the entrance off the highway into the town, some distance from the garden and the camp. The story has grown over the years through the accumulation of themes: the cemetery in 1964, the annual festival of international understanding from 1965, the two stages of the Cowra Japanese Garden’s completion in 1979 and 1985, and the 1992 gift to Australia of a ‘peace bell’ from Japan, similar to the one outside the UN Headquarters building. Cowra and Japan established a high school student exchange programme in 1970 (Cowra Council, n.d.). In 1991 an avenue of cherry trees was planted connecting the camp to the Japanese War Cemetery and the Cowra Japanese Garden, allowing for the celebration of the annual Sakura Matsuri (Cherry-Blossom Festival). At Naoetsu, in contrast, several commemorative strategies were overlaid on the former POW camp site. On a visit to Naoetsu in September of 2017, at the beginning of autumn when the site was still green, I had a better opportunity for studying the design of the Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park. With up to 80 per cent of the local community supporting the endeavour through fundraising, the resulting modest urban garden is embellished with a central monument and a museum building. The latter was originally a domestic house that was retained when the site was purchased and remained there when the park was opened in 1995. It is used as an education centre and repository for artefacts. When I asked Yoshi Kondo why the landscape was designed as a Western-style park rather than a Japanese garden, his response was that traditional gardens are associated with temples and shrines. Their use for cultural diplomacy, as a key aesthetic export, raises a range of interesting questions regarding how Japan projects its identity when peace building overseas. At Naoetsu, in contrast, the park simply serves to integrate a central sculptural feature, a series of memorials, and a cluster of trees. Each of these features bears separate meanings, much like the distinct parts of the constellation at Cowra (Figure 7.2). At the southern end of the site, representing the past, are five blue gums (Eucalyptus cinerea), representing five of the Australian states, and a monument to the Australian soldiers who came via Singapore—a girl holding a tropical cowrie shell titled ‘over the waves’ in allusion to their journey across the ocean. The park also contains two cenotaphs for the eight executed guards and the sixty deceased Australians—rigid rectangular boxes in black granite. In the northern part of the site, representing the future, is a circular plaza and two ‘Peace and Friendship Statues’ designed by the local sculptor Tetsuji Okamoto. Two angels adorned with gum leaves and cherry blossoms, respectively, symbolize the two countries. A lone

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Figure 7.2:  Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park. Photo by the author, 2017.

koala hugging a gum tree stump at the museum entrance makes the Australian connection explicit. Many disparate geographies—of Japan, of Australia, and of Singapore—are folded into the Naoetsu site. As in the case of Cowra, gum leaves and cherry blossoms symbolize Australia and Japan, while Singapore is identified by a cowrie shell. Although not as carefully choreographed as at Cowra, the presence of blue gums and the plainness of the Western-style landscaping are more suggestive of an Australian park. Botanical species are deployed for heritage diplomacy.

Conclusion: Organic Memory Making This chapter has described a range of multilayered and transnational heritage practices as organically producing the Cowra and Naoetsu memorial landscapes over time. Central to these processes are the involvement of local communities and exchanges of plant species identified with former enemy nations with whom reconciliation is sought. Gardens and parks, arguably, are the most innocuous form of dressing for dissonant heritage. They are less confronting than physical memorials or cemeteries. Both at Naoetsu and Cowra, creating these spaces required a deal of persuasion, but the townspeople were eventually won over and came on board.

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Introducing plant species is not without problems. The first group of cherry trees planted on Cowra’s Anzac Avenue became diseased and were removed to be replaced with apple trees until they could find a sustainable alternative. The strict biosecurity laws of both Japan and Australia affected the importation of species. I learned that the eucalypts Tony Mooney planted at Naoetsu in 2003 had been acquired from Nara. Both at Naoetsu and Cowra, non-endemic species had to be acclimatized to survive. The plants were also affected by the change of setting. Cowra suffered a severe drought in the early years of the garden’s inception, causing many plants to die, and was saved through the efforts of the local community in hand-watering plants in shifts (Blacha 2015, 154). At Joetsu City Hall, the original eucalyptus seedlings produced trees so large that they had to be cut down.6 There are some incidents of hostility towards such spaces from locals or visitors. When visiting the Cowra POW Camp site in 2014, I noticed graffiti on a storyboard stating that the person’s uncle had been a POW and that s/he could never forgive the Japanese. Such tensions that unfold over these invented landscapes show that organically evolving heritage practices may contain many contradictory and conflicting memories. Generational tensions and hostilities due to the deaths of family members as well as national sentiment towards specific events impact how reconciliatory efforts are received. The same plant species have been used by Japan for imperial expressions of diplomacy in the past, for example, the 1910 gift of cherry trees to Washington DC, equating their emergence to a national footprint (National Park Service, n.d.). In discussing the organic heritage strategies at Naoetsu and Cowra, I emphasized the transnational and collaborative energies that enlivened what were essentially local, subnational practices. Their capacity for using landscape aesthetics for conveying deeper reconciliatory messages has much to do with visitor recognition of their visual incongruity and incorporated meanings. Their evocation of extrageographical spaces using imported botanical species, through the simulation of miniaturized landscape features, or mutual celebration of landscape events are central to this memory exchange. Where do you draw the boundaries between national, subnational, and transnational memory in such a simulated space? Visiting Naoetsu in 2017, I found recent plantings of second-generation ‘hibaku’ (witness) trees from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story of the POW camp and the efforts of Japanese people to address it was circumscribed, it seemed, by Japan’s discourse of civilian victimization pointing to the Allies’ culpability for the atomic bombings. The introduced plantings diverted attention from the desire for dialogic reconciliation towards that other overpowering national narrative. Fundamental to organic heritage diplomacy, therefore, is the resolve and resistance of community custodians in protecting the pre-eminence of situated memories. 6. Author’s communication with Yoshikazu Kondo, 2017.

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Acknowledgements This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (no. 140100190) under the title ‘Temporal Cities, Provisional Citizens: Architectures ofInternment, 2015–2018’, and a University of Melbourne Establishment Grant. Thanks to Lawrance Ryan at Cowra and Yoshikazu Kondo at Naoetsu for communications on this topic and to Miki Hawkinson for translating documents from Japanese to English.

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Inglis, Ken, and Jan Brazier. 2008. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Japan-Australia Society of Joetsu. 1996. A Bridge across the Pacific Ocean [in Japanese]. Joetsu: Japan-Australia Society. Kobayashi, Ai, and Bart Ziino. 2009. ‘Cowra Japanese War Cemetery’. In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’, edited by William Logan and Keir Reeves, 169–93. Abingdon: Routledge. Kovner, Sarah. 2020. Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Logan, William, and Keir Reeves, eds. 2009. Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’. Abingdon: Routledge. Lyon, Alan B. 2000. Japanese War Crimes: Trials of the Naoetsu Camp Guards. Loftus, NSW: Australian Military History Publications. Maddrell, Avril, and James D. Sidaway. 2010. Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. Burlington: Ashgate. Miller, Patrick. 2007. ‘A Little Marvel of Timber and Tin—the Military P1 Hut of the Second World War’. Conference paper, Fourteenth National Engineering Heritage Conference, Crawley, Western Australia, September 18–21. Accessed June 21, 2021. https://www. vgls.vic.gov.au/client/en_AU/search/asset/1262145/0. National Park Service. n.d. ‘Cherry Blossom Festival’. Accessed June 23, 2021. https://www. nps.gov/subjects/cherryblossom/history-of-the-cherry-trees.htm. North China Marines. n.d. ‘Naoetsu 4-B’. Accessed June 23, 2021. http://www.northchina marines.com/id35.html. Pieris, Anoma, and Lynne Horiuchi. Forthcoming in 2022. The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. POW Research Network. n.d. ‘POW Camps in Japan Proper’. Accessed June 23, 2021. http:// www.powresearch.jp/en/archive/camplist/index.html#seikatsu. Takenaka, Akiko. 2015. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Post War. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Toland, John. 1970. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire. New York: Random House. Tunbridge, J. E., and Gregory Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester and New York: John Wiley. Twomey, Christina. 2007. Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Twomey, Christina, and Ernest Koh, eds. 2015. The Pacific War: Aftermaths, Remembrance and Culture. Abingdon: Routledge. Waterton, Emma, and Jason Dittmer. 2016. ‘Transnational War Memories in Australia’s Heritage Field’. Media International Australia 158 (1): 58–68. Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press. .

Part III Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Difficult Heritage Making

8 Staking Claims to Difficult Memories Diplomacy and Jewish Heritage in Shanghai and Beyond Shu-Mei Huang

Introduction Heritage making has allowed nation-states to step into memory as a contested terrain on which to compete with one another in producing historical statecraft. China, in particular, excels in this realm (Mayer 2018). This chapter presents how heritage is mobilized to present Chinese benevolence and generosity towards Jewish refugees during World War II, which exemplifies contemporary Chinese philoSemitism (Ainslie 2021), while, at the same time, attracting others and their different attempts at staking claims to the difficult memories of border crossings. This chapter investigates the tensions between national narratives of war memory, local urban-renewal initiatives, and the international politics of heritage, as Shanghai— and China—have sought to secure a role in commemorating what has been seen as the totemic atrocity of modern times: the Holocaust (also known as the Shoah). It will conclude, however, that this competition over memory and heritage might turn out to be more concealing than revealing. Over the past two centuries, diaspora Jews have reached China from different places and through various routes, leaving traces in the built heritage of colonial outposts like Hong Kong, Harbin, and Shanghai. Old synagogues have typically constituted the focus of efforts to preserve Jewish heritage, with a different emphasis or inflection in each case, though always with an eye to the transnational dimension. Of these three cases, Shanghai has assumed special prominence due to its role as a safe haven for Jewish refugees during World War II when travellers could arrive at the port without entry visas.1 Many of them settled in the Tilanqiao area of Shanghai, the basis for the research presented in this chapter. The designation of Tilanqiao as a 1. From the mid-nineteenth century, some Sephardi Jews arrived in Shanghai and Hong Kong following the establishment of British colonial power in the two outposts, the most well-known being the Kadoorie and Sassoon families. The largest group of Russian Jews arrived in Harbin to avoid oppression following the 1917 Revolution in Russia. The Jewish migrants enjoyed some level of economic and cultural prosperity until Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931. See O’Neill (2018).

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heritage area—associated with an ongoing effort to achieve a UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW) inscription for documentary heritage related to wartime Jewish refugees in Shanghai—is compared to other contested cases in China to shed light on the cross-border geographical and historical contingencies of heritage making, including but not limited to Sino-Israeli relations.

Unpacking the commemoration of Jewish heritage in China Preservation of Jewish heritage cannot be easily reconciled with the politically driven cultural nationalism that has driven ‘heritage fever’ in China (Zhu and Maags 2020), as it is about the Jewish community—foreigners to the country. Nostalgia, which is part of the emotional ground that supports preservation, is not as conveniently invoked, since Judaism is not officially recognized as a religion in China and the Jews are not one of China’s officially recognized ‘ethnic minority’ (shaoshu minzu) populations. Nostalgia availed from selective preservation of urban heritage has been instrumental and profitable in Shanghai, best exemplified in the case of Xintiandi, discussed below. Waley (2016) has taken note of ‘orientalizing gentrification’ in the former colonial metropoles of the Global East, which echoes Jiang and Vickers’ (2015) analysis of how Shanghai’s museums have increasingly been directed towards memories of the ‘exotic’ cosmopolitanism of the pre-1949 past and how this has contributed to a specific construction of civic identity on a local level. While this wider nostalgia-driven heritagization is less relevant in the case of Tilanqiao, the associated concept of ‘cosmonostalgia’ is worthy of further discussion. Often invoked in the context of Holocaust commemoration—the ‘paradigm case’ of cosmopolitan memory (Levy and Sznaider 2002)—it can help us understand the ‘memory boom’ around Holocaust memories since the 1980s. As a key constitutive case in the global assemblage of cosmopolitan memory, the Holocaust has been granted new meaning, as the blaming and accusing of the perpetrators has more recently been gradually replaced with claims of universalism and cosmopolitanism with a ‘future-orientation’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 102). Global and local cultures mutually bind and shape one another in mobilizing Holocaust memories to create ‘cosmopolitan memory’, sometimes by non-Jewish communities. Despite a growing recognition of Jewish heritage in Europe beyond a past tainted with anti-Semitism, Bunzl (2005) argues that anxiety towards ‘others’ continues to be deeply seated in universal claims to human rights and shared heritage for a global community. Jewish heritage has been incorporated into the imagination of ‘new Europe’ by right-wing groups seeking to exclude Islamic communities and African migrants. Macdonald (2013) discussed the workings of cosmonostalgia as harkening back to a prewar urbanism in which cosmopolitanism was the norm and the Jewish urban citizens contributed to the vitality of urban life. Cosmonostalgia as such might contribute to a polarized dichotomy of urbanity as accommodating of open, liberal universalism as opposed to backward, conservative rurality.

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In the case of Shanghai, cosmonostalgia is further complicated by political ideology; it represents one pole less on an urban-rural dichotomy than on a socialistcapitalist dichotomy, which can be seen in how the city’s past was rejected during the Mao Zedong era (Jiang and Vickers 2015).

Nostalgia as resistance In comparing Shanghai and Berlin, Lu Pan (2013) argued that in China nostalgia emerges as a form of power struggle in exhibiting competing understandings of modernity and reclaiming the legitimacy of pre-revolutionary urbanity, the plurality of whose local heritage didn’t enjoy favourable fame in the national context. Shanghai was a city that was only partially under Chinese control during the transition from the Qing dynasty to the Republic of China, and significant parts of the city were ruled as semi-colonies. The urbanity of Shanghai, which inevitably involved colonial capitalists accumulating wealth, made it a target for the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Pan 2016). The traditional Shanghainese residential architectural form of the Shikumen—distinguished by high brick walls enclosing a narrow front yard (a crystallization of the reinvention of modernity in a local context)—was not recognized as legitimate Chinese heritage by the state given that the Shikumen were largely built by foreign developers and foreign landlords to accommodate both the foreign and Chinese residents of Shanghai between the 1870s and the 1930s (Ren 2008; Wu 2015). Behind the notable speculative urbanism of the past two decades (He and Qian 2017; Shin 2016), Shanghai is remaking claims to its suppressed urban past and the cosmopolitanism of the prewar period. In the context of neoliberalizing China, there has been a tendency to romanticize Shanghai’s cosmopolitan ‘pre-Liberation’ past (Jiang and Vickers 2015). Nevertheless, the geography of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past has been mostly limited to the French Concession and the Bund. The district of Hongkou (known as Hongkew before World War II) was until recently not included in the cultural imagination of cosmopolitan Shanghai, and as such the cosmopolitan memories invoked by prewar Jewish life in the district are of special significance. In particular, the preserving of prewar Shikumen inhabited by Jews in Hongkou—the absent cosmopolitan subjects from whom the sense of cosmopolitanism is mobilized—raises intriguing questions, to which I turn next.

The Development of Tilanqiao Heritage Area and Its Recent Turn to Documentary Heritage In Shanghai, the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed rapid urban transformation in the build-up to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. During this time, the subject of heritage also made significant progress in the face of the obvious threats posed by massive and unprecedented demolition in the city. In 2004, Tilanqiao—a

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region of roughly twenty-nine hectares in Hongkou—was named a heritage area, Shanghai’s twelfth such area.2 Around the same time, the ultra-commercial, highend shopping and entertainment area of Xintiandi, built around the site of the First National Congress of the CCP in 1921, broke ground; it was later to be hailed as a successful ‘property-led redevelopment’ (He and Wu 2005; Wai 2006). Tilanqiao did not become another Xintiandi as the Hongkou District Government had hoped. Tilanqiao, as part of Hongkou, remains relatively rural and is considered inferior to inner-city districts such as Jing’an or Xuhui. In an effort to counteract its aura of backwardness, the street administration name ‘Tilanqiao’ was changed to the ‘North Bund’ (Beiwaitan) in 2018,3 but the area of about 178,000 registered residents, migrant workers not included, has remained relatively underdeveloped. During the war years, Tilanqiao presented different forms of imprisonment side by side, a Jewish ghetto and Tilanqiao Prison, forming an interesting and ‘difficult’ case of urban heritage. Today, the Jews are mostly gone. Taking a walk on Zhoushan Road in Tilanqiao today, one can still see some local residents drying clothes against the high wall of Tilanqiao Prison, which was built under the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) in the early twentieth century. Nearby are European gable houses, brick-built and characterized by arched windows and dormers. Now mostly occupied by lower-middle-class tenants and small shops, many of these are buildings with intriguing pre-Liberation histories. A decorative tile on the ground reading ‘Ark Shanghai’ indicates the historical theme officially chosen by the district government to frame the local past, highlighting how Tilanqiao served as a safe haven for the Jews during World War II. Hongkou was sparsely populated until the establishment of an international settlement took root. In 1903, the SMC built a sizeable, modern-style prison based on Singaporean and Canadian designs and named it the Ward Road Gaol. Once seen as the ‘Alcatraz of the Orient’, it gradually became the centre of a new urban neighbourhood. Before the 1930s, Tilanqiao was inhabited by a mix of foreigners and Chinese residents coming from the outlying villages. Many Chinese fled to avoid the Japanese air raids starting from the late 1930s, leaving behind some empty plots and damaged properties for the Jews who arrived between 1938 and 1940 (Ristaino 2001, 105–6). The enclave became formalized when the Japanese authorities (who took over Hongkou from the SMC after August 13, 1937) were pressured by the Nazis to establish the ‘Shitei chiku’ (meaning ‘designated area’ in Japanese), effectively a ghetto, to limit the mobility of roughly 20,000 stateless Jews on February

2. In 2003–2004, the Shanghai government approved eleven heritage areas. Tilanqiao became the twelfth when it was added to the list in 2004. 3. Although the North Bund is now the official name of the area, the more historically meaningful name of Tilanqiao remains in the name of the heritage area. The Jewish refugees in Shanghai would mostly have known the area as Hongkew (see Figure 8.1).

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18, 1943 (Ristaino 2001, 190–91).4 From 1943 to 1949, the Jewish refugees shared the designated area of forty blocks along with 100,000 Chinese residents. Postwar Chinese arrivals from the environs of Shanghai took over the remaining buildings after most Jewish people left for the US, Australia, or returned to Europe in the late 1940s. Some of those Shanghai Jews made it to Palestine after Israel was established in 1949.5 The prison was taken over and renamed by the CCP regime. The area remained underdeveloped until the 1990s. Most of its new development has been purposefully concentrated along the Huangpu River under the vision of remaking the industrial, dilapidated area between the waterfront and Tilanqiao into the ‘North Bund’. In 2001, a plan to build the Shanghai Port International Cruise Terminal in the North Bund area was proposed as a major state infrastructure investment project. Yet, soon after some early conceptual schemes were released, a few Shanghai-based Jewish groups and individuals started to campaign for more recognition of the Jewish memories in Tilanqiao. Some local historians and heritage experts also raised criticisms and eventually secured the preservation of the historical buildings in Tilanqiao and its status as a heritage area. Ron Yi-San, one of the most important heritage experts in China, was the key figure in the campaign during the early 2000s.

Selective preservation and the turn to documentary heritage The heritage area designation did not, however, guarantee the preservation of all significant local buildings. The Hongkou District Government continued to prioritize urban redevelopment over heritage preservation. Why weren’t there any developers being attracted to regenerate the place as there were in Xintiandi? One reason was that Tilanqiao Heritage Area cannot easily fit into the stages/prototypes identified by Zhong and Chen (2017), for its positioning in Hongkou and its built fabrics make it a rather difficult case. It is primarily composed of Grade-C listed buildings—mostly Shikumen houses that form lilongs (once the lowest level of self-governing administrative organs in urban Shanghai and still used in colloquial terms to refer to ‘residential communities’ in general); each of them may have only limited architectural value, but overall the collective is significant. In addition, Tilanqiao Prison is a unique complex within the district and its presence has led 4. Not all the Jews in Shanghai were stateless, so the number of stateless Jews was smaller than the total Jewish population of Shanghai. 5. The continual displacement of European Jews was sadly and ironically echoed in the forcing of more than 750,000 Palestinians to leave their homeland for the political project of establishing a Jewish nation-state, Israel. See more in Pappe (2017). In conversation with a Palestinian friend, she expressed concern that this chapter might isolate the discussion of Jews in Shanghai and their postwar movement from the long-term narrative of Zionism and the critical support granted by the British Empire, which would (again) marginalize the experiences and memories of the Indigenous communities of Palestine. While this concern is extremely valuable, this research is nevertheless limited by its scope and therefore cannot answer many important questions, such as whether or not there is any link between Zionism and the immigration of the Shanghai Jews to Israel. More research would be needed to address these remaining debates.

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to the view that the area is a relatively backward place inhabited by outlaws and rural migrants. During the 1990s, the prison was, ironically, the only listed historical building in Tilanqiao (Grade-A listed), commemorated as a site where Japanese war criminals were sentenced. At that time Jewish refugees did not feature as a focus of the local heritage narrative. The extensive lilongs accounted for 72.5 per cent of the residential landscape in Shanghai during the 1940s (Zhong and Chen, 2017) and were home to many of the Jewish refugees arriving in Hongkou. After the war, these buildings were confiscated by the municipal government to accommodate Chinese residents returning to the city. They have continued to serve as municipal social housing until today; those in Tilanqiao Heritage Area are prime examples. How to accommodate the sheer number of current tenants while preserving these buildings has presented a significant challenge, especially after the rise of Shanghai’s housing market in the 2000s elevated the opportunity costs of maintaining these low-rise buildings rather than redeveloping them. Preserving a large swathe of Grade-C listed buildings would have required a considerable amount of money to relocate urban tenants, at least four billion yuan, according to the state-appointed heritage experts (Zhang 2006).6 Yet, the district government has seemed hesitant to take decisive steps to ensure preservation, except in relation to a few selected monuments, such as Ohel Moshe Synagogue or the reconstructed White Horse Inn. Several attempts at further heritagizing Tilanqiao have come up over the past twenty years. There was the establishment of a prison museum in 1999 and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (hereinafter the SJRM) was opened in the former Ohel Moshe Synagogue building in 2007. There was an earlier project for listing Tilanqiao as a World Heritage Site (WHS) with which some Shanghainese advocates wished to get rid of the shame of Shanghai not having any such sites. In 2013, some news headlines suggested that the prison would soon be relocated to make room for a comprehensive adaptive reuse programme. Nevertheless, it continues to be an operational prison to this day. The adaptive reuse plan was brought up again in late 2020 and early 2021. Since 2010, more effort has been made to feature memories of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, the latest being the attempt at securing a UNESCO MoW inscription, which has shifted the focus from built heritage to documentary heritage related to difficult memories. Finally, in May 2019, an official statement issued by the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism clearly stated that the municipal government had decided to prioritize seeking an MoW inscription rather than WHS status, based largely on considerations of feasibility.

6. The proposed relocation of the Tilanqiao residents is in contrast with the redevelopment model of another of Shanghai’s historical Shikumen developments Cité Bourgogne, or Bugao Li, where the tenants were able to remain while their quality of life was also improved.

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Figure 8.1:  Ohel Moshe Synagogue was restored and converted into the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in 2007. The synagogue was designated as a historical building by the Shanghai Municipal Government in 2014. Photos by the author, September 2018.

Retrospective prophecies? Organizing pasts through museum making In contrast to the fading memories associated with the prison, the memories of the city’s Jews have recently been seen as a unique ‘cultural name card’ for Shanghai. This has led to the restoration of Ohel Moshe Synagogue and the establishment of the SJRM, resulting from a diplomatic move to celebrate the friendship between Israel and China. Part of the momentum came from a growing interest in Jewish studies that followed the establishment of the Sino-Israeli relationship in 1992, while another part of the momentum, arguably, came from Jewish communities in America. For Pan (2015), the SJRM is evidence of a new approach to the commemoration of World War II in China, replacing victimhood with the promotion of the Chinese people’s contribution to accommodating Jewish refugees during the war. The Chinese-led narrative of friendship invites interrogation, considering that Shanghai in the 1930s–1945 was increasingly dominated by Japan. The Japanese administration actually considered the arrival of Jewish refugees to be a diplomatic asset as exemplified in the ‘Fugu Plan’ in which a Jewish settlement was to be built in the Japanese Empire (Kearney 1993), possibly improving its ties with the US. In

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his book Japanese, Nazis and Jews David Kranzler (1976) states that Japan’s position was ultimately pro-Jewish. During the six months following the ‘Five Ministers’ Conference’,7 lax restrictions for entering the International Settlement allowed 15,000–20,000 Jewish refugees to be admitted to the Japanese sector in Shanghai. Others argue differently and suggest that Japanese and Chinese were both profoundly influenced by anti-Semitic ideas that encouraged them to see the Jews as mysteriously ‘powerful’ and therefore worth cultivating (Gao 2013; Vickers, forthcoming). The belief spurred competition in the 1930s between Japan and China for Jewish support and then seemingly again today with the two nations’ competition in heritagizing memories of saving Jews during World War II. But the reality was certainly not only about great humanity and friendship. At its peak, better-off Jewish refugees settled in the French Concession while poorer families found shelter in Hongkou. This soon brought about serious competition for housing and other resources (Ristaino 2001). Upon seeing refugees flooding into Shanghai, the Japanese carried out control measures to regulate the taking in of Jewish travellers on August 4, 1939. Several proposals by different parties suggested settling the arriving Jewish refugees elsewhere. The Chinese government (then in Chongqing) proposed establishing a refugee camp on Hainan Island. The US proposed resettling them on Polillo Island or Mindanao Island in the Philippines (Ristaino 2001, 116–17). The most ambitious suggestion came from a Jewish businessman, Jacob Berglas, who proposed moving roughly 10,000 Jews to Yunnan province. None of these ideas were realized, but the correspondence between international Jewish communities and these parties suggests that political-economic interests were weighed against the dire needs of the refugees. The current Chinese narrative, with contingent support from the Israeli government, tends to simplify the complexity of conflict and competition among the refugees in Shanghai. It portrays the Hongkou residents as consisting simply of Jewish refugees and poor Chinese while focusing on how much assistance was offered by the Chinese to the Jews.8 Today, under state supervision there has been a long process of archival collection and negotiation with a view to making individual memories part of a national ideological spectacle. Some relatives, according to Jin (2017), have had reservations about donating their family treasures to the SJRM, which the author has also observed. To encourage them to donate items to enrich its collection, the SJRM has, since 2011, held exhibitions in the most popular destinations for Jewish settlement after World War II, including Israel, the US, and Australia. One of the most recent 7. On December 5, 1938, a secret meeting of the highest officials in the Japanese government, attended by the prime minister, foreign minister, minister of finance, army minister, and naval minister, to discuss the government’s position on Jewish matters. Some members of the cabinet argued that a population of Jews would be an asset to Japan, attracting foreign capital and improving global attitudes towards Japan. The meeting ultimately proved a key step in the formulation of the ‘Fugu Plan’. 8. Edward Vickers (forthcoming) provides in-depth analysis of the exhibition content of the SJRM.

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examples could be found at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York from March to June 2019.9 Meanwhile, there have also been exhibitions sponsored by non-governmental actors like that accompanying the launch of the book Someday We Will Fly (DeWoskin 2019) in Chicago. The SJRM has continued to collect archives and artefacts to ensure that the positive ‘Ark Shanghai’ narrative can be more rigorously supported. Wang (2017) carefully reviews how the Shanghai Jewish refugees have been singled out among other memories of displacement and made into the ‘Shanghai myth’ embodied in the creation of the SJRM. Certainly, the memories of the refugees are not themselves a fabrication, but the narrative and the discursive claims made about them, according to Wang, are debatable. Up until the 1980s, Ohel Moshe Synagogue had been used as a government building. At that time, elderly Shanghai Jewish refugees started to visit Tilanqiao and increasingly the synagogue attracted interest because it was the only building that was at times open to the public. The formalization of Sino-Israeli relations and the fact that the then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was himself a second-generation Shanghailander led to a more significant transformation of the synagogue into a space of commemoration and reception in the 1990s. ‘Misfortune’ was the theme of the exhibition at the synagogue until the 2000s. The political potential of its history had yet to be mobilized at that point. Starting in 2005, the year when China celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘World’s Anti-Fascist War’, the metaphor of Noah’s Ark was used by Chinese officials to emphasize the significance of Shanghai as a haven during wartime. The theme soon appeared in public discourse and academic writing and dominated the social imagery of Tilanqiao. A book by the appointed heritage expert (Zhang 2006), titled in accordance with the wider Noah’s Ark theme, detailed the process of Tilanqiao’s 2004 listing as a heritage area and its architectural value. Among others, Ohel Moshe was listed as an outstanding historical building. A comprehensive renovation of the SJRM was undertaken in 2007. From this time, we start to see two lines of effort behind the Shanghai myth coming together, one searching for representation in geopolitics and the other based in heritage preservation. Other than the seemingly objective architectural value of the buildings, the ‘Shanghai myth’ has its political use. The heritage diplomacy between Israel and China took shape in its collaboration over creating an interactive database of the around 30,000 Shanghai Jews in 2008, which concurred with the sixtieth anniversary of the Israeli declaration of independence and the Beijing Olympics (Gutman 2008). Some Jewish media exhorted their nationals on the eve of the Olympics to remember the ‘brief but momentous history of the Jewish life in contemporary China, that short but 9. The exhibit, titled ‘Jewish Refugees in Shanghai: Multi-branch Exhibition, Film & Discussion Series’, was organized in collaboration with the Amud Aish Memorial Museum and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. See more at: https://www.bklynlibrary.org/event-series/jewish-refugees-exhibit.

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exceptional story of our people beyond the Great Wall of China’ (Kaufman 2008). Both sides expressed their enthusiasm. The recollection of the forgotten memories of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai seems to involve a great deal of ‘retrospective prophecy’ (Bennett 1995, 177–78). No one can comprehend what exactly happened, but there are many actors in competition with one another. If we accept that ‘China’ assisted the fleeing Jews, the question of who at the time represented ‘China’ is one such issue. There have been debates over who issued the most visas to Jews for them to arrive in China, Liu Yiwen from Manchukuo or He Fengshan of the Republican government. Japan also highlighted the contribution of Sugihara Chiune, a Japanese diplomat who served as vice-consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, for his offering an escape route to the suffering Jews in Europe. We can see clearly how this imagined competition plays out in the official words of a recent press release by the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism (May 2019), which contrasts with one local historian’s opinion that the credit should go to the Japanese who controlled Shanghai at the time.10 Or, at least, the interpretation should be left open since the admission of Jewish refugees was mostly the result of administrative gaps between different governing authorities (Zhou 2018). Some recent work unveiled the fluctuating nature of the Japanese governance of the Jews at the time—shifting from viewing the Jews as potential productive workforce to seeing them as dependents worsening the competition over housing and other resources in Hongkou (Ristaino 2001, 106–7), which has been obscured, if not erased, in the process of heritagization. Heritage diplomacy (Winter 2015) has been at work too. In November 2015, there was a screening of the documentary series Survival in Shanghai at Park East Synagogue in New York. The event, co-sponsored by the Israeli Embassy and the American Jewish Committee, attracted more than 200 attendees. Earlier, in April 2006, a group of international Jewish visitors arrived in Hongkou, joining tours arranged by the district government. The administration’s enthusiasm for preserving its Jewish heritage was unprecedented—or, at least, it was not the case when the former secretary of the treasury in the US, Werner Michael Blumenthal, once a Shanghai Jewish refugee himself, made his first memorable return to Hongkou in 1979 (Rowen 1979). Narratives and old photos of the urban landscape of Hongkou during wartime were exhibited along with the screening and the tours. Oftentimes, ‘Little Vienna’ was identified as representing the high culture of the European Jews in the exhibits. International actors outside of China have also shown their interest in recollecting the past. Among others, a present documentary initiative sponsored by the US broadcaster PBS has been considering telling the story through the lens of the cultural transfer of classical music between Europe and Shanghai (local member of staff of the documentary production team, interviewed by the author, November 10. Private communication with the author, August 2019.

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20, 2019). An earlier oral history project of the Shanghai Jewish community led by Steve Hochstadt paints a less cheerful picture, the archives filled with details about loss and suffering.11 What’s almost entirely missing from the existing initiatives, though, are the 2000 Polish and Lithuanian Jews who arrived in Shanghai in 1941 (Hochstadt 2012). One Israeli scholar, who is a third-generation descendant of the Lithuanian Jewish refugees, kindly shared with me how the neglect is also prevailing in Lithuania today (interviewed by the author, March 19, 2019). In short, the reorganizing of the entangled pasts in Tilanqiao has been intense, varying from overt celebration to neglect. Multiple forces have staking claims to the Holocaust memories in Shanghai. How is such a transformation received by the Jewish community, especially when a coherent, united Jewish community does not seem to exist?

Preservation Politics of Synagogues in and beyond Shanghai Living Jewish heritage or a museum? Ohel Moshe Synagogue, which accommodates the SJRM, used to be one of the seven synagogues in Shanghai. Today, the only other surviving synagogue building is Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Jing’an district. Shanghai’s synagogues went through different transformations over the postwar years. The formalization of China-Israel diplomacy did not immediately bring about protection of synagogues. From the early 2000s some personnel from the Chinese side gradually became determined to promote the ‘correct’ story of Jews in China. Among others, Chen Chien, the current director of the SJRM, has worked hard to collect materials and archives. While the Jewish community celebrated the momentary revival of Jewish life at Ohel Rachel after sixty years (Lyons 2008), Chen and his team opted to focus on Ohel Moshe in collaboration with the Israeli government, focusing on the memories of Jewish refugees during 1938–1945, rather than the earlier arrival of Jews who contributed to the development of Shanghai into a global city and whose later development has extended across borders. To understand the different heritage politics of these two synagogues in the same city, I will review the attempts to restore Ohel Rachel from the late 1990s until now. Ohel Rachel was built in 1917–1920 by the affluent Sephardi Jew Jacob Elias Sassoon to commemorate his late wife Rachel Sassoon; it was used by the Jews in Shanghai from 1920 to 1952. Earlier, the same family built Ohel Leah Synagogue in Hong Kong in 1901.12 The Sassoons were one of the wealthiest families to originate from India, and an architectural and decorative style was adopted to reflect their 11. From the late 1980s to 2000s, the project collected oral histories of surviving Shanghai Jews, focusing especially on the German-speaking refugees. See: https://scarab.bates.edu/shanghai_oh/. 12. See Zhou’s (2014) work for a review of the Sassoons’ merchant history, starting from Baghdad, and their involvement in opium trading in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Asia.

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Figure 8.2:  Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai was once the largest synagogue in the city. Photo by H. C. Chang, November 2019.

origins (Seth Kaplan, interviewed by the author, May 6, 2020). Ohel Rachel was once the largest synagogue in Asia; within its grounds was also a mikveh or ritual bath (now gone) and the Shanghai Jewish School, now occupied by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Smith 1998). Soon after 1949, the People’s Republic of China confiscated Ohel Rachel. The interior furniture and decorations were subsequently destroyed, especially during the Cultural Revolution. It was used mainly for storage and office space for the Communist Party Youth League and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission until 1998. Fortunately, most of the original, religiously significant elements remain intact, such as the original ark where the Torahs were kept. Ivy has covered the building; it has leaks and the layers of wall paint have peeled in the humid climate of Shanghai. Still, among the remaining synagogues in China, Ohel Rachel remains relatively restorable. Over the past three decades, international Jewish leaders and the local Jewish community have urged the restoration of Ohel Rachel through petitioning of the Chinese government, diplomatic negotiation, and appeals to international heritage institutions. Two years after the 1992 formalization of Sino-Israeli diplomatic ties, the city of Shanghai designated the site a Grade-B landmark. In the 1990s–2000s, as China seemed to be opening up, the growing Jewish community in Shanghai started to mobilize more support for restoring the synagogue, including leveraging

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support from the US government and having First Lady Hillary Clinton visit Ohel Rachel in 1998. It was only in preparation for this visit that the municipal government made some repairs to the building (Lyons 2008). Those who were involved in organizing Clinton’s visit saw it as much easier to engage with the US government than the Israeli government in advocating for restoration (Seth Kaplan, interviewed by the author, May 6, 2020). In June 1998, the restoration of Ohel Rachel for the US presidential delegation represented a flickering hope for freedom of religion in China (Goldberg and Kaptzan 1998). An informal diplomatic agreement over preserving and reopening Ohel Rachel was made between the American rabbi Arthur Schneier and Shanghai mayor Xu Kuangdi; the plan to restore, protect, and reopen the historic synagogue was, however, never carried out to the degree agreed upon (Historic Shanghai, n.d.). In parallel to the preservation effort was the postwar formal establishment of a branch of the Chabad-Lubavitch Educational Center in Shanghai in 1998, following Rabbi Shalom Greenberg moving to the city to minister to the growing Jewish community. In 1998, for the first time in nearly fifty years, the Shanghai Jewish community was given permission to open the building for one of the days of Passover—Chinese government officials sanctioned the building’s use as a venue for the ‘cultural event’ of the Jewish community as Judaism was ‘not a recognized religion in China’ (Chabad News 1999). Many Jewish people expressed that they preferred to worship in the synagogue rather than visit as tourists (Smith 1998). Realizing that the city of Shanghai had limited authority over the property, the Jewish Community of Shanghai (JCS)—and organization of Jews in Shanghai— decided to engage with the World Monuments Fund (WMF) to globalize its advocacy for preservation. The JCS used to be quite active in the 2000s and the preservation campaign was led by several professionals (lawyers, university professors, businesspeople, etc.) living in Shanghai at the time. In a phone interview, Seth Kaplan, one of the key people in the earlier effort of preserving Ohel Rachel and a contact person of the latest nomination, suggested that politics always matter: During the 2000s, then the district government or even the municipal government might have been interested, yet even back then all the conversation on Ohel Rachel had to go through Beijing. China was actually relatively open during the 1990s–2000s but even then, it ha[d] to go through Beijing . . . the local administration did not have authority over that building. (Seth Kaplan, interview with the author, May 6, 2020)

Kaplan’s comments touch upon the sensitivity of Jewish heritage in China and the differentiated ownership of Jewish heritage in Shanghai. While the Hongkou District Government has enjoyed more authority over the preservation and conversion of the Ohel Moshe building, the Jing’an District Government did not have much control over Ohel Rachel. In effect, the synagogue was never owned by the district government but rather by the Shanghai Municipal Government. It has been clear

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that even the municipal government does not dare to redesignate the synagogue as ‘Jewish heritage’ without permission from the central government in Beijing. In 2002, Ohel Rachel was placed on the WMF’s World Monuments Watch List due to its falling into disrepair again.13 The JCS sought to return it to its 1920 appearance. The Jewish Heritage Program of the WMF provided a grant for the planning stages of the project.14 In two years, the JCS, working closely with the WMF, created a long-term management plan. Some basic restoration and maintenance efforts were made. WMF placed the synagogue on the Watch List again in 2004 to show continued support for the project. According to Henry Ng, then the WMF’s executive vice-president, Ohel Rachel was chosen for its symbolizing of the long history of the Jews in China: ‘This is really the only active synagogue that’s authentic left in all of China’ (quoted in Clark 2001, n.p.). Ng also noted the significance of having the Jewish community as a critical on-the-ground advocate for heritage. The aforementioned recognition of the Jewish community’s contribution to heritage does not seem to have been sustained, as it is shown in the failed nomination of Ohel Rachel for the WMF Watch List in 2018. Representing the same group who made the earlier nomination, Steve Fieldman, who was a lawyer and professor teaching in Shanghai in 2000 and is now the acting president of the JCS, has been working with his community on ‘getting the Ohel Rachel synagogue back’ since the 2000s (Wildman 2000). For the JCS, they want a place of worship, a place for the community, rather than a museum. The synagogue was used for regular Shabbat services during the 2010 World Expo, and for some years it has been temporarily opened for major holidays such as Hanukkah, Passover, and Purim. The extent to which it has been open to the public, however, has not expanded over time as expected. Thus far, it remains a closed property managed by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission with only selected openings for particular Jewish festivals. Yet the commitment to restoring the building back to its 1920 form has been strong, shared among the local Jewish and international communities. The JCS observed that the city of Shanghai has shown itself extremely reluctant to sponsor any restorative work in the past two decades, while local and international preservationists have repeatedly offered to buy or rehabilitate it. Overall, it has been a winding, bumpy path. Kaplan thought it might also have to do with the different scale of heritage politics and different authority over these buildings. Beijing has had much more say in overseeing the case of Ohel Rachel than Ohel Moshe. The JCS prepared the nomination of Ohel Rachel for the WMF Watch List in 2018 but failed. With the nomination, they wished to convince the WMF and the 13. The World Monuments Fund publishes the list to bring attention to threatened cultural sites around the world. The fund revises its list every two years. The 2002 list also included one other synagogue—Subotica Synagogue in Yugoslavia built in 1902. 14. Since 1988, WMF’s Jewish Heritage Program has supported conservation work at nearly sixty sites to preserve monuments to Jewish traditions and faith. Among others, Ohel Rachel Synagogue is listed as the only one Jewish heritage in China. See more at https://www.wmf.org/jewish-heritage-program.

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Chinese government that a vibrant Jewish community would attract new residents and investments to Shanghai and assist in China’s economic growth. Yet, the WMF did not accept the nomination for a number of reasons, one of which is the lack of foreseeable positive impact of the nomination,15 a decision which upset the JCS. The fact that the two synagogues are located in two districts in urban Shanghai also matters. Similar to what I have learned, Kaplan talked about Hongkou as being relatively peripheral and underdeveloped until the 1930s: ‘Hongkou . . . was not and continued not to be the most attractive part of the city’ (Seth Kaplan, interviewed by the author, May 6, 2020). In this light, the Hongkou District Government had more motivation to highlight the memories of Jewish refugees via preserving Ohel Moshe while the Jing’an District Government had relatively little interest in doing the same with Ohel Rachel. Ohel Rachel is located in the centre of Jing’an district, a stand-alone, architecturally important building. According to Kaplan, ‘In Jing’an, they have a lot of properties and heritage. In Hongkou, it was just convenient. They [meaning the Hongkou District Government] found it useful’ (Seth Kaplan, interviewed by the author, May 6, 2020). His response echoes what I have learned from talking to other Shanghai-based planners—they felt that the Hongkou District Government just had less heritage to start with, so Ohel Moshe stood out for them as an asset. Juxtaposing the two synagogues in two parts of Shanghai, it is quite clear that China and Israel both agreed to neglect Ohel Rachel while celebrating the memories and histories anchored by the current adaptive reuse of Ohel Moshe as a museum. The best way to preserve and reopen these synagogues remains a question. The fact that Chinese government would not officially allow for a reversion back to religious use further complicates the nature of synagogues as Jewish heritage. The Chinese government seemingly prefers to see the Israeli state as the most legitimate partner in addressing so-called Jewish heritage. Yet, the Jews living in North America outnumber those in Israel, so the assumption that the Israeli state should lead the commemoration is questionable. Even among American Jews, there are different ‘agendas’ animating American Jewish associations. In the case of the synagogues in Shanghai, some are interested in preserving Ohel Rachel as a symbol of Shanghai’s wider pre-1949 Jewish heritage and perhaps as a centre for revived Jewish religious practice today; for others, the descendants of Jewish refugees, the heritage of the old Jewish commercial elites (the Sassoons, Kadoories, etc.), with whom Ohel Rachel is more closely associated, means relatively little. The latter camp appeared to be more narrowly interested in commemorating the Jewish refugee experience, and therefore might be more willing to subscribe to the official Chinese commemorative agenda.

15. WMF staff member, personal communication with the author, December 2019.

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Jewish heritage in Harbin and Hong Kong Moving beyond Shanghai, there is also an old synagogue in Harbin, a major city in North China. Harbin used to be a hub for Russian Jews following the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway. By 1903, a self-governing community of about 500 Jews existed in Harbin. The Jewish community had thrived and reached 25,000 people out of the 120,000 Russian residents in Harbin by the 1920s (O’Neill 2018). They developed a rich cultural scene in the north. In particular, Russian Jewish musicians contributed greatly to developing Western classical music in China (Qin 2016). Given the Republic of China’s support for Zionism,16 the Jews enjoyed relatively high level of religious freedom in Harbin. All kinds of investments and establishments of Jewish elites, including banks, hospitals, theatres, and of course synagogues, were once the most important landmarks of the city centre of Harbin, such as the Harbin Jewish National Bank and the Hotel Moderne, which still stand on Zhongyang Street. Unfortunately, the vibrant Jewish community was interrupted after Japanese influence loomed over North China from 1931. The Harbin Jewish community largely left for Shanghai after the 1933 kidnapping of Simon Kaspé, the son of the owner of Hotel Moderne, leaving only 5000 Jews in Harbin by 1935 (Ristaino 2001). In recent years, Harbin has endeavoured to capitalize on its cultural past which is best exemplified by the opening of the 121-acre Harbin Music Park in 2012. The government invested millions of dollars in restoring Jewish-built structures including the so-called ‘Old Synagogue’, built in 1909, where a local string quartet performed classical music and Chinese folk songs underneath its grand golden dome after it was restored and reopened to the public as a concert hall in 2014 (JTA 2014). Synagogues as religious spaces are converted into cultural spaces for the purpose of tourism promotion. China’s heritage policies have adopted ‘a particular understanding of “culture” to standardise, certify and legitimise Chinese religion’ (Zhu 2020). Since Judaism is officially not even legitimized as a religion in China, it seems obvious then that it has to be cultural. It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to further unveil the spatial politics of Jewish heritage in Harbin. Yet, it might be fair to say that the city of Harbin and the Hongkou District Government share a similar interest in leveraging the past for future development of cultural tourism to attract wealthy, Western, Jewish tourists (Lyons 2013). Interest in the Harbin Jewish community has only risen in the past decade, according to Dan Ben-Canaan, director of the Sino-Israel Research and Study Center at Heilongjiang University: ‘Fifteen years ago, there was zero interest and zero acknowledgment of the community’ (quoted in Qin 2016, n.p.).

16. Zionism as political project had gained momentum after the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which mandated British support for a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. It gradually gained international support between World War I and World War II, including from East Asia. See Goldstein (2004).

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Hong Kong’s Ohel Leah Synagogue, in contrast, has continued to be an orthodox synagogue, despite debates over the reconstruction of the Jewish Recreation Club as part of the compound in the 1990s (Li 2008). The project to conserve Ohel Leah received the Outstanding Project  Award  in the inaugural  UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards in the year 2000 (Lyons 2011). Sabbath is normally attended by 150 people at Ohel Leah. In Hong Kong, Judaism is a ‘living tradition’, whereas in Harbin and Shanghai it is effectively a culturalized artefact consigned to the museum. China and Israel have become important trading partners since the 1990s. Among others, the tycoon Li Ka-shing’s investment in telecommunications and water treatment in Israel has been one of the most ambitious and influential such examples since 1999. Horizon Ventures, one of the subsidiaries of Li’s business group, Cheung Kong Holdings, has invested extensively in the innovation technologies in Israel. Li’s investment has also extended to cross-border higher education that further links Shantou, China, and Haifa, Israel. In 2013, a donation by the Li Ka-shing Foundation allowed Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to establish a branch campus in Haifa and, at the same time, the Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Shantou where the Li family originates from. Many Chinese businesses followed suit. The 2010s witnessed closer Israel-China cooperation in infrastructure. In 2019, Israel awarded Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) a twenty-five-year concession to operate Haifa’s new Bay Terminal; SIPG will take over operations in 2021. Cities like Shanghai and Shantou have made themselves to become nodes of the deployment of international collaboration in different ways.

Conclusion: Tilanqiao as a Shifting Frontier of Memory This chapter discusses how difficult memories of Jews finding refuge in Tilanqiao have been recollected and represented as heritage by actors across borders. Local contestations around the narratives and initiatives associated with these two synagogues are constitutive of, and constituted by, international relations between China, Israel, the US, and beyond. These heritage-making actors do not necessarily agree with one another. For Chinese actors, the Jewish refugee experience has been represented as a rather positive aspect of wartime Shanghai, and local heritage has been strategically curated and framed in Hongkou for its specific use for the district in rebranding itself in line with this ‘cosmopolitan’ memory. For Jewish actors, the routes of their memories have gone beyond Tilanqiao and brought attention to different targets of preservation. Some initiatives might not necessarily correlate with one another very well. As such, Tilanqiao serves as a shifting frontier where borders and cracks of memories are exposed—in contrast to the present effort to fix Jewish heritage in particular sites, buildings, and culturalized understandings of Jewish footprints. Jewish refugee experiences in East Asia and their legacies have inevitably

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become a case of ‘difficult’ memory—notably, in the case of Shanghai, the difficulties are in attributing actions to any single nation-state, given the city’s intersection by multiple extraterritorialities during the war. It is difficult, therefore, not only in light of the hardships of the Jews surviving in foreign places but, moreover, for the challenges of navigating the multilateral nature of difficult heritage diplomacy (Huang and Lee 2020). As the difficult heritage discussed in this chapter is the result of multiple conflicts and wars, the strategic making of difficult heritage today does not seem to interrogate the past conflicts but to echo them. Heritage has been made in order for state actors to stake claims to others’ memories. What is at stake are multiple contemporary claims to heritage in which the most relevant state actor ensures a ‘correct’ narration of ‘cosmopolitan’ memories appealing enough to stimulate investment and tourism but which will not trigger unintended political incidents. Local governments have more interest in tourism and place-marketing while the Chinese state, on the diplomatic level, works with Israel to stage their dedication to peace and humanity. Nevertheless, this case of difficult memories embedded in prewar Shanghai, which was characterized by its extraterritoriality, raises questions about the retrospective, transnational staking of claims to the particular Hongkou chapter of the wider memory of the Holocaust, especially those by the states or those seeking to engage state power. How the multiple states are collaborating (or competing) to appropriate the past—especially China and Israel—before the establishment of the two states exposes how nationstates continue to dominate heritage and how that can be problematic. In this case China is probably doing more than Israel.17 On the recent turn to seeking a UNESCO MoW inscription in Tilanqiao, and its specific narratives of a certain degree of historical revisionism in reinterpreting the memories of refugees, an Israeli scholar of anthropology laughed and shared with me his witticism that ‘as long as it’s not anti-Semitism, we are fine with factual issues in understanding Jewish matters’. Meanwhile, he thought that Israelis might have more knowledge about the Kaifeng Jews than the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, which invokes a more Orientalist sense of diaspora than war memories (Eyal BenAri, interviewed by the author, March 19, 2019).18 His response certainly cannot represent every Jew—it is already very different from those who have been advocating for restoring the synagogues as synagogues. There seem to be differences between the Jewish societies and Jewish refugees (and their descendants) in the US. The former groups have closer relationships with the US government while the latter are less organized, scattered across borders, and might care less about which synagogue is selected for preservation, and as such, might be happy to support the Chinese campaign. 17. Similar assessment can be applied to Chapter 9 of this volume where PRC is staking claim to the Republican era of China to co-share the past with South Korea. 18. It is believed that the Kaifeng Jews have existed in China for at least a thousand years since the Northern Song dynasty. See more in Goldstein (1998).

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Finally, we might also want to reflect on how selective making of heritage and memory might be more concealing than illuminating. The celebration of cosmopolitanism disguises the fact that the fear of anti-Semitism is still much alive—recent cases have exemplified how it might creep into disputes surrounding the COVID19 pandemic.19 The opposition to and fear of anti-Semitism behind the global promotion of Holocaust memory, however, might also blind one to the continuous precarity of Palestine, lately in Gaza and Jerusalem. This reflection calls into question the contemporary appropriation of difficult heritage and memory intersected by difficult border crossings in Tilanqiao, a frontier of memory where aggressive claims to the past are rearticulating our relationship with difficult heritage and, in so doing, possibly make it even more of a contested terrain.

Acknowledgements This research has received financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (MOST109-2410-H002-168-MY2). Along with this funding, this project was completed thanks to the generosity and support of the numerous people who shared their insights, lived experiences, and familial memoires in Tilanqiao. I am particularly indebted to Lu Pan and Yujie Zhu whose knowledge about and connection with the community in Shanghai have helped ground this project. Sahera Bleibleh, Edward Vickers, Roslynn Ang, and Anoma Pieris provided critical comments to the earlier draft of the chapter. I am also grateful to research assistants who offered great help carrying out the fieldwork, including Hao-Chun Chang, Yao Wang, P. C. Yang, Lijing Yao, and Omos Dongi.

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9 From Offshore Heritage to Shared Heritage Transnational Difficult Heritage Making and the Shanghai Provisional Government of Korea Hyun Kyung Lee

We all together aspired to independence and dreamed of popular sovereignty. Those who harboured the chants of the March First Independence Movement in their hearts began to realize that common people like themselves were the main drivers of the independence movement and the rightful owners of the country. . . . The first fruition was the Provisional Republic of Korea Government, the root of a democratic republic. The Provisional Government stipulated ‘a democratic republic’ in Article 1 of its Charter, upholding the spirit of the March First Independence Movement. It was the first case in world history of a democratic republic expressly set forth in a constitution. —President Moon Jae-in’s address on March 1, 2019, marking the one hundredth anniversary of the March First Independence Movement (Korea Times 2019)

The year 2019 marked the centennial of the establishment of the Provisional Government of Korea in Shanghai, China, along with the one hundredth anniversary of Korea’s March First Independence Movement—the first nationwide resistance movement of colonial Korea against Japanese imperial power, which began on March 1, 1919. At a grand ceremony marking the centennial, President Moon Jae-in emphasized the inextricable link between the March First Independence Movement and the activities of the Provisional Government of Korea. As seen in the quote above, Moon reaffirmed the provisional government’s legitimacy as a root of the Republic of Korea and hailed its democratic spirit. In official narratives of South Korea’s colonial history, the March First Independence Movement is recorded as one of the most significant historic milestones that precipitated Korea’s independence movement, leading ultimately to Korea’s liberation from imperial Japan. In locating the Provisional Government of Korea as the ‘first fruition’ of the March First Independence Movement, Moon drew South Koreans’ attention to the Provisional Government of Korea: to its historic meaning and value in relation to South Korea’s democratic identity. Amid increasing interest in the history of the Provisional

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Government of Korea, increasing attention has fallen on the Shanghai Provisional Government of Korea (hereinafter SPGK), which is regarded as a starting point for the entire history not only of Korea’s provisional government but also of Korea’s national roots. Therefore, new academic efforts on re-examining the SPGK have been made by focusing on Korean independence activism at the international level and its political/legal system during the colonial period (e.g., Song 2019). However, this chapter pays attention to the heritagization of the SPGK during the postcolonial period in order to understand the diplomatic role of the SPGK in the national and international context. I examine the SPGK from the perspective of ‘difficult heritage’: places associated with traumatic historic events, differing interpretations of which have led to political dissonances and political conflicts affecting the formation of communities’ identities (see Logan and Reeves 2009; Macdonald 2009; see also the introductory chapter of this volume). Looking at the site of (one of) the former headquarters of the SPGK on Madang Road in Shanghai, which today houses a museum, I show how this difficult heritage site can be termed not only ‘offshore heritage’ from a South Korean perspective but also ‘shared heritage’ insofar as it relates to historical connections between South Korea and China. By analysing memory conflicts that played out during two stages of the SPGK’s heritagization, I investigate which factors have made this difficult heritage site more complicated as a site of shared heritage. I further argue that the dynamics of the ‘shared heritage’ construction can shift according to the nature of the transnational relationship between South Korea and China. In order to understand the dynamics of transnational cooperation relating to the heritage-making process of the SPGK between China and South Korea, this chapter treats heritage diplomacy as an analytic tool. Since heritage is considered to be a useful resource of soft power, it is often weaponized by states as a political or diplomatic tool (e.g., Nakano 2021). Akagawa (2014) defines heritage diplomacy as a part of cultural diplomacy and emphasizes the role of heritage conservation assistance and collaborative heritage programmes in the state’s strategies to increase its soft power. According to Winter (2015, 2016), heritage diplomacy extends beyond the mere usage of culture as a tool for strengthening international public and political relations. Winter notes that, while heritage diplomacy can be used to reconstruct strategic cross-border narratives and to enhance overall transnational cooperation, it can also result in increased dissonance and conflict between nations. Within this wider spectrum, heritage diplomacy is employed to not only win external support for international cooperation for heritage issues but to also strengthen the formation of a national identity that is driven by domestic desire (Nakano 2021). By scrutinizing the two stages of the SPGK’s heritagization, this chapter analyses the types of heritage diplomacy strategies which were implemented and how heritage diplomacy affected the construction of the shared heritage site’s ‘harmonious’ status. Additionally, this analysis provides the opportunity for an interesting comparison

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with cases of preserving Jewish heritage for commodifying ‘cosmonostalgia’ and staging peace in Shanghai (see Chapter 8 by Shu-Mei Huang). It is perhaps necessary to briefly explain the multifaceted, multilayered definition of shared heritage that informs this analysis. Both UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) promote the language of ‘shared heritage’ for the benefit of all of humanity and emphasize human beings’ responsibility and accountability to protect World Heritage sites. However, here, I use the term ‘shared heritage’ more narrowly, specifically to refer to the heritage shared between China and South Korea. Due to the scarcity of official documents regarding the heritagization of the SPGK, I rely particularly on the information drawn from newspaper articles, looking at journalists’ interviews with those who were involved in the heritagization process, as well as drawing upon interviews with key informants and architects who were associated with significant curation and restoration projects from the 1990s to the 2010s, many of whom chose to remain anonymous.

Locating the SPGK in Shanghai The provisional government had its origins within the French Concession in Shanghai, where it was founded immediately after the March First Independence Movement, on April 11, 1919, seeking international support for Korean independence from imperial Japan. In November 1919, the united Provisional Government of Korea was established in Shanghai by integrating scattered organizations related to the Korean independence movement formed earlier in the US, Russia, and Korea, including the SPGK (established in April 1919). Scholars have agreed on three reasons for Shanghai’s suitability in facilitating such an international Korean independence movement (e.g., Kim 2018). First, as a major trading port, Shanghai held powerful international influence as an emerging cosmopolitan city. Second, its welldeveloped transportation infrastructure and lack of visa requirements for entrants by train or boat meant Korean independence activists could travel through it freely. Third, the French Concession in Shanghai was relatively safe and free due to its extraterritoriality, and French officials had great compassion for Korean independence activists. Despite this ostensible safety, the SPGK relocated its Shanghai offices no fewer than thirteen times in response to Japanese pressure, and ultimately the Provisional Government of Korea had to leave Shanghai in 1932 (e.g., Chang 2019; Kim 2018): this was sparked by the killing of Japanese general Yoshinori Shirakawa by Korean activist Yoon Bong-gil in April in Shanghai during celebrations for Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s birthday. Prior to this assassination, Japanese troops occupied the French Concession in Shanghai during the January 28 Incident (also called the Shanghai Incident) in 1932. From then on, France tried to improve the peaceful relationship with Japan in order to retain its territory in Shanghai. As such, the French Concession was no longer safe for the Korean provisional government.

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After departing Shanghai, the Provisional Government of Korea relocated seven more times within China before the end of World War II (see Figure 9.1). Of the twenty-seven years of the Provisional Government of Korea’s existence in China (1919–1945), three original sites of the exile government remain: in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Chongqing. These today operate as three separate museums to commemorate the provisional government’s activities. The Former Site of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai is one of the most well-known and popular cases representing memories of the Provisional Government of Korea. Of those thirteen relocations within Shanghai, this site is not only the only one to have survived but was the one used as the provisional government’s headquarters for the longest period (1926–1932).1 The site, which now

Figure 9.1:  The relocation route of the former Provisional Government of Korea before the end of the Second World War. Illustration by Dami Kim and the author. 1. The site of the first headquarters of the SPGK is unknown but it is assumed to have been located on Ruijin Second Road (Ruijin Erlu 瑞金二路). The building which housed its second headquarters, on Huaihai Road (Huaihai Zhonglu 淮海中路), has subsequently been demolished; the site is now the location for a branch of the clothing retailer H&M (Kim et al. 2019).

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houses a museum, is a Shikumen house on Madang Road, Shikumen representing a traditional Shanghainese architectural style combining Western and Chinese elements that first appeared in the 1860s (Shanghai Street Stories, n.d.; see also Chapter 8). Adjacent to the Xintiandi area (see Chapter 8) and the site of the first National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not only has the museum hosted South Korean politicians and, in particular, each new South Korean president for their obligatory visit, it has also become a popular tourist attraction among Korean visitors to Shanghai, averaging 600 to 1000 Korean visitors per day (Pan 2012, 137; Paeng 2019). It glories in the unofficial title the ‘Holy Palace of Korean Nationalist Independence Movement’ and is a highly admired pilgrimage destination representing the Korean independence movement (Pan 2012, 138).

Relocating the SPGK in the Context of Difficult Heritage The SPGK can be classified as difficult heritage in three distinct respects: (1) as a colonial heritage site, (2) as a result of controversies concerning its legitimacy during the Cold War era, and (3) as an offshore heritage site.2 First, the SPGK is a representative colonial heritage site formed during the Japanese colonial period. In South Korea’s official narratives, the period of Japanese colonial rule is regarded as one of the most shameful, painful, and traumatic events in the country’s history (Lee 2019). The preservation of colonial heritage has thus sometimes been regarded during the postcolonial period as protecting shameful Japanese legacies, provoking sharp conflicts between pro-conservation and pro-demolition groups (see, e.g., the demolition of the Japanese Government-General Building in Seoul in 1995–1996; see also Han 2014; Lee 2019). Meanwhile, some colonial heritage sites have been strategically preserved through conversion into museums to enshrine memories of the colonial period for education purposes (see, e.g., the heritagization of both Seodaemun Prison History Hall and Independence Park in 1988–1992 and 1998, respectively; see also Lee 2019). Such cases’ narratives operate in two ways: emphasizing South Korea’s victimhood under repression by the brutal colonial aggressors, but also emphasizing the victory of South Korea’s independence movement, which led to ultimate liberation from Japan. The case of the SPGK can be seen to align with such an approach, serving to educate South Korea about the ‘correct’ colonial history, to counteract narratives advanced by the right-wing Japanese government, and to boost South Korean patriotism. Hence, South Korea’s colonial heritage is used politically not only to strengthen South Korea’s national identity but also to locate Japan as a ‘significant other’ (Lee 2019). Meanwhile, its management and the 2. I would like to pinpoint the SPGK’s symbolic meaning. The Former Site of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai has been a powerful symbol representing not only this specific architectural heritage site in Shanghai but also the condensed history of the overseas independence movement of Korea and the entire history of the former Provisional Government of Korea. Hence, all the historic controversies related to the former Provisional Government of Korea tend to materialize at the Madang Road site.

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character of the narrative it purveys may fluctuate somewhat depending on the state of bilateral relations with Japan. The second aspect that renders the SPGK as difficult heritage concerns the provisional government’s centrality in debates about the nation’s founding. Left-wing political groups identify the establishment of the provisional government as the start of the nation’s founding, citing a statement in the Constitution of the Republic of Korea that states that the nation inherits the legal traditions of the provisional government. They support the view held by some historians that April 13, 1919, the founding date of the provisional government, constitutes the nation’s founding (Lee 2009; Park 2019). On the contrary, right-wing political groups maintain that August 15, 1948, the date of the establishment of the Korean government under Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, is when the Republic of Korea was officially founded. Conservative former presidents Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013–2017) both said during their respective Liberation Day speeches (in 2008 and 2016) that the nation was founded on August 15, 1948 (Do 2020). While left-wing political groups praise the achievement of the provisional government in leading the liberation, right-wingers question the actual contributions of the provisional government to achieving independence. For one thing, they contend, its role was limited given that independence came as a consequence of the end of the Second World War and not as a result of the independence movement itself. For another, the provisional government was not recognized internationally; some also questioned its legitimacy (Do 2020).3 Against the backdrop of these controversies, further ideological conflicts complicate the debate. In South Korea, Kim Gu and Kim Won-bong are regarded as the two main political leaders of the provisional government, despite the fact that Syngman Rhee was the first actual president of the provisional government. Right after liberation, the Korean peninsula was divided to create North Korea and South Korea in the agreement of the Allied leaders:4 they decided to put the two zones of occupation under the Allied Trustees until they would be deemed ready for selfrule (South Korea under the US and North Korea under the Soviet Union). Kim Gu, a political rival to Syngman Rhee (who in turn became the first president of the Republic of Korea), had argued for the establishment of a unified government of South Korea and North Korea, but ultimately in 1948 the Republic of Korea was established with the rationale of protecting South Korea from communism. In 1949, Kim Gu was assassinated, and to this day, the motive for his assassination has still not been clearly revealed by government authorities (Oh 2015). In addition, another political leader Kim Won-bong later defected to North Korea and became a prominent politician there. Conservatives have branded him a communist and 3. Please see Chapter 6 (by Tomoko Ako) presenting a similar instance of difficult heritage making involving left- and right-wing parties in the shadow of the Cold War. 4. The scholarly debates on the rationale for the division of the Korean peninsula are still ongoing. See Cumings (2010).

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have valued Syngman Rhee’s political achievement in keeping South Korea free from communism. Therefore, the right wing does not acknowledge the legitimacy of the provincial government while the left wing praises the provincial government as the first government, existing even before the division of North Korea and South Korea. Therefore, the SPGK, as a symbol of the provisional government, reflects the difficult political situation stemming from the unstable inter-Korean relationship during the Cold War era. A third factor in the SPGK’s status as difficult heritage is its ‘offshore’ status, implicating it in the history of the bilateral relationship between South Korea and China. Offshore heritage refers to sites that carry significance to a certain nation but are located beyond the reach of that nation’s sovereignty (Huang and Lee 2019).5 South Korea’s offshore heritage includes overseas heritage sites related to the independence movement during the colonial era; the SPGK is one of the most valuable offshore heritage sites from South Korea’s perspective. Since 2001, South Korea has sought several offshore heritage sites, focusing particularly on sites related to the independence movement, termed ‘overseas heritage sites of the Korean independence movement’. According to 2019 statistics from the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs in South Korea, 905 heritage sites relating to the independence movement exist across twenty-four countries (e.g., China [409], the US [142], Russia [114], and Japan [57]). From South Korea’s perspective, these offshore sites are ‘our’ heritage. However, they are located in non-Korean territory, so their ownership does not lie with South Korea, rendering their preservation and systematic management challenging and reliant upon transnational cooperation. More specifically, if the meaning and value of such heritage sites are not congruent with the official narratives of the nation within which they are located, their protection may not be possible. In addition, the two countries’ international relationship can be a significant precondition for transnational collaboration for offshore heritage protection. These characteristics of offshore heritage seem to play an even further role in making the SPGK’s status complicated and difficult, as they add an additional layer (the contemporary bilateral relationship with China) to the controversies concerning the colonial period with Japan and concerning the Cold War era in the inter-Korean relationship. Next, by taking into consideration these complex webs formed by different temporal and spatial relationships, I analyse the two stages of the SPGK’s heritagization process through the lens of heritage diplomacy.

5. Some might argue that the term ‘extra-territorial’ is more analytically useful than the term ‘offshore’ in that the former phrase implies political power and control. However, neither the SPGK nor South Korea have any legal power over the territory on which the SPGK building stands; as such, it is inadequate to refer to it as a site of ‘extra-territorial’ heritage.

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The Heritagization of the SPGK and Heritage Diplomacy The first phase of heritagization, 1988–1993 Memories of the SPGK faded from official South Korean historical narratives from the 1950s to the 1980s, due to sharp controversies over its legitimacy that themselves stemmed from ideological conflicts. It was only when the 1987 revised constitution proclaimed the Provisional Government of Korea as the root of the Republic of Korea that the Provisional Government of Korea again began to receive attention as a significant part of the Korean independence movement’s history (Ko 2014; Chon 2019). In addition, the SPGK’s historic importance was re-examined in the late 1980s along with the establishment of the Independence Hall of Korea in 1987. The Independence Hall of Korea was founded to counteract attempts by Japan to whitewash its imperial aggression in a new 1982 edition of the national history textbook, which came to be known as the ‘textbook controversies’ (Lee 2019).6 It is worth noting that its location is in the city of Cheonan, the hometown of Yu Gwansun, a female martyr and symbolic figure of the Korean independence movement, in order to strengthen the hall’s connotations related to South Korea’s resistance against Japan (Lee 2019, 122). The Independence Hall was built to educate South Koreans about the independence movement and Japanese imperial rule, endeavouring to archive historic materials and to investigate heritage sites related to the independence movement.7 In addition, during the late 1980s, the success of the pro-democracy movement helped to raise the voices of South Korea’s nationalists, especially expressions of their anti-Japanese sentiments, which had previously been suppressed by the military regimes (1962–1987). In this context, the South Korean government made plans to trace historic sites associated with the former Provisional Government of Korea: in particular, in Shanghai in 1988 (curator A, interview with the author, September 10, 2020).8 This can be seen as a significant turning point for South Korea’s perspectives on the SPGK, shifting it from a marker of uncomfortable legacies during the Cold War era to an important educational resource that helped evidence the glorious independence movement against the Japanese aggressors. From 1988 to 1990, the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Independence Hall of Korea carried out a collaborative research and investigation of the SPGK (Yuko and Huh 2007). Attempts were made to locate all thirteen of the sites the SPGK had occupied, but it was found that the building used today as the SPGK museum was the only one that remained intact. Hence, the South Korean government officially requested protection from the Shanghai Municipal Government for 6. In China, as a counter to the textbook controversies, the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders was established in 1985 (see, e.g., Qian 2009). 7. For more details, see the Independence Hall of Korea official website: https://search.i815.or.kr/main.do. 8. ‘Curator A’, who worked at the Independence Hall of Korea, was involved in the curation and renovation of the SPGK museum exhibition from 1993 to 2019.

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this historic site, which was designated as no. 174 among the Shanghai Historic Relics. In June 1991, a Promotion Association for the Restoration of the SPGK was organized by the Cultural Heritage Management Department of the Shanghai Municipal Government; it made efforts to collect archives and to encourage fundraising. In February 1992, the Samsung Corporation (now Samsung Construction and Trade Group) raised a fund of $30,000 for the SPGK’s restoration and conversion into a museum, and Samsung and the Shanghai Cultural Heritage Management Department formed a contract for its restoration. After a two-year restoration, the SPGK was reborn as a museum in 1993, aiming to systematically preserve the memories of Korean national resistance against imperial Japan. It is interesting to note why Samsung was engaged in this project on behalf of South Korea. Although no official documents have been found that demonstrate the rationale for Samsung’s involvement, it is assumed that the South Korean government was not able to take on that role as the collaboration project predated the establishment in 1992 of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea. Hence, Samsung, which had its Chinese base in Shanghai, participated not only due to its interest in Korean history but also to secure future economic benefits through its relationship with China (curator A, interview with the author, September 10, 2020). Another aspect of the background to the SPGK project is worthy of note. As mentioned above, it can be seen as part of the South Korean government’s extended efforts to counteract the Japanese narrative associated with the aforementioned textbook controversies. Meanwhile, proceeding with the collaborative excavation and SPGK-related projects seemed to positively alleviate the forty years of ideological antagonism between South Korea and China during the Cold War period (Pan 2012, 138). The two countries were former battlefield foes, China having fought on North Korea’s side against South Korea and the US-led UN forces in the 1950–1953 Korean War which ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. Although the inter-Korean relationship placed South Korea firmly on the frontlines of the Cold War, South Korea seemed to enter a new era after Seoul successfully hosted the Olympic Games in 1988. International travel, hitherto strictly controlled in order to block potential contact between South and North Koreans, began to be liberalized from 1988. In addition, South Korea began to consider China as a potential trade partner, and the countries’ long-frozen relationship evinced a new dynamic partly influenced by their four-year collaboration over the SPGK. Immediately after forging a new collaboration plan together, in August 1992, South Korea and China established diplomatic relations, and South Korea announced the liberalization of overseas travel with China in 1994. This changing relationship between South Korea and China has facilitated tourism between the two countries, and Shanghai has become one of South Koreans’ favourite tourist spots in China (Yuko and Huh 2007). Meanwhile, since then, the number of Korean visitors to the SPGK has increased: to 800 per day and 50,000 per year in 1997 (Editorial Board of Seoul Media Group 1997, 423,

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quoted in Yuko and Huh 2007, 40). This reveals how heritage diplomacy worked to improve the two countries’ political and economic relationship. The two-year collaborative project to restore the SPGK (1992–1993) reflects how heritage diplomacy was actively conducted through trans-border collaboration between not only the nations’ diplomats in the political arena but also between their heritage professionals in the cultural arena. Its launch was immediately preceded by a conflict between the building’s residents and the Shanghai Municipal Government. At that time the SPGK building was in residential use; it formed ‘Building No. 4’ on a twelve-building residential site and housed five households. Three of these moved out at the restoration project’s commencement, but two stayed on, postponing work on the project from March until the end of that year when the Shanghai Municipal Government forced the remaining residents to move out. Meanwhile, the Independence Hall of Korea carried out fieldwork with two groups of scholars: historians specializing in the independence movement and architects specializing in Asian architectural history and styles (curator A, interview with the author, September 10, 2020). While the architects discussed the physical architectural style of the SPGK with Chinese architects and officials, the Independence Hall of Korea and the historians focused on providing archives for the exhibition. The curation of the SPGK site focused mainly on thirteen years of the SPGK’s independence activities within the provisional government’s twenty-seven-year history in China (curator A, interview with the author, September 10, 2020).9 The collaborative work of converting the building into a museum involved several strands: the Independence Hall of Korea was in charge of the ‘software’ of the SPGK, providing all the materials for display contents (archives, photos, and maps), as well as determining the exhibition style and design, while the Shanghai Municipal Government was responsible for the ‘hardware’—physically realizing and managing the displays according to plans provided by the Independence Hall of Korea. Despite this restoration project, further maintenance and restoration were still required, revealing the limits of offshore heritage management from the South Korean perspective of heritage diplomacy. From 1994 to 1997, the building required an average of $88,000 per year in maintenance costs (Pan 2012, 138). When President Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) visited during an official visit to China in 1998, he remarked on the necessity of further renovations for the SPGK building. According to an interview with ‘curator A’ on September 10, 2020, the building was so fragile that it seemed as if it ‘would be easily demolished when a strong person kicked it’. As mentioned before, the building is a Shikumen house; while its exterior looks like brick, the interior was made of lime, which had badly deteriorated. In 2000, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji of China visited South Korea and discussed the 9. According to the interview, there were three museums related to the activities of the Provisional Government of Korea in China: Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Chongqing. Regarding the curation style, the museum in Hangzhou focuses on the moving period of the Provisional Government of Korea between Shanghai and Chongqing, and Chongqing’s case deals with the independence activities in Chongqing.

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building with his Korean counterparts; thereafter, with $500,000 funding from the South Korean government, the SPGK was further renovated from 2000 to 2001. In particular, in order to support the SPGK (in Building No. 4), two neighbouring buildings (Nos. 3 and 5) were bought for use as a management office, museum shop, and theatre (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015; curator A, interview with the author, September 10, 2020). In this phase, the evaluation of its historic and political significance was higher in South Korea than in China. Hence, the SPGK’s management did not draw much attention in China, aside from the changes which were prompted by the financial support and political pressure coming from South Korea. Hence, despite the presence of transnational collaboration, China’s role remained rather passive in supporting the management of South Korea’s offshore heritage site.

The second phase of heritagization, 2013–2015 After the first phase of the SPGK’s heritagization, South Korea began to experience greater difficulty in communicating with China with regard to its preservation. The first stage of heritagization consisted of the opening of the SPGK museum in the 1990s and its renovation and extension in 2000–2001. Nevertheless, deterioration of both the building itself and the exhibition was not completely resolved (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015). The South Korean government, on the occasion of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, attempted to encourage the Chinese government to carry out a new renovation project. However, in the Olympic year, the Chinese government was focused on expanding its global network with the other countries and did not seem to have further interest in this collaborative project with South Korea (curator A, interview with the author, September 10, 2020). Therefore, the project planning was postponed (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015). However, a 2013 South Korea–China summit brought a turning point for the SPGK. Discussing economic cooperation and the North Korean nuclear issue at a summit meeting, President Park Geun-hye suggested that China and Korea build an enhanced relationship (Koo 2014). At that time, both political leaders were strongly tied with a shared anti-Japan sentiment in opposition to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s doctrine of historical revisionism (Nam 2014). In addition, both had a common political intention to exploit anti-Japanese nationalism to strengthen domestic nationalist discourse. Park specifically asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to preserve Korean offshore heritage sites in China relating to the independence movement. In response, Xi lent active support to the memorialization of South Korea’s independence movement by completing several significant heritage projects. A memorial hall to Ahn Jung-geun, who assassinated Itō Hirobumi, the former prime minister of Japan and the first resident-general of Joseon (Korea’s former name), was opened at Harbin station in 2014. A memorial marking the second zone of the Korean Independence Army was opened in Xi’an the same year.

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The following year saw the reopening of a memorial hall to Yoon Bong-gil in Lu Xun Park (formerly Hongkou Park), Shanghai (Kim 2015). In such a political climate between China and South Korea, the second renovation of the SPGK was launched. In 2013–2015, China became more involved in the renovation project and took on the role of not merely a helper but of an active stakeholder sharing a similar level of commitment to South Korea. A new renovation project commenced in May 2014 when Park Seoung-chun, the head of the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs in Korea, met Tang Jiping, the head of Huangpu District in Shanghai, in order to discuss the improvement of the exhibitions. In June 2015, a final blueprint for a new exhibition design was completed by the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs and the Independence Hall of Korea. According to final plans, China launched the renovation project not only to improve the exhibition environment but also to change the exhibition contents and style, in particular by adding an exhibit on the entire history of the SPGK on the ground floor of the museum (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015). The Chinese government covered all the expenses ($700,000), and most South Korean media coverage praised China’s generosity, positively interpreting this project as a symbol of the amity between the two countries (e.g., Kim 2015). The 2015 reopening of the SPGK was closely associated with the strengthening of the friendly bilateral relationship. The year marked a significant historic milestone for South Korea and China: the seventieth anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan and of victory in the ‘Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-fascist War’. As a political gesture marking deepening trade and security ties with China, President Park participated in the seventieth anniversary of China’s Victory Day on September 3, 2015: the event was attended by thirty world leaders, including the Russian president and the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of North Korea but not by any Japanese politicians (Cha 2015). It was as part of the same trip that President Park participated in a reopening ceremony for the SPGK. In her address, Park noted that the SPGK would act as a significant historic site to not only educate visitors about the roots of Korean history but also inspire South Koreans’ patriotism. Moreover, Park highlighted the fact that the reopening ceremony showed how China and South Korea ‘shared’ the historic value and meaning of heritage sites related to the Korean independence struggle against Japan (Shin 2015). Park’s address adopted a similar tone to a special lecture given by President Xi at Seoul National University, South Korea, in 2014. Xi emphasized that ‘we [China and Korea] were comrades in arms during the anti-Japanese war’, emphasizing how both countries supported and collaborated with each other against imperial Japan’s aggression. Evidently, the SPGK renovation project was not a mere heritage project but part of a political and diplomatic agenda to build up the two countries’ international relationship by casting Japan as their ‘shared’ enemy. Reflecting this emphasis on the two countries’ ‘shared’ history, a newly added exhibition on the third floor

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told the various stories of China’s financial support for and Chinese collaboration with the activities of the Korean independence movement in Shanghai (author’s field notes, September 6, 2018). Besides the 2015 reopening of both the memorial hall to Yoon Bong-gil in Lu Xun Park and the SPGK museum, 2016 saw the erection of a first statue commemorating the Chinese and South Korean ‘comfort women’ at Shanghai Normal University (Vickers 2021). It reveals how both countries were aware of the significant role of heritage diplomacy and how they endeavoured to take advantage of the second stage of transnational heritage making in order to reshape the international discourse against Japan. In addition, compared to the first stage, China began to consider the SPGK as not merely one of South Korea’s offshore heritage sites but rather a site of shared heritage between the two nations, although the latter can be interpreted as China’s political gesture and effort.10 Based on a mutual understanding of the colonial and war memories associated with imperial Japan, these two countries have been involved in heritage-making projects in Shanghai that, in turn, have helped improve the diplomatic relationship between them. However, the bilateral relationship between South Korea and China has since soured substantially following South Korea’s decision in 2016 to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system;11 this has also negatively affected transnational collaboration on heritage making between South Korea and China as can be seen in the cases of Seodaemun Prison History Hall and Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison (see Huang and Lee 2019). Nevertheless, in 2019, the celebration of the centennial of both the establishment of the Provisional Government of Korea in Shanghai and Korea’s March First Independence Movement drew even more attention from both South Koreans and South Korean media to Shanghai.

Figure 9.2:  Left to right: a. the sign of the SPGK on Madang Road, Xintiandi; b. the main gate of the SPGK; c. the exhibition of the signatures of South Korean presidents on their state visit. Photos by the author, September 2018.

10. In 2015, China endeavoured to portray itself as the key Allied power, contributing more than any other to the victorious global struggle against fascism. Similarly, many museums were renovated as part of its political efforts in Nanjing, Beijing, and Shanghai (please see Frost, Schumacher, and Vickers 2019; Vickers 2017). 11. For the details on THAAD, see Tselichtchev 2017.

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Whose Heritage? The SPGK between Two Nationalisms The two stages of the SPGK’s heritagization demonstrate strategic transnational collaboration between South Korea and China for the restoration and management of South Korea’s offshore heritage. It is worthwhile to note that the focus of each stage of the heritagization was different. During the first stage, although transnational heritagization served to thaw the forty-year freeze in the relationship between two countries, each country pursued its own distinct purposes: South Korea intended to secure historic and educational benefits from the project, and China perceived the site as a potential economic resource, a tourist site that could attract more South Korean visitors to Shanghai. However, in the second stage, both countries had a political intention to build up a ‘shared heritage and history’ as a diplomatic gesture in order to enhance their bilateral relationship against Japan. As noted in the introduction, with regard to ‘heritage diplomacy’, a term coined by Winter (2015, 2016), the SPGK had become a ‘strategic narrative’ to enhance transboundary interconnectivity and international cooperation while retaining the potential to cause political contestation and conflict. Although both South Korean and Chinese media praised this transnational heritage-making project, in this section I critically analyse its processes by casting light upon how each country has built up its own political rhetoric. In addition, I question whose heritage the SPGK is, and whether the SPGK is ‘shared heritage’. On the Chinese side, in order to enhance the impression of transnational cooperation between China and Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, the CCP has continually blurred the historical facts about who helped the activities of the SPGK. As Mitter (2020) emphasizes, the CCP’s ‘blurring’ strategy is used to appropriate the historic wartime military and diplomatic record of the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in order to enhance the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) legitimacy in the present. Precisely speaking, during the period it was the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek, that supported the SPGK’s independence movement, but the KMT was subsequently forced into exile on Taiwan in 1949. Lu (2013, 139) also points out that ‘the ambiguous term “Chinese Government” instead of the KMT appears all the way through the narrative in the museum of SPGK’. In the course of his enhanced transnational political rhetoric during the second phase of heritagization, Xi Jinping repeatedly used the terms ‘we’ and ‘together’ in order to indicate not only the relationship of South Korea and China (as political allies) but also to elide the historical distinction between the ‘Republican government’ (i.e., the KMT) and the CCP in order to make them out to be common supporters of Korean independence (e.g., Luo, Ji, and Tan 2014; Yang 2015). On the South Korean side, since the late 1980s, the South Korean government has used narratives of the SPGK politically to strengthen national pride and identity. President Moon Jae-in has shown more enthusiasm than any other Korean leader in recent decades for honouring the provisional government. He was the first

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president to visit the provisional government complex in Chongqing, China, during an official visit to the country in December 2017 that marked the renovation of a memorial hall for the Chongqing provisional government. In addition, celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the SPGK, he confirmed a plan to open a memorial hall to the provisional government in 2021 next to the Seodaemun Prison History Hall complex to maintain the spirit of the provisional government (Do 2020); construction of this memorial hall commenced in 2019. This demonstrates Moon Jae-in’s political passion to promote the victorious history of the Korean independence movement. However, reflecting his address, his interest in not only the SPGK but also in memorializing the provisional government seems to imply a political intention to overcome the right wing’s aforementioned argument on when the nation was founded. He has repeatedly used the sentence ‘the provisional government provided a solid foundation for our nation to be reborn as a democratic republic’ in his official addresses (such as those delivered on the one hundredth anniversary of the March First Movement in 2019 and the 101st anniversary of the SPGK in 2020). Similarly, in praising the aforementioned SPGK political leaders Kim Gu and Kim Won-bong—who are problematic from the perspective of Korean conservatives—Moon has tried to reaffirm the legitimacy of the SPGK and to end these long-term ideological controversies. Hence, Moon found in the SPGK useful value and meaning to support his political enthusiasm for locating the roots of the nation and defeating his political opponents. Despite transnational cooperation in the heritagization of the SPGK, the two nations concerned have tended to use this heritage site to fulfil their own political purposes and to enhance their respective nationalist agendas. In the spectrum of heritage diplomacy, this case represents how heritage diplomacy’s politicization is used to strengthen the domestic political discourse’s alignment with the discourse surrounding the accession of the ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’ to UNESCO World Heritage Site status, a strategy pointed out by Nakano (2021). According to an interview with curator A on September 10, 2020, and with three architects who participated in the heritagization of the SPGK on November 23, 2019, China’s attitudes toward transnational cooperation in the heritagization project changed over time, and internal conflicts arose among staff on the ground at the SPGK. The interviewees noted that whilst the Shanghai Municipal Government had during the first stage of heritagization endeavoured to fully realize the plan provided by the Independence Hall of Korea, during the second stage the eventual exhibition reflected the plans supplied by Korea with only around 50 per cent fidelity. According to these interviews, as China has emerged as a world-leading economic power since 2005, the Chinese staff on the project have become more assertive in seeking to influence the curation style and exhibition contents: although the interviewees were hesitant to discuss specific examples, China asked South Korea to emphasize the support of ‘China’ for the independence movement rather than that of the ‘Republican government’. They said that from the mid-2000s, China

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began to perceive the SPGK as China’s heritage and part of Chinese history, showing a view that relegated the South Korean story to a subordinate position as a strand of Chinese history. The interviewees reported that ‘we ourselves hence felt like “independence activists” endeavouring to keep Korean history free from Chinese power, as they considered the SPGK to constitute their own significant offshore heritage’. Admittedly, the transnational collaboration on the SPGK’s heritagization provided the grounds to construct a ‘shared’ history and heritage between South Korea and China. Yet these interviews also show that this collaboration took place in the context of a relationship between the two nations that could easily be broken and could even be converted into an intense battleground between the two countries over historical facts.

Potential Efforts towards Shared Heritage Despite the fact that transnational difficult heritage implies potential political difficulties concerning shared heritage, this section introduces three short episodes that hint at the possibilities for creating a genuine ‘shared’ value and meaning concerning the SPGK, offering grounds for hope. The first episode concerns the story of those residents who lived in the SPGK building immediately before heritagization began. According to the work of Yuko and Huh (2007), a family who lived in Building No. 4 identified themselves as guests living in a heritage site rather than as hosts who lived in Chinese housing. They expressed their pride to live in such a significant historic site (Yuko and Huh 2007). According to an interview with curator A on September 10, 2020, in 1989 and 1990, near Lu Xun Park, this family guided Korean visitors to the building in order to introduce the historic significance of their residence to them. The second episode concerns the help extended by one Chinese individual to protect the SPGK building against proposed redevelopment. In order to prepare for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, a 2007 plan to redevelop Huangpu District was announced in 2003, threatening the SPGK’s preservation as a historic site (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019). Since late 2003, the South Korean government had been making unofficial preparations to pursue the building’s preservation, complicated by the site’s sensitive diplomatic status in the relationship between the two countries (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019). At that time, Cui Yongyuan—one of China’s most influential journalists as a prominent news reader at China Central Television (CCTV)—expressed deep sympathy with the South Korean government’s endeavours (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019). He made extensive efforts to persuade the Shanghai Municipal Government and staff working on the 2007 redevelopment plan to consider the protection of the SPGK (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019). The South Korean government pointed to Cui as one of the most significant figures in helping to cement the legitimacy and value of the SPGK in China (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 2019).

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The third episode concerns cultural tourism in Shanghai. To celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the SPGK, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in South Korea organized a public diplomacy event whereby one hundred South Korean students were selected to visit six former provisional government sites from Chongqing and Shanghai as well as heritage sites related to Korea’s independence movements (July 9–18) (Korean Broadcast Station [hereafter KBS] 2019). Their trip was scheduled not only to trace the route taken by the provisional governments but also to build up mutual relationships with selected Chinese students by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in China by discussion sessions and the preparation for a ‘peace concert’ (KBS 2019). Through these processes, these selected South Korean and Chinese students exchanged opinions on peace building in Northeast Asia and the role of South Korean and Chinese youth in enhancing the international relationship between their countries based on a mutual understanding of ‘shared’ heritage and history (KBS 2019). These three short episodes do not give us a full answer to the question of how transnational difficult heritage can overcome nationalism and politicization. Nevertheless, they provide some clues to the potential power of individuals’ grassroots efforts for understanding the ‘shared’ value and meaning of transnational difficult heritage (Frost and Watanabe 2019; Morris-Suzuki 2014). Such bottom-up understanding and empathy might act as a seed to build up ‘shared’ responsibility, accountability, and history between two nations.

Conclusion: Limits and Possibilities of a Shared Heritage beyond Borders Through the transnational heritagization of the SPGK’s fraught legacy, both South Korea and China have promoted new transnational collective memories in order to build up their respective positive national images at both the international and domestic levels whilst forming Japan’s image as imperial and unreflecting aggressor. Additionally, this ‘shared’ heritage site acts as a political litmus test that reacts sensitively to shifting conditions in the international and domestic political climate. From the perspective of heritage diplomacy at the national level, the transnational heritage making of the SPGK has revealed the hidden political tensions between South Korea and China as well as the nuances of the two countries’ cooperation for the sake of their political and economic purposes. Hence, the SPGK can be praised as one of the primary examples emphasizing how successful transnational shared heritage can serve to reinforce diplomatic bonds while simultaneously revealing the diplomatic tensions between two nations who are seeking to strengthen their own political narratives through shared heritage making. In this respect, I would like to pinpoint the limits of the SPGK as a site of shared heritage. The SPGK is such a vulnerable site of memory that it can be easily manipulated by political decisions occurring at the edges of the international relationship. The international relations which affect the dynamics of the SPGK are not

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limited merely to bilateral ties between South Korea and China. Rather, the shared heritage-making processes of the SPGK also face potential influence (or disruption) from multilateral relationships involving the US, Japan, and North Korea.12 Since the inauguration of the Biden government in 2021, many stakeholders have perceived a drive by China to create stronger ties with South Korea, in competition with the US and Japan (e.g., Baptista 2021; Yonhap News and South China Morning Post 2021). Thus, the tensions between China and South Korea have been alleviated, and THAAD seems to not be perceived as such a large issue currently. Meanwhile, South Korea seems to be struggling to balance its relationships with China and the US, who are both key nations influencing inter-Korean relations. Recent information on ongoing projects related to the SPGK is scant due to the general hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but we can predict that further projects on the SPGK will reflect changed and complicated multilateral power struggles, causing the site’s narratives and curation styles to shift accordingly. Nevertheless, such diplomatic efforts to preserve a site of shared heritage can provide the possibilities for this politicized site to become a ‘genuinely’ shared cultural site. Although the motives for heritagization originally stem from the countries’ political ambitions and the potential benefits they may receive from it, this attempt can work as a potential seen for individuals who would like to develop their own new heritage channels. As can be seen in the three short episodes, non-governmental collaboration and public diplomacy can open a new channel of dialogue that could eventually help to solidify the role of heritage as an agent for promoting a narrative of interconnectivity and cooperation beyond mere politicization and nationalism. This positive prospect might not immediately occur due to the current political climate where difficult heritage management has been over-politicized. However, in the long-term and ceaseless processes and efforts of shared heritage making, the case of the SPGK can be an example for trans-border communication becoming much more expansive, transparent, and a signal for the new expansion of transnational memories.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dami Kim for her help in producing the map for this chapter and to the anonymous interviewees, including key informants, for their generous support. This work was supported by the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (grant no. AKS-2016-LAB-2250005). In addition, this work was supported by the Ministry of

12. Similarly, the recent heritagization of the ‘comfort women’ shows how difficult heritage making has been vulnerable to the multilateral relationships between China, South Korea, Japan, and the US (see Vickers 2021).

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Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A5B5A01042686).

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10 Mapping Kyushu’s War-Related Heritage Hard and Soft Frontiers of Memory in Japan’s ‘Asian’ Gateway Edward Vickers

What is the rationale for discussing the politics of war-related heritage in Kyushu? Historically, a good case can be made for seeing this island as distinctive in a number of ways. Dubbed the ‘Gateway to Japan’ in one English-language history (Cobbing 2009), Kyushu has always been Japan’s most important conduit for traffic—whether peaceable or otherwise—with the Asian mainland and the wider world. During the Heian period (794–1185), Hakata Bay (today the site of Fukuoka city) was a principal port of embarkation for traders, officials, and scholars visiting China. The nearby ‘western capital’ of Dazaifu was one of the earliest sites at which a Buddhist presence is recorded in Japan. Much later, from the sixteenth century, Kyushu was the main venue for contacts with the Portuguese, Dutch, and other emissaries from early modern Europe. Having fended off two invasion attempts by the Mongols in 1274 and 1281, in 1592–1598 it became the launchpad for Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s hugely destructive invasions of Korea. Finally, from the mid-nineteenth century, it was Kyushu (and nearby Yamaguchi) that witnessed Japan’s earliest efforts to adapt the technology and ideas of the modern West—ideas that included the thenprevalent fashion for imperialist expansion. In 2005, Japan’s fourth ‘National Museum’, the first such institution to be established in over a century, opened in Dazaifu. Its first director declared that the museum was ‘built around the concept of understanding the formation of Japanese culture from the perspective of Asian history’ (Cobbing 2009, xiii). In recent years, other sites relating to Kyushu’s premodern role in connecting Japan to the wider East Asian ‘Sinosphere’ have been officially canonized as ‘heritage’. So too have locations related to interaction with European powers in the early modern period (e.g., the port of Hirado in Nagasaki) and to the beginnings of Japan’s industrialization in the nineteenth century (e.g., the Shimazu clan’s factory in Kagoshima). However, this chapter examines how sites related to the more recent and ‘difficult’ history of Japanese imperialism in Asia are, or are not, articulated with the ‘gateway’ narrative so prominent in the broader heritage landscape. In the age of

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imperialism, Kyushu became a crucial base for the movement to claim for Japan the leadership of Asia. The Genyōsha (玄洋社, ‘Dark Ocean Society’), founded in Fukuoka, played a significant role in spearheading the imperialist project that eventually led to the Asia-Pacific War. Kyushu’s strategic location also meant that military and naval bases were clustered there, and its many factories and mines witnessed the wartime deployment of forced labourers (including prisoners of war). Moreover, the industrial and strategic importance of the island’s major cities made them key targets for American bombing raids in the latter stages of the war. Kyushu thus became the locale for the final atrocity of World War II: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. There are, therefore, ample resources for a Kyushu-centred perspective on the Asia-Pacific War as heritage. Besides the familiar themes of wartime suffering—horrifically epitomized by Nagasaki—and fortitude on the home front, we might expect Japan’s ‘gateway’ to exemplify a more outward-looking approach, acknowledging the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and ways in which local experiences of war intertwined with those of Japan’s neighbours. After all, Kyushu today continues to trumpet its role in connecting Japan to Asia, for example, through the city of Fukuoka’s annual ‘Asia Month’ every September. But does this apparent embrace of transnational ‘Asianness’ for instrumental purposes in the present extend to any willingness to reflect on darker manifestations of Kyushu’s ‘gateway’ role in the past? Or do we instead see here further evidence of a pattern whereby, as Ted Boyle (2019, 301) has put it, ‘the state’s official narrative [of the war] fails to map onto local experiences’—let alone those of Japan’s Asian neighbours? I shall argue here that the case of Kyushu illustrates how, in Japan, the ‘frontiers of memory’ in public history tend to take on a more or less open or ‘permeable’ quality, depending upon historical period and thematic focus. Put very simply, when there is a happy story of international cultural and commercial exchange to be told, the imagined frontier between Japan and the Asian mainland tends to be treated as ‘soft’ or permeable, with shared legacies acknowledged, even celebrated. However, with respect to episodes relating to the more ‘difficult’ themes of Japanese imperialism and military expansionism, the frontiers of memory tend to be drawn very differently, with a hard, impermeable boundary cordoning off Japanese experience from that of other Asians. It is the purpose of this chapter to trace how these frontiers are drawn in Kyushu’s heritage landscape, analyse patterns of sanctification and suppression, and discuss their implications.

Heritage Policy in Context Before focusing on local heritage sites and museums, it is useful to consider how Japan’s historical ties to Asia are portrayed in other vehicles for official discourse. The school curriculum is perhaps the most important of these. As the Chinese historian Yang Biao has observed, the portrayal of the history of Sino-Japanese

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interaction in the Japanese school curriculum is almost a mirror image of typical portrayals of relations with Japan in China’s textbooks (Yang 2014). In China, the focus tends to be on recent history and especially on Japan’s mid-twentieth-century invasion. Premodern exchanges are also discussed, but generally only as brief footnotes to the main narrative. In Japan, however, exchanges with China, especially during the Tang dynasty (618–907), are portrayed as a crucial formative influence on Japanese civilization, whereas the more recent history of Japanese imperialism in Asia typically receives only superficial coverage. Textbooks deal evasively with Japan’s invasion of China, instead focusing on the conflict with the US, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Coverage of the latter events overshadows all other aspects of the war, embodying a pacifist national identity premised upon the uniqueness of Japan’s atomic victimhood. The pattern of downplaying Japanese involvement in modern Asia while highlighting Asian influences on premodern Japan is evident beyond the history curriculum—for example, in subjects such as Japanese language and civics. Classical Chinese (kanbun 漢文) is a compulsory element of the high school ‘national language’ (kokugo 国語) curriculum, but students have no opportunity to study modern Asian languages at school: the foreign-language curriculum begins and ends for most with poorly taught English. It is as if all European pupils were forced to study basic Latin grammar and gobbets of Virgil and Ovid but systematically denied the opportunity to learn modern Spanish or French. This curricular narrowness is not exclusive to Japan; as Caroline Rose has shown, notions of shared ‘Asianness’ are similarly absent from China’s school curriculum (Rose 2015). In Japan, however, this inward-looking tendency has recently worsened as an electorate spooked by China’s rise, alarmed at the anti-Japanese rhetoric from Japan’s neighbours, and chronically ill-informed regarding the country’s imperial past has become more receptive to the arguments of homegrown nationalists—hence, the success of nationalist politicians such as Abe Shinzo (prime minister from 2012 to 2020), Ishihara Shintaro (governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012), and Hashimoto Toru (governor and then mayor of Osaka from 2008 to 2015). Abe championed the unapologetic celebration of Japanese traditions and history, significantly tightening censorship of school textbooks, especially their coverage of the Asia-Pacific War and territorial disputes. He derived considerable support from right-wing activist groups such as the Nippon Kaigi (日本会議), founded in the mid-1990s specifically in order to restore national pride (for example, through ‘moral education’ in schools), revise the postwar ‘Peace Constitution’, and push back against what conservatives portray as ‘masochistic’ narratives of national history. Such groups have been effective in pressuring the mainstream media, notably the public broadcaster NHK, to eschew critical analysis of controversial historical episodes such as the ‘comfort women’ system of wartime sexual slavery (Yoshifumi 2017; Fackler 2014).

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The same nationalistic political trends have important implications for heritage management in Japan. There is strong bureaucratic control over public museums, dating back to Meiji times, when museums, along with schools, were treated as instruments for moulding loyal imperial citizens. The structure of centralized control survived the postwar American occupation when, as Aso puts it, the state sought to ‘avert domestic and foreign suspicion of latent militarism’ by promoting Japan as ‘a peaceful “culture nation” (bunka kokka [文化国家]), salvaging an imperial-era aesthetic canon that would still be administered from the centre, but now in the name of the people’ (Aso 2014, 203–4). Although it is now an ostensibly liberaldemocratic state pulling the bureaucratic levers, this administrative apparatus has rendered museums and heritage-management functionaries ultimately accountable to the conservative nationalists who dominate contemporary Japanese politics. An increasing admixture of profit-oriented ‘new public management’ since the early 2000s has enhanced corporate influence in the sector (Aso 2014, 215–19), but the intertwining of corporate and bureaucratic power in Japan means that this has not made for greater diversity or openness. As Bull and Ivings (2019) show in a recent article on a museum devoted to postwar Japanese refugees from formerly occupied regions of Asia, museums in contemporary Japan find it very hard to deviate from a standard, bureaucratically endorsed narrative of national history. This is particularly so with respect to museums focusing on World War II, concerning which ‘fierce debates’ have ‘stimulated a visceral awareness of public accountability’ (Aso 2014, 221; Hein and Takenaka 2007). Pressure on museums, along with other institutions, to conform to a sanitized, nationalist narrative of the wartime past has significantly intensified since the early 2000s. Perhaps the most notorious instance of this concerns a formerly notable venue for the airing of critical perspectives on the Asia-Pacific War, the Osaka International Peace Centre (Ōsaka Kokusai Heiwa Sentā 大阪国際平和センター), founded as the result of ‘local citizen and media collaboration’ in 1981 (Aso 2014, 221). Threatened with the withdrawal of funding from the municipal government, then headed by Hashimoto Toru of the Japan Restoration Association (Nippon Isshin no Kai 日本維新の会), in 2014 this museum closed in order to revamp its exhibits. Following its 2015 reopening, the exhibition excluded previous content relating to Japanese atrocities in wartime East Asia and instead focused on the ‘victimhood and stoicism’ of Japanese civilians (Seaton 2015)—an approach which, as we shall see, is also much in evidence in Kyushu. Nationalist efforts to censor historical narratives for public consumption (or encourage self-censorship) have also extended into the international arena. For Japan, as well as for her East Asian neighbours, the process of obtaining recognition from UNESCO in the form of World Heritage Sites or Memory of the World inscriptions has in recent years become a significant arena for nationalist rivalry (Vickers 2021). UNESCO’s high prestige in Japan means that both the government and the public attach high importance to obtaining its imprimatur for heritage sites

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or documentary manifestations of ‘memory’. But when sites or archives are deeply intertwined with Japan’s fraught relations with the Asian mainland, as is often the case in Kyushu, UNESCO’s seal of approval can be used to legitimate profoundly nationalist and divisive visions of the past. China and Korea have also been deeply implicated in the ‘weaponization’ of war-related heritage through UNESCO processes, but Japan is no laggard in this respect (Vickers 2019).

Kyushu’s Heritage and Alignment with the Establishment Vision of Japan’s Past Before turning to the treatment of World War II–related heritage, it is relevant to note that tensions between local, national, and transnational interpretations of Kyushu’s past are evident in the treatment of various sites relating to earlier historical periods. Lindsey DeWitt has shown how the successful campaign to inscribe the Okinoshima and Munakata Shrine complex (in northern Kyushu) as a World Heritage Site (approved in 2017) sought to celebrate ancient connections with Asia while sidestepping the site’s more recent significance for nationalists as the location of a significant naval victory during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War (DeWitt 2018). Yamaguchi Yuka (2018) has analysed the campaign (also crowned with success in 2017) to gain a UNESCO Memory of the World inscription for records of Edo-period (seventeenth to nineteenth century) diplomatic missions that traversed the strait between Kyushu and the Korean peninsula, with the island of Tsushima (north of Kyushu) serving as the main venue. This campaign, backed by rightists close to Prime Minister Abe, portrayed these exchanges as a model of reconciliation between former enemies, even while Tokyo continued efforts to stymie the Koreanled transnational drive to commemorate wartime ‘comfort women’. In 2018, another successful campaign secured World Heritage status for sites relating to the ‘hidden Christian’ communities of northwestern Kyushu. A critical analysis of the process by which these Catholic sites were assessed for their ‘outstanding universal value’ noted how the original push for registration came from local Catholic groups who sought the ‘conservation of their churches as living heritage’ (Otsuki 2018, 39). Both the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS, the expert body that advises UNESCO on heritage matters) and the local group of experts convened by the Nagasaki authorities (on which ICOMOS depended for local access) were accused of ignoring ‘local voices and ethnographic knowledge’—although one expert involved in this process recalls that the initial application to UNESCO was ‘totally incoherent’.1 Otsuki argues that the eventual exclusion from the World Heritage Site inscription of any sites dating from the period after the lifting of the state ban on Christianity in the late nineteenth century presented ‘a romanticized image of underground Catholics’, conveniently confining this group, and the injustices they experienced, to the past. 1. Anonymous, personal communication with the author, April 2021.

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In seeking UNESCO registration for their own purposes (typically involving tourism promotion), local actors across Japan often seek to tap into a self-exoticizing narrative of Japaneseness, detached from the more difficult aspects of the twentiethcentury past, that aligns with the proclivities of the conservative establishment. The Japan portrayed here is as a society that treasures its traditions and ancient cultural ties to the Asian mainland, sees itself as a model of peaceful international coexistence, and has so far transcended any legacy of religious or ideological intolerance that the longstanding persecution of Kyushu’s Christians (for example) can safely be repackaged as tourist-friendly ‘heritage’. In its general lineaments, this narrative is consistent with the ‘Japan is Great’ or ‘Wonder Nippon’ rhetoric of Abe and his supporters (Yamaguchi 2017), which reflects the Nippon Kaigi’s goals of restoring or enhancing national pride while denying or suppressing all ‘negative’ history (Yoshifumi 2017). As we shall see, when it comes to the ‘heritagization’ of sites that relate more immediately to the modern history of imperialism and war, strategies of commemoration reflect a persistent concern to avoid disturbing core tenets of this officially sanctioned national self-image.

Charting Kyushu’s War Heritage Landscape: Whose Stories Get Told? The remainder of this chapter analyses the treatment of some of Kyushu’s most notable war-related sites and museums and what this indicates about how politics shapes the heritage discourse. I begin by discussing sites relating to the Meiji period (1868–1912), which witnessed the beginnings of Japanese imperial expansion on the Asian continent. Here I analyse commemoration of the Genyōsha, the ultranationalist Fukuoka-based society heavily implicated in the origins of Japanese imperialism, and an exhibition in Kita-Kyushu on the ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 despite Korean and Chinese misgivings concerning links to the wartime use of forced labour. While the presence of slave labourers in wartime Japan is seldom publicly acknowledged, the suffering and stoicism of Japanese civilians is central to public history, as is exemplified by the permanent exhibition of the Fukuoka City Museum. Following examination of the treatment there of women in wartime, I turn to the (also notably gendered) portrayal of the fate of Japanese civilians stranded in Asia after the 1945 surrender, many of whom were exiled to Siberia or Mongolia. While the presence of captured soldiers among those refugees is acknowledged in such exhibitions, their wartime actions are seldom discussed. I therefore turn next to the commemoration of Japanese combatants, focusing especially on the idiosyncratically named ‘Chiran Peace Museum (to Kamikaze Pilots)’ in Kagoshima.2 2. The Japanese name of the museum, Chiran Tokkō Heiwa Kaikan 知覧特攻平和会館, literally translates as ‘Chiran Special Attack Peace Hall’ (the official Japanese term for the kamikaze squadrons was ‘special attack squadrons’). The standard English title, simply ‘Chiran Peace Museum’, elides this awkward juxtaposition of ‘special attack’ and ‘peace’.

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The ‘peace’ label used to brand the Chiran Peace Museum is more commonly associated with memorials to those iconic symbols of both the horror of war and Japanese victimhood: the atomic bombings. However, I compare the public Nagasaki Memorial Museum with the small, private Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum, which seeks to remind the public of Japan’s status as a perpetrator, not just a victim, of military aggression. That small memorial includes in its roll call of wartime atrocities the notorious ‘Unit 731’, the site in Manchuria of Japanese biological and chemical weapons experimentation on live human subjects. Similar torture and murder in the name of medical experimentation occurred within Japan itself, notably with the 1945 vivisection of captured American servicemen at Kyushu University’s medical faculty. I therefore include a brief analysis of how this dark episode in the history of my own university is dealt with in the Medical Museum of Kyushu University.

Figure 10.1:  Map of Kyushu. Map by Dami Kim and Hyun Kyung Lee.

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In discussing these various sites, I analyse the narratives of heroism and victimhood that emerge and their significance. Throughout, the focus is as much on what is excluded from the public narrative as on what is included or emphasized. In my concluding remarks, I therefore return to the idea of the ‘permeable’ and ‘impermeable’ frontiers of conflict commemoration in Kyushu, reflecting on what the patterns of permeability observable in the local heritage landscape tell us about the meaning of the island’s much-vaunted status as Japan’s ‘gateway’ to Asia.

The Genyōsha and the origins of Japanese imperialism: Sanitizing and suppressing difficult heritage Writing in 1944, as the Asia-Pacific War ground towards its bloody dénouement, the Canadian historian E. H. Norman pointed a finger of blame at Kyushu, and specifically Fukuoka. Observing that Fukuoka was ‘the centre of a huge munitions industry’ as well as a key ‘embarkation point for troops en route to China’, he remarked that ‘it is a city where in recent years few foreigners have been permitted even to alight from the train’ (Norman 1944, 266). It had also been Japan’s main naval base during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. However, Fukuoka’s significance was not just strategic but cultural and political, having ‘produced more men who have concerned themselves with an aggressive foreign policy than perhaps any other centre’. It was, Norman wrote, ‘the spiritual home of the most rabid brand of Japanese nationalism and imperialism’ (266). The most significant vehicle for propagating these ultra-nationalist and imperialist views, Norman argued, was ‘the Genyōsha of Fukuoka’, established in 1881 out of a congeries of smaller societies. Although often referred to as a ‘secret society’, there was nothing secret about the Genyōsha’s agenda or activities. Its origins could be traced to the resentments of déclassé Kyushu samurai during the early Meiji period: men who had fought to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate but then felt their social position threatened by a wave of modernizing reforms. Many came to see a ‘large-scale war’ against Korea as a means of recovering ‘their prerogative of leadership in the country together with the rich prospects of military colonization’ (263). The 1873 defeat of the ‘war party’ within the government intensified discontent and led to a series of rebellions in Kyushu, culminating in the great Satsuma Revolt of 1877 led by Saigo Takamori. Saigo died during the rebellion, but his memory continued to be revered by the most ardent exponents of imperial expansionism. The most important founders of the Genyōsha, Toyama Mitsuru and Uchida Ryohei, were youthful disciples of Saigo, but learnt from his defeat that ‘the raising of armed revolt as a means to achieve their goal of a reactionary government at home and expansion abroad was foredoomed to failure’ (268). Instead, they curried favour with key establishment luminaries—seeking to capture the state rather than overthrow it (an approach Norman compared with Hitler’s from the mid-1920s

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onwards). Adopting the three principles of reverence for the emperor, loving and respecting the nation, and defending people’s rights, the society saw itself as ‘the guardian of the nation’s prestige, ever watchful for slights and insults by the foreign powers’ (267). In practice, this involved thuggish intimidation of figures or groups seen as insufficiently committed to promoting or defending Japanese prestige; men associated with the Genyōsha and its various ephemeral ‘offshoots’ conducted terrorist acts and assassinations both within Japan and overseas. One of the society’s ‘chief purposes’ was to establish ‘an unofficial intelligence service’ by sending young men to various parts of Asia, especially China, to collect information and build contacts with rebel or anti-colonial nationalist groups (278). Toyama cultivated figures such as the Chinese nationalists Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek in the hope that, should they ever take power, they would rely on Japan for financial support and advice, ‘finally accepting Japanese leadership in all vital matters of domestic and foreign policy’ (273), in the service of the greater cause of ‘driving Western interests and influence out of Asia’ (274). In the cases of Sun and Chiang, these hopes were dashed since both sought unity and independence for China rather than Japanese tutelage. But a constellation of lesser figures (in Norman’s words, ‘adventurers’, ‘cheap careerists’, and ‘political mountebanks’) remained within Toyama’s orbit. Echoing Norman’s damning verdict, the American authorities in postwar Japan swiftly moved to outlaw the Genyōsha, which was disbanded in 1946. More recently, Joos (2011, 62) has argued that ‘the postwar reputation of the Genyōsha as a powerful “fascist” organization may be exaggerated’. The society now features as little more than a footnote in most English-language scholarship on modern Japanese history; it is only briefly referenced in Cobbing’s history of Kyushu (2009, 237, 244). While the extent of its influence may be disputed, however, few would question its complicity with the promotion of a ‘forward policy’ of aggressive Japanese expansionism in Asia under the banner of pan-Asian solidarity. Within Japan, meanwhile, the Genyōsha appears to have been largely forgotten, along with the related history of Japanese aggression in Asia—largely, that is, but not entirely, since in Fukuoka there remains a small but active band of enthusiasts dedicated to rehabilitating the society’s legacy. A small private Genyōsha Memorial Museum closed for lack of funds in 2008, but the ‘Fukuoka History Study Group: Genyōsha Subcommittee’ (Fukuoka Rekishi Kenkyūkai [Genyōsha Bukai] 福岡歴 史研究会﹝玄洋社部会﹞) maintains an active Facebook page (with around 1,200 followers)3 and continues to organize events and talks. The general thrust of this work is to depict the Genyōsha as a forerunner of and exemplar for a vision of contemporary Japan as the ‘Fortress of Freedom in Asia’ (in the words of a local

3. See: https://www.facebook.com/福岡歴史研究会玄洋社部会-170189819763002/.

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political activist associated with the group, Ishii Hidetoshi; see Ishii, n.d.).4 An active member of the ‘Genyōsha Subcommittee’, Urabe Noboru, in 2017 published a book rejecting the characterization of the society by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) as a ‘criminal terrorist sect’, portraying it instead as a group pivotal to the promotion of freedom, liberty, and dignity for Japan and its Asian neighbours (Urabe 2017). This is the view that in 1997 the Genyōsha Memorial Museum promoted on a memorial at the former site of the society’s headquarters in central Fukuoka whose inscription reads: Genyōsha Site Memorial Plaque: Genyōsha, born in the twenty-second year of the Meiji era (1879), in the midst of the Movement for Freedom and People’s Rights [Jiyū Minken Undo 自由民権 運動], campaigned in the turbulent world of Meiji, Taisho, and Shōwa to protect Japan’s independence and to liberate Asia. Until its dissolution in the twenty-first year of Shōwa (1946), this site served continuously as the centre of [the society’s] activities for sixty-seven years.5

Nonetheless, less striking than attempts to whitewash the Genyōsha’s legacy in Fukuoka today is its relative marginalization. To the extent that the society is commemorated at all, its embrace of violence and imperialism is suppressed. The gangster-like figure of Toyama himself is meanwhile memorialized at the Nishijin Civic Hall (西新公民館) in western Fukuoka with a plaque next to a cedar tree he is supposed to have planted as a boy in 1865. While his role in founding the Genyōsha is mentioned, no explanation is given of the society’s nature. Instead, the young Toyama is portrayed as an apolitical paragon of youthful ambition, expressing the determination to ‘become a man of upstanding character [seisei 正成] like this cedar tree’. Meanwhile, in Kagoshima, at the southern end of Kyushu, Toyama’s mentor Saigo is prominently celebrated as a local hero and exemplar of the samurai virtues; a monumental statue erected to his memory in 1898 still stands, while his role in bringing about the Meiji Revolution is hailed in a large museum, the Reimeikan (黎明館), opened in 1983. Little mention is made of Saigo’s vigorous espousal of a ‘forward policy’ towards Korea; his early death, before visions of overseas empire became a reality from the 1890s, seemingly exempts him from any opprobrium attaching to the realization of his expansionist dreams.

4. Ishii, whose website proudly reports a recent interview given to the right-wing US news agency Breitbart, clearly associates ‘freedom’ most intimately with activism challenging China’s communist regime, declaring his fervent support for independence for Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Tracing the connections of the more nationalist wing of the local political establishment to prewar Genyōsha activists would make for a fascinating further study but lies beyond the scope of this article. 5. Author’s translation from the Japanese.

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The sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution That glorification of militarist expansionism sits uneasily with postwar Japan’s pacifist self-image helps explain why mainstream conservatives keen to arouse nostalgia for the prewar order generally ignore the Genyōsha. The celebratory focus has instead fallen on sites associated with the more peaceable achievements of the Meiji era. Saigo’s home region, the Shimazu domain of Kagoshima, hosts three of the ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’ that were inscribed collectively as UNESCO World Heritage in 2015. This was a project close to the heart of Prime Minister Abe, a native of Yamaguchi prefecture (on the southwestern tip of Honshu, adjacent to Kyushu). The celebration of Meiji industrialization, symbolizing late nineteenthcentury Japan’s status as Asia’s pioneering modern power, forms a positive counterpoint to rightists’ efforts to negate the darker aspects of the country’s recent past. To coincide with the UNESCO inscription, the town of Hagi in Yamaguchi prefecture on the southern tip of Honshu (the location of most of the few inscribed sites outside Kyushu) received a lavish heritage makeover that included conversion of the site of the former domain school, the Hagi Meirin Gakusha (萩明倫学舎), into a visitors’ centre with a museum celebrating the role of local figures in the Meiji Revolution.6 Prominent among these is Itō Hirobumi, remembered in his homeland as ‘Japan’s first prime minister’, but reviled in Korea as a prime mover in that country’s colonial subjugation (Ito was assassinated by a Korean nationalist in 1909).7 Indeed, the campaign to inscribe the Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution as UNESCO World Heritage attracted significant Korean criticism. This consisted primarily of demands for acknowledgement of the wartime deployment at seven of these sites of Koreans and other nationalities as forced labourers. Having indicated intent to comply with a UNESCO recommendation to make clear the ‘full history’ of these sites, Japan was subsequently accused of reneging on its commitments, prompting South Korea in 2020 to lodge a formal request with UNESCO for their removal from the World Heritage Sites register (Mainichi shimbun 2020). It is certainly hard to find any acknowledgement of wartime forced labour at the sites themselves, or in related publicity. A lengthy NHK television programme on ‘The Road to World Heritage Registration’, broadcast in early 2015, featured no reference to the issue of forced labour (NHK 2015). Nor was there any discussion of the wartime history of these sites in a special exhibition in early 2019 at the Kita-Kyushu Museum of Natural History and Human History. The narrative recounted Japan’s industrial revolution as a triumph of Asian modernization, focusing on the sweat and toil of the Japanese workers who made it possible. The latter are depicted as Stakhanovites 6. Generally referred to as the ‘Meiji Restoration’, the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate was actually a revolution. ‘Restoration’ was a euphemism used to legitimize the sweeping changes that the Meiji elite imposed on Japanese society. 7. In fact, Ito was mistrusted as a moderate by Genyōsha firebrands who paid him a special visit shortly before the 1904 Russo-Japanese conflict to stiffen his resolve to wage war (Norman 1944, 271–72).

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stoically dedicating themselves to the cause of strengthening the nation and laying the foundations for a brighter collective future. The role of Japanese female workers, for example in the Tomioka Silk Mill (a related UNESCO World Heritage Site), is also acknowledged, though in a somewhat ‘cute’ and infantilizing fashion.

Wartime suffering, civilian stoicism, and gender Given that the Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution are explicitly linked to the Meiji era, it may seem unfair to expect an exhibition commemorating their designation as World Heritage to discuss the Asia-Pacific War (although it can be countered that associating them solely with the Meiji era was a conservative tactic to avoid engagement with more ‘difficult’ aspects of their past; see Underwood 2015). However, this temporary World Heritage–themed exhibition was held alongside a permanent exhibition on the history of Kita-Kyushu which also ignores the use of wartime forced labour at local industrial sites. The same absence is notable in Fukuoka City Museum, where discussion of the wartime period focuses entirely on the suffering of the local civilian population. Here as elsewhere, vagueness surrounds accounts of the origins of the Asia-Pacific War. The museum’s section on wartime life is immediately preceded by a small section on education displaying copies of prewar textbooks, some of them highly nationalistic. But the exhibition makes no attempt to link ideology, imperialism, and education to Japan’s drift into war in Asia—and is entirely silent on the role of the Genyōsha in prewar Fukuoka. Among the causes of local suffering, the American firebombing of Fukuoka receives prominent coverage in the Fukuoka City Museum, as does the plight of Japanese refugees returning from Asia after the surrender (discussed in the following section). Here the exhibition features frames from an early edition of the Sazae-san (サザエさん) manga, created just after the war by a local artist, Hasegawa Machiko. The manga became hugely popular for its light-hearted take on the everyday travails of the eponymous young heroine and her family, and in its early days provided a running commentary on the hardships of postwar Japan. The Fukuoka City Museum itself stands in the Nishijin district inhabited by Hasegawa: an adjacent street has been named after her famous creation and adorned with commemorative plaques. Sazae-san epitomizes a cheerful, comforting, apolitical vision of Japanese feminine domesticity. In the late 1940s, Hasegawa’s depiction of women’s status within the family was seen as remarkably, even shockingly, progressive—Sazae-san is no wallflower—but today the animated television series evokes nostalgia for a simpler, more traditional Japan. Such effusions of nostalgia are uninterrupted in the museum exhibition by any allusion to the widespread abuse and exploitation of women during wartime, most notoriously in the network of ‘comfort stations’, or military brothels, overseen by the Japanese military. Japanese women from Kyushu and other regions of Japan, in addition to thousands of Korean and Chinese women, were trafficked to

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these brothels by the Japanese civilian and military authorities; the Chinese historian Su Zhiliang has documented the direct involvement in their recruitment of the police in Nagasaki prefecture (Su 2021) as well as the existence of a ‘comfort station’ at the Futsukaichi hot spring resort to the south of Fukuoka city. However, public acknowledgement of this darker side to women’s experience of war is almost entirely absent in Kyushu as elsewhere in Japan (see also Frost and Vickers 2021). A case in point was a 2019 Fukuoka City Museum special exhibition on Japanese women in wartime, one of a series of exhibitions staged annually since the early 1990s to mark the anniversary of the 1945 Fukuoka firebombing. This exhibit focused on the ‘home front’, emphasizing women’s stoicism in the face of the various difficulties of wartime life. It showed aspects of the propaganda effort to rally women to the war and celebrate their contribution, including uncritical description of the activities of the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujin Kai 愛国婦人会) and similar bodies. But there was no mention of the state-orchestrated sexual exploitation of women during wartime—nothing to trouble or problematize the equation of Japanese femininity with comforting, conventional domesticity.

‘Peace’ and Japanese victims of war on the Asian mainland The Sazae-san comic strip displayed in the Fukuoka City Museum deals specifically with the difficulties experienced by Japanese refugees from postwar Asia—an issue that has received heightened publicity in recent years. In 2015, a three-year campaign spearheaded by staff at the Maizuru Repatriation Memorial Museum in Kyoto, and backed by the Japanese government, succeeded in securing a UNESCO Memory of the World inscription for documents relating to the postwar internment of Japanese soldiers and civilians in Siberia and the survivors’ eventual return to Japan (Bull and Ivings 2019). But this was only part of a broader movement to commemorate these refugees, whose stories received relatively little publicity during the early postwar decades. In 2000, the Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia and Postwar Repatriates (Heiwa Kinen Tenran Hakubutsukan 平和記念 展覧博物館) was established in Tokyo by the Peace Memorial Foundation (Heiwa Kinen Jigyō 平和祈念事業特別基金).8 This institution was formally adopted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Sōmushō 総務省) in 2010, thus becoming a public museum.9 Part of this museum’s remit is to organize temporary exhibitions around Japan in the cause of ‘peace education’. In November 2019, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum 8. There is a clear discrepancy between the Japanese and English names for this museum. 9. At around the same time, the Japan Association of Bereaved Families and Veterans’ Groups (Nippon Izoku Kai 日本遺族会), ‘which argue that the Japanese prosecution of the war was honourable and paved the way for postwar prosperity’, successfully lobbied for the establishment of the National Showa Memorial Museum (Shōwakan) in 1999 (Aso 2014, 221). The Shōwakan, like the museum dedicated to Siberian repatriates, focuses entirely on the wartime suffering of Japanese. [AU: not sure what the yellow highlight here indicates; please double check]

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was the venue for one of these: the ‘Prayer for Peace Exhibition in Fukuoka: Passing Down the Memory of Victims to the Future’ (Heiwa Kinen Ten in Fukuoka: Mirai he Tsutaeru Taikensha no Kioku 平和祈念展 in 福岡：みらいへ伝える体験者の 記憶). Strikingly absent was any discussion of why these civilian and military personnel had found themselves on the Asian mainland in the first place. The context of Japan’s colonial project in Manchuria or the invasion of China was ignored, entirely excluding memories of suffering inflicted by Japanese on other Asians. The stories deemed essential to preserve in the interests of ‘peace’ consisted entirely of hardship endured by Japanese subjects. Here, too, suffering, stoicism, and the innocence of victimhood were gendered, with images of women and children—archetypes of innocence—prominently featured (Figure 10.2).

Reframing imperial warriors as icons of ‘peace’ In the early postwar decades, the rhetoric of ‘peace’ was widely coupled to a resolutely forward-looking narrative of reconstruction. As Zwigenberg (2015) has shown, this was epitomized by official promotion of ‘atoms for peace’, hailing the potential of nuclear technology for economic development rather than dwelling on its military use in wartime. Suffering itself was to be commemorated, not the circumstances that caused it. This approach to commemoration is reflected in a ‘peace’ statue erected in 1976 at Fukuoka’s Gokoku Shrine (Gokoku Jinja 護国神社) (Figure 10.3). The shrine itself was originally one of a network of regional shrines, subordinate to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, established in the Meiji period to commemorate all those who died fighting for Japan (Gokoku means ‘Preserve the Country’). Originally a monument to militant patriotism, the shrine nowadays serves as a venue for weddings, coming-of-age rituals, funerals, and other familial rites. Reflecting this domestic repurposing of the shrine, its Peace Statue (Heiwanozō 平和の像) depicts not soldiers in uniform but a civilian family, humbly attired, their expressions placid but determined, embodying confidence in Japan’s pacifist postwar destiny. Below them flutter a flock of bronze doves. On the back of the plinth, however, is a plaque invoking the memory of ‘World War II’ (Dainiji Sekai Taisen 第二次世界大戦), commemorating the ‘more than 88,000 spirits of warriors of this prefecture’ among the ‘2.5 million’ Japanese soldiers killed during that conflict. The visitor is exhorted to ‘pray for world peace’ while ‘holding down the tears’ evoked by the memory of these ‘kind fathers, beloved husbands, sons, and brothers’. It turns out, therefore, that this is a war memorial after all, but one that elides the zone of conflict and its origins, instead invoking Japanese suffering as the inspiration for a future-oriented national commitment to peace. While this approach to commemoration of wartime suffering, linking it to postwar pacifism, is to be found throughout contemporary Japan, Kyushu also boasts at least one sizeable museum dedicated explicitly to combatants: the kamikaze (or ‘special attack unit’) pilots based at Chiran in Kagoshima (Allen 2019). This

Edward Vickers 223 Figure 10.2:  Suffering innocents. Image of mother and child at exhibition commemorating postwar Japanese exiles in Siberia at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Photo by the author, November 2019.

Figure 10.3:  Peace Statue at the Gokoku Shrine, Fukuoka. Photo by the author, July 2020.

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Chiran Peace Museum (Chiran Tokkōtai Heiwa Kaikan 知覧特攻平和会館) is not a conventional ‘public’ museum, though it has received substantial support from local government. While branding itself a ‘peace museum’, it adopts an idiosyncratic interpretation of pacifism. The exhibition preface describes the Asia-Pacific War, in terms echoing Fukuoka’s Genyōsha aficionados, as a noble struggle waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. The kamikaze pilots are thus depicted as heroes sacrificing themselves in the cause of a war waged to establish a ‘peaceful’ Asia free of Western domination. The sacred aura surrounding the pilots’ sacrifice is accentuated by the museum’s use of religious symbolism. A prominent mural near the entrance shows heavenly maidens lifting the spirit of a dead pilot from the cockpit of his burning plane. The museum complex also includes a Shinto shrine dedicated to the spirits of the dead pilots. This shrine-museum combination mimics the pairing of Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine and its accompanying war museum, the Yūshūkan (遊 就館), which notoriously glorifies Japan’s prosecution of the Asia-Pacific War. The Chiran Peace Museum has been associated with a campaign to secure a UNESCO Memory of the World inscription for the pilots’ final letters to their wives, mothers, or sweethearts (Allen 2019, 240). Here again, Japanese women are portrayed as reassuring symbols of domesticity—sources of largely desexualized ‘comfort’ conforming to traditional notions of female purity. These letters are prominently displayed in the museum without any discussion of how wartime censorship or the conditions under which the pilots were recruited might have affected their content. In the Chiran Peace Museum, the pilots are presented unambiguously as heroes, rather than victims, while also portrayed as martyrs for a vaguely defined notion of ‘peace’. This peculiar variant of pacifism went global in 2015, with a special exhibition on the USS Missouri in Hawai‘i consisting of loaned items from the Chiran Peace Museum and timed to coincide with Prime Minister Abe’s visit to the US. Analysing this exhibit, Allen (2019) concludes that its effect on many American visitors was to mobilize sympathy for a form of wartime conduct (i.e., suicide bombing) that in other circumstances most would likely vehemently condemn. But absent from public accounts, either for domestic or foreign consumption, is any discussion of the regime of control and intimidation to which these young men were subjected, thus occluding the nature of their victimhood. For example, pilots who failed in their bid for martyrdom, because their planes malfunctioned or for some other reason, were hidden from public view in a specially designated hostel in Fukuoka (the ‘Shinbu Hostel’ [Shinbu Ryō 振武寮]). There, they were taunted with jibes such as ‘We don’t have any planes for cowards like you!’ (Matsuda 2020). This aspect of the ‘special attack unit’ experience, unacknowledged in public museums, is contained in an album of photographs held in the tiny, one-room Hayashi Eidai Commemorative Ariran Archive (Hayashi Eidai Kinen Ariran Bunko Shiryō Shitsu 林えいだい記念ありらん文庫資料室), housed in a small building down a Fukuoka backstreet that is seldom open to the public.

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Japanese as victims and perpetrators: Two perspectives on the Nagasaki bombing ‘Peace education’ has been a staple of the postwar Japanese school curriculum, supplying the theme of many extracurricular excursions. In Kagoshima prefecture, it is common for schoolchildren to be taken on outings to the Chiran Peace Museum, giving peace education there a special local twist. In northern Kyushu, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum (Nagasaki Genpaku Shiryō Kan 長崎原爆資料館) functions as the Mecca for peace education. The museum and its surrounding Peace Park associate the suffering inflicted by war with a future-oriented commitment to world peace. The exhibition has gone through a number of iterations since its original foundation in 1955, and currently features some acknowledgement of the victimhood of foreigners as well as Japanese. There is also some discussion in one corner of the Asia-Pacific War as context for the bombing. However, the main thrust of the narrative places the bombing in the context not so much of the profoundly dehumanizing, racialized conflict between Japan and the Allied Powers (Dower 1986) as of Western technological innovation and strategy. A timeline traces the invention of the atomic bombs back to the discoveries of scientists such as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, but no similar chronology traces the Asia-Pacific War back to Japanese imperialism and aggressive militarism, let alone to the role of Kyushubased ideologues in leading Japan down that path. Concern over this ‘missing link’ in the official memorial to the Nagasaki bombing led a local Christian pastor, Oka Masaharu, to pursue a long campaign to document and commemorate the suffering inflicted on Asians by imperial Japan’s overseas adventures. Following his death, a group of supporters in 1995 established a small memorial museum in his name. This stands quite close to Nagasaki’s main railway station, but its existence is effectively concealed from most visitors to the city. In late 2016, when I was taking a group of overseas visitors to Nagasaki, we asked at the station’s tourist information desk for directions to the Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum (Oka Masaharu Kinen Nagasaki Heiwa Shiryō Kan 岡まさはる記念長崎平和資料館). It appeared on none of the maps provided by the local tourist board, and the staff there had never heard of it. The reasons for this official neglect become swiftly apparent on inspection of the exhibition, which is dedicated to those parts of the wartime narrative that public museums generally avoid. There are sections devoted to wartime forced labour by Koreans, Chinese, and captured Allied prisoners of war (featuring extensive discussion of their deployment at Gunkanjima, or ‘battleship island’, an offshore coal mine near Nagasaki where many forced labourers worked); the ‘comfort women’ phenomenon; and the Nanjing Massacre. The exhibition also links Japan’s war of imperialist aggression to the wider phenomenon of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialist rivalry and to the racism that informed it. However, in contrast to the exhibition at the Chiran Peace Museum, there is no attempt here to

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justify or defend Japanese imperialism. The Oka Masaharu Museum’s original 1995 ‘mission statement’ calls for compensation for victims of Japan’s wars of aggression (many of whom then still survived), but its abiding purpose is to moderate the obsessive focus on Japanese suffering by highlighting the ‘atrocities’ committed by Japan ‘against Korea, China and the people of the Asia-Pacific’. It also seeks to draw attention to ‘the history of Chinese and Korean forced labourers who were brought to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and experienced or died in the atomic bomb blast’ (OMM 2010, 30).

Struggling to confront suppressed memories of atrocity: The Kyushu University vivisection incident Among the atrocities the Oka Masaharu Museum documents are the experiments with chemical and biological weapons carried out at Unit 731 in Northeast China (see Brooks 2019), in which scientists from most of Japan’s imperial universities were involved. Exceptionally, Kyushu University also conducted such experiments on its own campus in one notorious incident in 1945 when captured American pilots were subjected to vivisection by faculty at the university hospital. For decades following the war, discussion of this incident within Kyushu University remained largely taboo. However, in April 2015, just before the seventieth anniversary of the war’s end, the university’s medical faculty opened a small exhibition hall that acknowledges this incident. Local media reports originally suggested a plan to make the vivisection incident a major focus of the exhibition, with one newspaper headline proclaiming ‘“Negative History” as a Lesson’ (‘Fu no rekishi’ kyōkun ni 「負の歴史」教訓に). The same article reported prominent members of the Medical Faculty Alumni Association, who were funding the exhibit, as voicing opposition and insisting there was ‘no need to introduce negative history’ (Shimozaki 2014). However, the dean of the medical faculty was quoted as insisting that this atrocity ‘could not be completely avoided’, and that the records had to be preserved and passed on ‘for the instruction of future generations’. Nonetheless, when the exhibition eventually opened in 2015, the incident was only minimally acknowledged with a tiny display in the farthest corner of the hall. It features an open copy of the faculty’s own fiftieth anniversary history showing a passage recounting the steps taken by the Committee of Professors (kyōjukai 教授 会) to denounce this atrocity, ‘reflect’ upon it, and ‘solemnly commit’ to ensuring that no such betrayal of medical ethics would ever be repeated. A nearby panel notes the damage inflicted on the hospital campus during the 1945 firebombing of Fukuoka shortly before the vivisection incident, perhaps implying that the torture and killing of American pilots was a form of revenge for this attack on the city. However, there is no mention of Unit 731 nor of experimentation on live human subjects as an institutionalized and officially sanctioned practice during wartime.

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The Kyushu University vivisection incident is thus implicitly portrayed as an isolated aberration: an inexplicable lapse in the ethical standards of certain individuals rather than one instance of a far wider and more troubling pattern of state-mandated torture and murder.

Conclusion: Heritage, Museums, and the Story of Kyushu’s War Kyushu University, like the city of Fukuoka in which it is located, has in recent years made Asia central to its strategy for ‘internationalization’. Just as Fukuoka and other cities around Kyushu (such as Nagasaki, Kumamoto, and Kagoshima) have pursued stronger commercial ties with Asia, so leading local universities, notably Kyushu University, have sought to expand academic partnerships and exchange programmes with their Asian counterparts. However, efforts to promote presentday links with Asia imply no coherent, publicly articulated narrative of past ties to the continent. They reflect an essentially instrumental or tactical approach to relations with neighbouring societies, aimed at enhancing prosperity through trade, collaboration, exchange, and tourism. The guiding motivation, as Kaori Okano (2018, 43) remarks of university internationalization, revolves around achievement of ‘business and political goals, rather than emphasizing intrinsic human development and the pursuit of knowledge’. This instrumentalism does not imply some sort of apolitical pragmatism; its premises are profoundly ideological. As we have seen, the canonization as ‘heritage’ of various premodern sites around Kyushu reflects considerable enthusiasm for commemorating the region’s ancient role in connecting Japan to continental Asia. These sites qualify as ‘heritage’ because they are unthreatening to postwar Japan’s cherished self-image as a peaceful society seeking only harmonious, mutually beneficial relations with its neighbours. Sites or memories that might call this image into question, especially those related to the history of Japanese empire building in Asia, are either ignored or reinterpreted so as to obscure their more troubling aspects. In so far as the war is commemorated, the overwhelming emphasis, as at Nagasaki, is on Japanese victimhood. The nature and extent of Japanese violence on the Asian mainland is systematically obscured. The representation as ‘heritage’ of sites related to Kyushu’s ties to Asia therefore reflects and reinforces the features of official discourse identified earlier in this chapter: Japan-centred parochialism and weak consciousness of ‘Asianness’ in the present, alongside acknowledgement of the importance of Japan’s ties to and borrowings from Asia in the distant past. This emphasis on Japan’s cultural indebtedness to ancient Asia, only vaguely related to present-day China or Korea, also reflects and reinforces self-exoticizing notions of Japanese culture and identity of the sort promoted through government campaigns such as ‘Wonder Nippon’. In Kyushu especially, depiction of that heritage highlights ancient links to Asia as a

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central theme of the local past and of the region’s role in the formation of Japanese statehood and civilization. This approach to the interpretation of the Asian dimension in Japan’s heritage represents a welcome contrast to the politicized notions of ‘Pan-Asianism’ that characterized official propaganda before 1945, when scholars, politicians, military figures, and assorted activists (such as those associated with the Genyōsha) preached a Japanese mission to dominate Asia for the sake of its ‘liberation’ from the West (Saaler and Szpilman 2011). The different messages conveyed today by heritage sites and museums in part reflect a genuine postwar turn towards pacifism and neighbourliness. However, the combination of an emphasis on harmonious interaction in ancient times with determined airbrushing of more recent ‘negative history’ provides a fragile basis for international understanding or sustainable peace. It makes for a vague and rootless sense of Kyushu’s ‘gateway’ status, tied to a romanticized portrayal of the remote East Asian past, rather than to any engagement with the region’s complex and ‘difficult’ involvement in more recent relations with Asia. In Kyushu, as in many other parts of Japan, we can turn around Boyle’s statement that ‘the state’s official narrative fails to map onto local experiences’ and conclude that the interpretation of local experience as public history generally maps onto the government’s favoured narrative. So, for example, public portrayal of the Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution delivers a triumphalist account of Japan’s modernization and industrialization with no acknowledgement of costs incurred by non-Japanese forced labourers during wartime, or of links to Japanese imperialism. Depiction of the Asia-Pacific War in local public museums focuses almost exclusively on Japanese victimhood, stoicism, and the desire for peace that springs from suffering, even while ‘pacifist’ rhetoric also extends to the veneration of suicide bombers. Foreign victimhood at Japanese hands is largely ignored, except as the product of isolated or aberrant behaviour, as in the case of the Kyushu University vivisection incident. Meanwhile, women in wartime are depicted in a highly stereotyped fashion, suffused with a comforting aura of domesticity. As regards Asia, the narrative of the local and national past conveyed through heritage sites in Kyushu thus takes on a very different quality with respect to the modern and premodern eras. In relation to the premodern era, international boundaries are represented as permeable, with Japan’s inheritance from classical Asia celebrated as foundational for Japanese culture itself. By contrast, Japanese history from the Meiji era onwards is largely cordoned off from any account of Japan’s military adventures on the Asian mainland or Southeast Asia. A hard frontier separates the solemn and elaborate remembrance of national victimhood during World War II from acknowledgement of the wider suffering Japan inflicted on neighbouring Asian societies. To borrow a term used by Christodoulou (2018) in her analysis of history education in Cyprus, heritage in Kyushu (as in Japan more widely) relating to the experience of war is ‘securitized’. For the conservative establishment, suppressing critical perspectives on Japan’s wartime record is seen

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as nothing less than a matter of national security: this is a mnemonic frontier that must be defended at all costs. Why does this matter? As David Rieff (2016) writes in In Praise of Forgetting, remembrance is not an unalloyed ‘good’ in and of itself. In particular, the insistence on commemoration of our suffering can turn ‘toxic’ (87)—an insight that applies as much to Korea or China as to Japan, or Kyushu specifically, where, as we have seen, it is precisely our suffering that is emphasized. But whatever the merits of allowing memories of suffering to fade, it is not the perpetrators who get to decide when it is time to ‘move on’ and forget. Rieff also argues that ‘when a historical crime or tragedy has been covered up, lifting the veil about what took place is almost always something to be welcomed’ (65). As this survey of Kyushu’s war-related heritage demonstrates, a thick veil still shrouds the record of local involvement in Japan’s military adventures in Asia, even while the memory of domestic suffering during wartime is sanctified and commemorated with pseudo-religious fervour. Inverting that pattern, in Kyushu as elsewhere in Japan, will remain impossible unless public discourse on World War II can be ‘desecuritized’, something that remains a remote prospect almost eighty years after the war’s end.

References Allen, Mark. 2019. ‘Affect and Dislocation: Exhibiting the Kamikaze in Japan and Pearl Harbor’. In Remembering Asia’s World War Two, edited by Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, 228–46. New York and London: Routledge. Aso, Noriko. 2014. Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boyle, Edward. 2019. ‘Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan’s Heritage’. Japan Forum 31 (3): 293–312. Brooks, Tony. 2019. ‘Angry States: Chinese Views of Japan as Seen through the Unit 731 War Museum since 1949’. In Remembering Asia’s World War Two, edited by Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, 27–55. New York and London: Routledge. Bull, Jonathan, and Steven Ivings. 2019. ‘Return on Display: Memories of Postcolonial Migration at Maizuru’. Japan Forum 31 (3): 336–57. Christodoulou, Eleni. 2018. ‘Deconstructing Resistance towards Textbook Revisions: The Securitisation of History Textbooks and the Cyprus Conflict’. Global Change, Peace & Security 30 (3): 373–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2018.1453492. Cobbing, Andrew. 2009. Kyushu: Gateway to Japan. Folkstone: Global Oriental. DeWitt, Lindsey. 2018. ‘Report on the 2017 Inscription of “Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region” as a UNESCO World Heritage Site’. Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University 3: 135–40. Dower, John. 1986. War without Mercy. New York: W. W. Norton. Fackler, Martin. 2014. ‘Japan Official under Fire for Saying Public Broadcaster Won’t Criticize Government’. New York Times, January 27.

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Frost, Mark, and Edward Vickers. 2021. ‘Introduction: The “Comfort Women” as Public History—Scholarship, Advocacy and the Commemorative Impulse’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 3: Article ID 5555. Hein, Laura, and Akiko Takenaka. 2007. ‘Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States since 1995’. Pacific Historical Review 76 (1): 61–94. Ishii Hidetoshi. n.d. Ishii Hidetoshi Official Website. Accessed April 19, 2021. www.hidetoshi.asia. Joos, Joel. 2011. ‘The Genyōsha (1881) and Premodern Roots of Japanese Expansionism’. In Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850–1920, edited by Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, 61–68. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Mainichi shimbun. 2020. ‘S. Korea to Demand Removal of Japanese Sites from World Heritage List’. Accessed July 28, 2020. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200622/ p2g/00m/0na/054000c. Matsuda Kouzo 松田幸三. 2020. 「特攻作戦」を考える：生還者隠した「振武寮」 [Considering ‘war by special attack’: The ‘Shinbu Hostel’ for those who returned alive]. Mainichi Shimbun (Fukuoka edition), August 19. NHK. 2015. ‘Sekai issan he no michi—“Meiji no sangyō kakumei issan”’ 「 ‘ 政界遺産への 道’明治の産業革命遺産’」 [‘The heritage of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’—the road towards (registration as) World Heritage]. Mō sugu! Kin suta もうすぐ！きん★すた [Right now! Friday star]. NHK TV, Friday documentary programme. April 3. Norman, E. H. 1944. ‘The Genyosha: A Study in the Origins of Japanese Imperialism’. Pacific Affairs 17 (3): 261–84. Okano, Kaori. 2018. ‘Patterns of Variations in the “Internationalising Education” Discourse and Practice’. Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook 12: 35–48. OMM (Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum). 2010. Oka Masaharu Memorial Nagasaki Peace Museum. Nagasaki: OMM. (English guide). Otsuki, Tomoe. 2018. ‘A Critical Review of Catholic Heritage Sites in Nagasaki, Japan’. The Newsletter 80 (summer): 38–39. Rieff, David. 2016. In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Rose, Caroline. 2015. ‘Going Global? National versus Post-national Citizenship Education in Contemporary Chinese and Japanese Social Studies Curricula’. In Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship, edited by Edward Vickers and Krishna Kumar, 83–104. London and New York: Routledge. Saaler, Sven, and Christopher Szpilman. 2011. Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History: Vol. II, 1920–Present. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Seaton, Philip. 2015. ‘The Nationalist Assault on Japan’s Local Peace Museums: The Conversion of Peace Osaka’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13 (30), no. 3: Article ID 4348. Shimozaki Chika 下崎千加. 2014. 「負の歴史」教訓に [‘Negative history’ as a lesson], Nishinippon shimbun, August 17. Su, Zhiliang. 2021. ‘Reconstructing the History of the “Comfort Women” System: The Fruits of 28 Years of Investigation into the “Comfort Women” Issue in China’. Translated by Edward Vickers. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 7: Article ID 5548.

Edward Vickers 231 Underwood, William. 2015. ‘History in a Box: UNESCO and the Framing of Japan’s Meiji Era’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13 (26), no. 2: Article ID 4332. Urabe Noboru 浦辺登. 2017. Genyōsha to wa nani ka? 玄洋社とは何か？ [What is the Genyōsha?]. Fukuoka: Genshobo. Vickers, Edward. 2019. ‘Commemorating Comfort Women Beyond Korea: The Chinese Case’. In Remembering Asia’s World War Two, edited by Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers, 174–208. New York and London: Routledge. Vickers, Edward. 2021. ‘Slaves to Rival Nationalisms: UNESCO and the Politics of “Comfort Women” Commemoration’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19 (5), no. 5: Article ID 5546. Yamaguchi, Tomomi. 2017. ‘The “Japan is Great!” Boom, Historical Revisionism, and the Government’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15 (3), no. 3: Article ID 5021. Yamaguchi Yuka. 2018. ‘Rekishi jissen no Chōsen tsūshinshi kanren bunka jigyō— Kankokugawa no torikumi wo chūshin ni’ 歴史実践としての朝鮮通信使関連文化 事業――韓国側の取り組みを中心に [The cultural project of the Chosen Tsushinshi as a historical practice—from the perspective of the Korean side]. Unpublished MA Dissertation. Kyushu University: Faculty of Integrated Science for Global Society. (In Japanese). Yang Biao. 2014. Riben lishi jiaoliaoshu zhong de Zhongguo 日本历史教科书中的中国 [China in Japan’s school textbooks]. Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe. (In Chinese). Yoshifumi, Tawara. 2017. ‘What is the Aim of Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-Right Organization that Supports Japan’s Abe Administration’. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15 (21), no. 1: Article ID 5081. Zwigenberg, Ran. 2015. Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contributors

(in alphabetical order) Tomoko Ako is a professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. Her research interests include empowerment of socially vulnerable people such as migrant workers, HIV/AIDS-positive people, women, elderly people, and children, with a particular focus on China. She has conducted research in China on the new generation of migrant workers, HIV/AIDS victims who contracted the virus through blood selling and transfusion, the building of social capital in rural development, and other issues. Recently, she has been involved in research projects on civil society and social media, and has interviewed a wide range of Chinese public intellectuals, human rights lawyers, and journalists. Her recent publications include The Country That Devours Its Poor: A Warning from China’s Divided Society (2009; 2014); Prospect of China’s Civil Society and Democratization: Tortuous Interrelation between Social Media and Political Reform (2012); Rising Social Tension: ‘Politics’ around Environmental Problems, China Risk (2015); and Empowered Citizens on the Rise: Where Is China Going? The Future of a Superpower 5 (2016), and Hong Kong: The City in Tears (玉山, 2022). Roslynn Ang works with the Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai, an intangible cultural heritage performance group that focuses on revitalizing Ainu song and dance (upopo and rimse) within their community. Situated in the intersections of anthropology, East Asian studies, and settler-colonial studies, her research interests include performance, decolonizing methodology, indigeneity, representations of race and nation, and Japan’s colonial history with East Asia and the West. Roslynn is one of the founding members of the Early Career Researchers Network at the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and was a Global Perspectives on Society Fellow at New York University Shanghai between 2018 and 2021. Lachlan B. Barber is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Hong Kong Baptist University. A human geographer interested in cities, heritage, culture, and mobility, Barber’s current research, supported by a General Research Fund grant from Hong Kong’s University Grants Council, focuses on connecting Hong Kong’s colonial policing heritage to broader political, economic, and historical

234 Contributors

currents. He has also conducted research on work-related mobilities in Canada. His recent work has appeared in journals such as Gender, Place and Culture; The Journal of Transport Geography; Applied Mobilities; and Urban Studies. Edward Boyle is an associate professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, and serves as editor of the Japan Review. He conducts research relating to the boundaries and borderland spaces of Japan, the wider AsiaPacific, and Northeast India, focusing on issues relating to maps and representation, scalar governance, territoriality, infrastructures, memory and heritage, and history in order to understand the representation and transformation of borders and their broader political and societal effects. His contribution forms part of a larger project investigating the role of borders of memory in Asia; for more details see www. bordersofmemory.com. A related project on Resilient Material examines the role of material structures in community resilience and post-disaster recovery and is funded by Kyushu University. Shu-Mei Huang is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. Her research interests include postcolonial urbanism, dark heritage, and recovery planning in the Indigenous context. She has published her work with International Journal of Heritage Studies, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Environment and Planning E, and Natural Hazards Review. Her co-authored book manuscript titled Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia was recently published. Hyun Kyung Lee is a research professor in the Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea. Her research interests include difficult heritage (colonial/Cold War heritage) in East Asia, transnational heritage networking, the role of UNESCO programmes in East Asia, and peace-building. Her latest book is Heritage, Memory, and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia written in collaboration with her Taiwanese colleague Shu-Mei Huang (2020). She is also the author of Difficult Heritage in Nation Building: South Korea and Post-conflict Japanese Colonial Occupation Architecture (2019). Lu Pan is an associate professor at the Department of Chinese Culture, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests coalesce around urban culture, visual culture, war memory, and media studies. Pan is author of three monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (2016); Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (2015); and Imagination and Imaginarium: Remapping World War II Monuments in Greater China (2020). Anoma Pieris is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her training is in architectural history and in geography. She has published widely on issues of nationalism, citizenship, and

Contributors 235

sovereignty with a specialist interest in penal architecture from the colonial period to the Pacific War. Desmond Hok-Man Sham is a researcher affiliated with the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. He received his PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests are in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, cultural heritage, cultural economy, cultural memory, identity, and urban studies. Edward Vickers holds the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice, and Global Citizenship at Kyushu University, Japan. He researches the history and politics of education, and the politics of heritage across contemporary East Asia. His books include Remembering Asia’s World War Two (2019, co-edited with Mark Frost and Daniel Schumacher); Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017, with Zeng Xiaodong); and (as a coordinating lead author) the 2017 UNESCO report Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century. With Mark Frost, he co-edited a March 2021 special issue of Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on ‘The “Comfort Women” as Public History’. He is director of Kyushu University’s Taiwan Studies Program and secretary-general of the Comparative Education Society of Asia.

Index

Abe Shinzo, 11, 211 Adachi, Takeo, 156 Adams, Kathleen M., 12, 21 Ainu (Yaunmosir), 10, 18, 45–63, 233; Ainu Cultural Promotion Act, 47, 49, 62; Ainu culture, 18, 45–47, 49, 53–54, 57–58, 60, 62; Ainu Mosir, 48–49; Ainu movements, 47, 55; rimse, 46, 54, 233; upopo, 46, 54, 233. See also Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai (Sapporo Upopo Preservation Society); representations of Ainu, 46. See also Hokkaido (Ezo); Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act; wétiko psychosis Andrade, Tonio, 15, 21 Aono, Tatsushi, 156 Ashworth, Gregory J., 8, 24, 123, 148, 162 Asianness, 210–11, 227 Asia-Pacific War, 20, 39, 50, 53, 56, 61, 143–44, 210–12, 216, 220, 224–25, 228; Japan War-Bereaved Families Association, 37; Japanese occupation, 77, 93, 96, 106, 108, 112, 114, 117. See also World War II; Anti-Japanese War; War of Patriotic Resistance against Japanese Aggression Australia: New South Wales, 143–44, 152 Ballantyne, Roy, 8, 24 barbarians, 16, 48, 51 Bell, Daniel, 12, 21, 75, 157–58 Belt and Road Initiative, 3, 147

Berglas, Jacob, 172 Blumenthal, Michael, 174 British Empire, 19, 46, 103, 109, 118, 169; British Empire Exhibition, 109, 118. British Malaya, 103, 108–10, 114, 118; Malay Pavilion, 109. See also Straits Settlements; International Settlement Canton Railway, 93 Catholic, 155, 213, 230 cemeteries, 143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 159; Chidorigafuchi Cemetery, 145; Cowra Japanese War Cemetery, 147, 153, 156, 162; Graveyard of the National Heroes, 65; Japanese War Cemetery, 147, 153, 156, 158, 162; Manila American Cemetery, 36; National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, 36; Yokohama Cremation Memorial, 146; Yokohama War Cemetery, 146, 153, 161 Central Police Station Compound (Tai Kwun), 19, 83–86, 88, 90–92, 94–97, 99–101, 144 ceremonial space, 96–97 Chiang Kai-shek, 18, 65–66, 72–74, 76–77, 80, 200, 217. See also Soong Mei-ling; Chinese Civil War; Chongqing; Soong Mei-ling; Republic of China (ROC) Chibber, Vivek, 17, 21 China: Chongqing, 172, 190, 196, 201, 203; Hainan Island, 77, 146, 172; Hangzhou, 6, 190, 196; Harbin, 165, 180–81,

238 Index 185, 197; Hengyang, Hunan, 65; Shanghai: Hongkou, 167–70, 172, 174, 177, 179–82, 198; Huangpu District, 198, 202; Madang Road, 188, 191, 199; North Bund, 168–69; Tilanqiao, 165–70, 173, 175, 181–83, 186; Xintiandi, 166, 168–69, 184–85, 191, 199. See also International Settlement Chinese Civil War, 65–66. See also Chiang Kai-shek; Communist Party (CCP); Soong Mei-ling; Republic of China (ROC) Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 1, 65–66, 77, 167–69, 191, 200. See also Chinese Civil War; Mao Zedong Chinese government, 5, 172, 176–77, 179, 197–98, 200. See also Chinese Communist Party (CCP); Republic of China (ROC) Chinese immigrants (sinkeh), 108, 110–11, 113. See also ethnic Chinese (hôa-jîn/ huaren) Ching, Leo T. S., 14, 21, 56, 61, 73, 111, 120–21 civil society, 12, 15, 17, 85, 87, 90–92, 100, 134–35, 233; civil society groups, 15, 91 civilian guards, 151. See also Yokohama War Crimes Trials civilization, 8, 21, 48, 51–52, 55–56, 61, 211, 228 class, 5, 19, 88, 105, 107–10, 112, 116, 126, 168; class-based differentiation, 105, 107 Cold War, 3, 12, 18, 56, 66–67, 71–74, 124–25, 140, 145, 153, 191–95 colonialism, 3–4, 6–8, 10, 13–19, 22, 24–25, 45–50, 52–57, 59, 61–63, 86, 95–96, 210; anti-colonial riots, 89; architecture, 10, 68, 80; expansion, 45; governance, 88–89, 97–98, 103–4, 107–8, 110–11, 114; history, 24, 45, 59, 79, 98, 187, 191, 233; metropole, 48, 166; society, 14, 48, 123; structures, 45, 60; colonizers, 6, 32, 45, 48, 51, 59, 65,

67; decolonization, 2–3, 24, 84, 87, 98, 145; frontiers, 1, 3–4, 8, 13–14, 17, 20, 22–23, 61, 209–10, 216; postcolonial, 1, 7, 15, 19, 21, 24, 41, 43, 46, 66, 85, 98–99, 102–5, 107, 117, 188, 191, 229; postcolonial nationalism, 1, 7 Comfort Women, 1–2, 5–6, 11–12, 15, 21–24, 141, 199, 204, 207, 211, 213, 220, 225, 230–31, 235. See also sexual slavery commemoration, 2, 6–8, 11–13, 15, 17–18, 20, 36, 38–40, 42–43, 66–67, 79, 86, 101, 103–6, 116, 118, 120, 124–25, 143, 146, 149, 161, 166, 171, 173, 179, 207, 214, 216, 222, 229, 231 conflict-related heritage, 1, 13, 17 consumption, 8, 59–60, 84, 90, 92, 212, 224 Cooper, David, 11, 21, 31, 43 Corcuff, Stéphane, 16, 21 COVID-19 pandemic, 6, 86, 103, 109, 117, 134, 140, 204. See also Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Cowra POW Camp, 143, 160; Cowra Information Centre, 158; Cowra Japanese Garden, 144, 155–58, 161; Cowra Peace Precinct, 157; Cowra Tourism Development Corporation, 156. See also New South Wales, tourism cross-border, 3, 10, 12, 89, 166, 181, 188 cultural diplomacy, 156, 158, 188, 205. See also heritage diplomacy cultural governance, 90, 99; cultural practices, 51, 57; geocultural, 3, 24 Cultural Revolution, 65, 97, 176. See also Mao Zedong; People’s Republic of China (PRC) Cunningham, Michael, 11, 21 Daase, Christopher, 11, 21 Dainihon Rengo Fujinkai (Great Japan Federation of Women’s Associations), 135 Dakis Nomin, 77. See also Indigenous Seediq

Index 239 Dazaifu, 209. See also Fukuoka city deathscapes, 143, 162. See also Asia-Pacific War de-Japanization, 78. See also Japanese Empire democratization, 66, 73, 76, 78, 233 Denton, Kirk, 15–16, 21 detention, 106, 115–17, 120–21, 135–36. See also prisons Development Commission (Kaitaku-shi), 49. See also Hokkaido (Ezo); Meiji era Dezaki, Miki, 11, 21 diaspora, 11, 23, 62, 165, 182, 185–86 Dikötter, Frank, 16, 21, 62 diplomatic exchanges, 146, 156 drug rehabilitation, 103, 114–15; drug rehabilitation centre, 114–15 Duara, Prasenjit, 16, 22 Dutch and premodern Japan, 210 Dutch colonialism, 15, 21, 150, 152, 209 Edo period: Edo Cottage, 156; Edo-period strolling garden, 156; Tokugawa Government, 48; Tokugawa Shogunate, 216, 219 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 72, 74 Elvin, Mark, 17, 22 Emperor Hirohito, 189 ethnic Chinese (hôa-jîn/huaren), 19, 105, 112–13, 116–17. See also Chinese immigrants (sinkeh) ethnicity, 50, 61, 84, 96 Favre, John Pierre, 157 First Sino-Japanese War, 70, 77 Foley, Malcolm, 8, 23 Fowler, Corinne, 22 French Concession, 20, 167, 172, 189, 205–6. See also Shanghai Fujito, Enri, 153 Fukuoka History Study Group, 217. See also Fukuoka city; Kita-Kyushu; Kita-Kyushu

Gate of Peace, 126, 128, 137; Amsterdam School, 128. See also Nakano Prison gaze, 39, 70–71; ego-centred gaze, 39 genocide, 5–6, 63, 85 Genyōsha (Dark Ocean Society), 210, 214, 216–20, 224, 228, 230–31; Genyōsha Subcommittee, 217–18. See also Genyōsha Memorial Museum; Genyōsha Site Memorial Plaque geopolitics, 3, 17, 22, 56, 100, 145, 173 Gidney, Andrew, 157 Gokoku Jinja, 66–67, 76, 222. See also Gokoku Shrine Gokoku Shrine, 64, 66, 80, 222–23. See also Gokoku Jinja Gokoku, 64, 66–67, 74, 76, 80, 222–23. See also Gokoku Jinja; Gokoku Shrine; Gokoku Jinja Goody, Jack, 17, 22 Graham, Brian, 8, 22, 43, 161 Haha no Kai (Mother’s Association), 135 Hanaoka Ichirō, 77 harmony, 48, 62, 74, 106 Harrison, Rodney, 7, 22 Hasegawa Machiko, 220 He Ying-qin, 74 heritage: 1881 Heritage, 83–84, 90, 92; cultural heritage, 22, 45, 79, 92, 99, 195, 233–35; dissonant heritage, 8, 23–24, 149, 152, 154, 159, 162; heritage landscape, 19, 38, 94, 117, 209–10, 214, 216; heritage makeover, 219; heritage, share, 20, 166, 188–89, 199–200, 202–4; heritagization, 2, 20, 85, 90, 106, 124, 166, 174, 188–89, 191, 193–94, 197, 200–204, 214; negative heritage, 8, 23; offshore heritage, 29, 187–88, 190–94, 196–200, 202, 204, 206, 208; transnational heritagization, 200, 203; war heritage, 5, 65, 145, 214, 234; heritage diplomacy, 5, 20, 22, 44, 100, 143–44, 146–48, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158–60, 162, 173–74, 182, 186,

240 Index 188, 193–94, 196, 199–201, 203, 205, 207. See also cultural diplomacy Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome), 11, 125, 143; hibaku (witness trees), 160; Shima Hospital, 143. See also Japanese victimhood history: historical memory, 21, 23, 123, 230; historical revisionism, 182, 197, 206, 231; historical statecraft, 6, 21, 165, 183, 185; history of migration, 105–6; history wars, 11, 17, 21, 23; Negative History, 226, 228, 230; oral history, 104, 106, 108, 111–12, 115, 117, 175; popular history, 105, 112, 116, 148 Hochstadt, Steve, 175 Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act, 49; Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai (Sapporo Upopo Preservation Society), 46, 233. See also Ainu (Yaunmosir) Hole, Frank, 155 Holy Palace of Korean Nationalist Independence Movement, 191. See also pilgrimage; South Korea Hong Kong: Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance, 91; Central School, 94; cha chaan teng (Hong Kong–style tea café), 83; Conservation Management Plan, 91, 101; Extradition Law Amendment Bill, 90; freedom of assembly, 97; Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters, 83, 94; Hong Kong Island, 88, 93; Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo), 92, 95–96, 99; Mong Kok, 89; National Security Law, 89; New Territories, 88; Sino-British Joint Declaration, 89; Umbrella Protests, 89. See also Japanese occupation; Revitalising Historic Buildings Through Partnership Scheme Huang Di (Yellow Emperor), 66, 70, 76, 80, 126, 145, 162, 222, 224 human remains, 62, 152, 154. See also spatial segregation human rights, 2, 11, 21, 61, 78, 134, 166, 186, 233

Huxtable, Sally-Anne, 11, 22 ideology of homogeneity, 52. See also nihonjinron immigrants, 86, 106–11, 113, 120, 154; Overseas Chinese (hôa-kiâu/huaqiao), 112, 123. protective asylum, 106. See also Chinese Imperial Japan, 4, 61, 187, 189, 195, 198–99, 225, 229 Imperial Japanese Army, 125, 131, 152; Unit 731, 215, 226, 229; Imperial Japanese Army Field Service Code (Senjinkun), 152, Ichigayadai Building, 125–26. See also Japanese Empire imperialism, 4, 8, 17, 19, 32, 39, 78, 209–11, 214, 216, 218, 220, 224–26, 228 incorporating practices, 144, 149 independence movement, 187, 189, 191–94, 196–97, 199–201, 203, 207 Independence Park, 191. See also South Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), 89. See also Hong Kong indigenous peoples, 14–15, 49, 55, 59; benshengren, 77–78; communities, 10, 47, 55, 169; cultural sovereignty, 57; indigenous inhabitants, 33, 35, 39; indigenous lands, 49, 53, 57; Indigenous Peoples Summit in Ainu Mosir, 49; indigenous rights, 47, 62; indigenous status, 51, 55; indigenous struggles, 53; native, 4, 41, 48–49, 54–56, 59, 61–63, 219. Seediq, 77. See also Dakis Nomin; Musha Uprising Indonesia, 116, 152; Ambon, 146; Javanese, 152 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), 189, 213 International Settlement, 168, 172. See also Hongkou; Shanghai Ishii Hidetoshi, 218, 230 Ishizuka, Shoichi, 153, 155 Israel, 2, 6, 20–21, 169, 171–73, 175, 179–85

Index 241 Jacob Elias Sassoon, 175 January 28 Incident, 189 Japan is Great, 214, 231. See also Abe Shinzo Japan Restoration Association (Nippon Isshin no Kai), 212 Japan: Hiroshima, 5, 11, 24, 124–25, 142–43, 160, 162, 211, 226, 231. Kyushu, 6, 20, 209–10, 212–22, 224–31, 234–35; Fukuoka city, 209, 214, 220–21; Hakata Bay, 209; Hokkaido (Ezo), 14, 18, 43, 46–50, 52, 54, 56–58, 60–66; Kagoshima, 128, 209, 214, 218–19, 222, 225, 227; Kita-Kyushu, 214, 219–20; Nagano, 125–26; Nagasaki, 5, 125, 128, 142–43, 160, 209–11, 213, 215, 221, 225–27, 230; Niigata, 143–44; Naoetsu, 143–44, 146–56, 158–62; Okinawa, 28, 32–33, 44, 47, 51, 56, 61, 124, 131, 137 Japan-Australia Friendship Society, 155 Japanese colonial period, 66–67, 78, 191; Japanese colonizers, 65, 67. See also Japanese Empire Japanese Empire, 37, 45, 52–54, 62, 68, 162, 171, 227 Japanese government, 37–38, 40, 48–49, 51, 153, 172, 191, 221 Japanese Government-General Building, 191 Japanese Shinto shrine, 65, 68, 76. See also torii; shinmei-zukuri Japanese victimhood, 1–2, 125, 215, 227– 28 Jewish heritage, 20, 165–66, 174–75, 177–81, 189; anti-Semitism, 166, 182–83, 186; Chinese benevolence, 6, 165; Fugu Plan, 171–72; Holocaust (Shoah), 2, 5–6, 20, 24, 165–66, 175, 182–85; Jewish refugees, 6, 24, 165–66, 168–75, 179, 182, 184–86; Judaism, 166, 177, 180–81, 186; Kaifeng Jews, 182; Lithuanian Jewish refugees, 175; Ohel Moshe Synagogue, 170–71, 173, 175; Ohel Rachel Synagogue, 175–76, 178, 183–84. See also Nazi Germany;

Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM); Little Vienna Jones, Roy, 8, 23–24, 89, 91, 95, 97, 101 kaitaku, 49, 52 kaiyū shiki, 156 Kamikaze Pilots, 214, 222, 224. See also Asia-Pacific War; Chiran Peace Museum Kan Tai-sai, 77 Ke Tie, 77 Kefalas, Christo, 22 Keiji Goto, 127, 129 Keijiro Yamashita, 128 Kenzo Tange, 143 Kibbler, Don, 156 Kim Dae-jung, 196 Kim Gu, 192, 201, 207 Kim Won-bong, 192, 201 Kim, Mikyoung, 5, 9, 11, 17, 22, 189–90, 192, 196, 198, 201, 204–7, 215 Kishi Nobusuke, 74 Korea: Korean War, 153, 195, 205 Koror, 33, 35, 39 Kowloon, 88, 93 Kristof, Ladis K. D., 13–14, 22 Kumar, Krishna, 17, 22, 24, 184, 230 Kung Ling-chun, 73 Kuomintang (KMT), 1, 65–67, 71, 73–74, 77–78, 200. See also Chongqing; Chung-Shan Building Kurile Islands, 48. See also Hokkaido (Eso); Russia Kushner, Barak, 17, 22 kyōsei (harmony), 48 Kyushu University, 215, 226–29, 231, 234–35. See also Kita-Kyushu Lawrance Ryan, 155, 161 League of Nations, 36. See also South Seas Mandate Lee Myung-bak, 192. See also South Korea Lee, Theo, 155 Lennon, J. John, 8, 23 Leo Ching, 14

242 Index Li Ka-shing, 93, 181 Liang Sicheng, 75 Liang Si-yong, 75 Liberation Day, 192. See also South Korea lilongs, 169–70. See also Shikumen house Lin Huiyin, 75 Lin Shao-mao, 77 Little Vienna, 174. See also Jewish heritage localization, 76, 94, 96, 101 Lowenthal, David, 7, 23 Macdonald, Sharon, 8, 10, 23, 67, 80, 84–86, 101, 139, 141, 166, 185, 188 Malaysia, 87, 118 Mao Zedong, 13, 167. See also Chinese Communist Party (CCP); Cultural Revolution March First Independence Movement, 187, 189, 199 Margalit, Avishai, 7, 23 Matsushiro Complex Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex, 125–26. See also Asia-Pacific War Meiji era, 10, 68, 128, 142, 218–20, 228, 231; Meiji Restoration, 5, 138, 152, 219; Meiji Revolution, 218–19. See also Development Commission (Kaitaku-shi) memorialization, 18, 28–29, 31–32, 36–39, 41, 53, 143, 145, 147, 153, 197. See also commemoration memorials: Australian War Memorial, 145, 154, 161; Chung-Shan Building, 74; civilian memorials, 143; Genyōsha Site Memorial Plaque, 218; lingwei (collective memorial tablets), 76–77; memorial tours, 37; national, 36, 146–47; military memorials, 143, 149; Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park, 144, 153, 155, 158–59; National Dr Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, 74; war memorial, 64, 143, 145, 148, 154, 161–62, 222 Meskell, Lynn, 8, 23 Micronesia, 32–33, 36, 43–44

migrants, 62, 68, 103, 105, 107–8, 111–13, 115, 119, 165–66, 170 Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affair, 193, 198. See also People’s Republic of China (PRC) Mitter, Rana, 3–4, 6–7, 23, 200, 206 mnemonic objects, 28–30, 39, 41 modernity, 4, 49, 73; Asian, 5; colonial, 33, 95; global, 16 modernization, 20, 47, 64, 96, 219, 228 Mooney, Tony, 155–56, 160 Morris, Paul, 7, 11–14, 17, 23, 48, 56, 62, 203, 206 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 7, 11–13, 17, 23, 48, 56, 62, 203, 206 Muminov, Sherzod, 17, 22 Museum: Chiran Peace Museum, 214–15, 224–25; curatorial decisions, 46; Fukuoka City Museum, 214, 220–21; Genyōsha Memorial Museum, 217–18; Hokkaido Historical Museum (Hokkaido Kaitaku Kinenkan), 49, 60; Museum Anthropology, 45–46, 50, 52, 56, 59, 62; museum exhibits, 47, 52, 90; museum practices, 47, 57, 59; Nagasaki Peace Museum, 215, 225, 230; National Museum of Ethnology, 46, 62; Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum, 46; Peleliu World War II Memorial Museum, 40; Seodaemun Prison History Hall, 191, 199, 201; Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (SJRM), 6, 170–73, 175, 185 Musha Uprising, 77. See also benshengren (Indigenous Taiwanese) Nakajima, Takeshi (‘Ken’), 156 Nakano, Ryoko, 7, 13, 19, 23, 126–29, 131–35, 137–42, 188, 201, 206 Nanjing Massacre, 5, 11, 194, 207, 225. See also Asia-Pacific War Nanyue Martyrs’ Shrine, 65. See also shrines nation: nation-building, 85, 116; national identity, 7, 14, 18, 21, 51, 80, 125, 138, 188, 191, 205, 211; national ideology,

Index 243 50–51, 54, 59, 64; national myth, 13, 77; national narrative, 13, 15, 55, 160, 165; subnational, 143, 146–47, 160; Healthy Nationalism, 124, 141; victimhood nationalism, 112–13, 116, 119. See also victimhood Nazism, 4–6, 10, 23, 80, 101, 141, 168, 172, 184; Nazi Germany, 4. See also Holocaust (Shoah) New Zealand, 3–5, 8, 10, 17, 20, 121. See also ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) nihonjinron, 45, 50–54, 57–60. See also ideology of homogeneity Nippon Kaigi, 211, 214, 231 Nishijin Civic Hall, 218. See also Fukuoka city Northeast Asia, 11, 15, 22–24, 42, 44, 100, 203, 205 Northern Palace, 67, 71–73 nostalgia, 10, 52, 55, 78, 83–86, 166–67, 185, 206, 219–20; cosmonostalgia, 166–67, 189 Ogiya Shūkin, 71 Okamoto, Tetsuji, 158 Operation Coldstore, 115. See also St John’s Island (Ki-chiun-san/Qizhangshan) opium treatment centre, 115 Orientalized, 156–57; orientalizing gentrification, 166 Pacific Ocean, 27, 33, 41, 43, 162 pacifism, 6, 64, 125, 138, 222, 224, 228. See also Peace Constitution Palau, 8, 14, 18, 27–29, 32–44; Ngaraard, Badeldaob, 35; Palau Peace Memorial Park, 40; Monument of the War Dead in the Western Pacific, 40; Operation Stalemate II, 35; Peleliu Island, 27–28, 40, 44; Republic of Palau, 32, 44; Trust Authority, 39. See also Bloody Nose Ridge; peace parks; Peleliu World War II Memorial Museum Palauan, 27, 29, 33, 35–36, 38, 40, 44

Palestine, 169, 180, 183–84 Pan-Asianism, 62, 228, 230; Pan-Asian solidarity, 4, 217 panopticon, 95 Papua New Guinea, 146 paramilitary, 88–89, 98 Parents’ and Teachers’ Association (PTA), 127, 134–35, 137, 140–41 Park Geun-hye, 192, 197. See also South Korea Park, Soon-Won, 12, 19, 23, 40, 44, 68, 70, 72–73, 101, 127, 131, 134, 138, 141, 143–45, 149, 153, 155, 158–60, 162, 174, 180, 191–92, 197–99, 202, 207, 225 Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujn Kai), 221 peace: peace parks, 19, 143, 145; peace precinct, 149, 157; Peace Constitution, 138, 211. See also Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park; pacifism; Palau Peace Memorial Park; Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park Peleliu Historical Society, 42 Penang, 103, 107, 114, 117, 119. See also Malaysia People’s Republic of China (PRC), 11–13, 112, 176, 182, 200, 207. See also Mao Zedong Philippines, 5, 27–28, 32, 35–36, 74, 148, 172. See also 1st Marine Division; 81st Infantry Division; Asia-Pacific War pilgrimage, 191; Hajj pilgrims, 103, 107. See also Holy Palace of Korean Nationalist Independence Movement policing, 11, 19, 31, 68, 83–102, 110, 119, 144, 221, 234; crime deterrence, 84, 95; District Watch Force, 88; Hong Kong Marine Police Force, 92; Royal Irish Constabulary, 87; Royal Hong Kong Police Force, 84; Tai Po, 88 politics: political indifference, 124; political prisoners, 7, 85, 114, 126, 135, 138, 152; activism, 58, 89; political climate, 198, 203–4; political detainees, 103,

244 Index 114; political dissidents, 115, 152; political division, 11–12, 78; political economy, 90, 124; political leaders, 12, 125, 192, 197, 201; political party, 73, 137–38; political relations, 48, 188; political struggles, 46, 53; political tensions, 45, 111, 203; politically sensitive, 2, 57; politics of apology, 11, 21 POW, 103, 114, 143–58, 160, 162; dispatch camp, 150; Dutch POWs, 150; Italian POWs, 157–58; POW camp, 114, 143–44, 147–51, 153–54, 157–58, 160, 162; factory camp, 143; Hay, 154; Hokura River, 150, 155; Kokoda Track, 146; Loveday, 154; Moorook, 154; Tatura, 154; POW labourers, 148, 150; prisoner of war, 10, 19–20, 146, 154, 161; Prisoner of War Research Network Japan, 146; Returned Services League, 153 Prescott, John, 14, 23 Preservation: heritage preservation, 173; preservation campaign, 117; preservation movement, 117; preservation of colonial heritage, 191 Principles for the Conservation of Heritage Sites in China, 91 prisons: Nara Juvenile Prison, 128–29, 142; Changi Prison, 146; Chiayi Prison, 7, 133; Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison, 199; Nakano Prison, 19, 126–27, 129, 133–35, 137–41; preventive detention centre, 135–36. See also Thought Offense Probation Act problem populations, 105, 113–17. See also prisons production of knowledge, 46, 53 Provisional Government of Korea, 20, 187–91, 194, 196, 199, 205–7 public memory, 18. See also Memory of the World Register public memory: borders of memory, 13, 21, 27–31, 37–39, 41–43, 229, 234: community custodians, 144, 160; frontiers of memory, 1, 3, 14, 20,

209–10; memory communities, 28–29, 31; memory politics, 18, 20, 25, 147, 155; memoryscapes, 15, 20, 84, 101, 120, 155; war memory, 18, 38, 43–44, 65, 78, 100, 104, 112, 118, 124, 144–45, 162, 165, 182, 199, 205, 234 Pulau Jerejak, 103, 107–8, 114–15, 117, 122 Qing dynasty, 32, 72, 75, 167; Qing China, 77; Qing Structural Regulations, 75 qualitative methods, 87 quarantine, 18–19, 86, 103–14, 116–18, 120–23, 144; quarantine stations, 103, 106–8; Angel Island, San Francisco, 104, 118–19; colonial quarantine, 19, 103–4, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122; Ellis Island, New York, 104, 118; North Head, Sydney, 104, 118; quarantine structures, 104. See also sites of commemoration race: racial discourse, 51; racial hierarchies, 96; racialize, 105, 113; racialized victimhood, 110; racism, 4, 84, 225. See also White Australia Policy; Asiatic racial harmony, 106 Ramseyer, J. Mark, 1–2, 23 reconciliation, 7, 11–13, 16, 21, 23, 67, 84, 119, 124–25, 142–43, 145–49, 152, 159–60, 205–6, 213 refugees, 6, 24, 94, 103, 106, 115–16, 121, 123, 165–66, 168–75, 179, 182, 184–86, 212, 214, 220–21 Reimeikan, 218. See also Saigo Takamori remembrance, 2, 7, 29, 44, 64, 86, 106, 124, 141, 143, 145–46, 148, 154, 156, 161–62, 206, 228–29 Republic of China (ROC), 11, 18, 64, 112, 167, 176, 180, 184, 200, 207. See also Chiang Kai-shek; Soong Mei-ling; Taiwan Revitalising Historic Buildings Through Partnership Scheme, 90. See also Hong Kong Rieff, David, 7, 23, 229–30

Index 245 Robinson, William I., 15, 23 Rudao, Mona, 77 rule of law, 84, 97–102 Russia, 18, 20, 165, 189, 193 Russian, 114, 180, 198 Russo-Japanese War, 213, 216. See also Japanese Empire; Russia Saigo Takamori, 216. See also Reimeikan Sakhalin, 48. See also Russia; Hokkaido (Ezo) Sakura Matsuri (Cherry-Blossom Festival), 158 Sazae-san, 220–21. See also Fukuoka City Museum Schumacher, Daniel, 7–8, 11, 17, 22–23, 85, 100–101, 145, 161, 199, 205, 229, 231, 235 Schwartz, Barry, 22 Security Act (1925), 126–27 Seringat Island, 103, 116–17 settler: colonial structures, 45, 60; colonial values, 50; colonial-state formation, 49; colonialism, 10, 15, 45–50, 52–57, 59, 61, 63; society, 50, 106, 116; consumption of indigeneity, 59. See also wétiko psychosis Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 109, 118, 123. See also COVID-19 pandemic shame, 8, 10–11, 17, 22–23, 44, 100–101, 104, 113, 119, 125, 141, 147, 152, 162, 170, 205–7 Shanghai Expo, 202 Shanghai Incident, 189. See also Asia-Pacific War Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG), 181 Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism, 170, 174, 185. See also tourism Shanghai Municipal Government, 171, 177, 194–96, 201–2 Shanghai Provisional Government of Korea (SPGK), 20, 187–207

Shaw, Brian J., 8, 23–24 Shigeru Yura, 153 Shimazu, Naoko, 7, 23, 209, 219 Shin Heisoo, 24 Shin, Gi-Wook, 5, 12, 17, 23–24, 150, 167, 185, 198, 207 shinmei-zukuri, 68, 70. See also Japanese Shinto shrine; shrines Shinto, 65–68, 70–71, 73–74, 76, 78, 80, 126, 135–36, 145, 154, 224. See also torii; Taiwan Jinja shrines, 65–70, 74–77, 135, 143, 158, 222; deity, 68, 70, 76, 156; torii, 70, 74, 78. See also Japanese Shinto shrine; Taiwan Jinja; shinmei-zukuri; National Martyrs’ Shrine; Nanyue Martyrs’ Shrine Sikh, 19, 96–97, 110–11, 122. See also Hong Kong; Singapore Singapore: Lazarus Island, 103–4, 107, 117, 122; Pulau Senang, 115, 119; Pulau Ubin, 103, 123; St John’s Island (Ki-chiun-san/Qizhangshan), 19, 86, 103–17, 119–22, 144. See also Operation Coldstore; Singaporean; Japanese occupation Singaporean, 46, 104, 109, 115–16, 168. See also Singapore Sino-Israeli relations, 166, 171, 173, 176 sites of commemoration, 104, 116. See also North Head, Sydney; Ellis Island, New York Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution, 10, 214, 219–20, 228; Hagi Meirin Gakusha, 219; Tomioka Silk Mill, 220. See also Kyushu slavery, 150; slave labour, 11, 214; slave trade, 11; slavery, sexual, 211. See also Comfort Women Slocombe, Emma, 22 Smith, Laurajane, 12, 24, 61, 124, 142, 176–77, 185 Sneider, Daniel, 17, 24 social movements, 54, 135, 137, 142 soft power, 23, 188

246 Index Soh, Chunghee Sarah, 11, 24 Soong Mei-ling, 66, 71, 73. See also Chiang Kai-shek; Chinese Civil War; Republic of China (ROC); Republic of China (ROC) South Korea, 5–6, 12, 20, 124, 182n, 187–89, 191–204, 219. See also Syngman Rhee; Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism; Seodaemun Prison History Hall; Liberation Day; Park Geun-hye; Holy Palace of Korean Nationalist Independence Movement South Seas Mandate, 33, 36. See also League of Nations; Strategic Trust Southeast Asia, 8, 11, 15–16, 85, 112–16, 145–46, 228. See also Southeast Asian Chinese Southeast Asian Chinese, 112–13. See also Southeast Asia sovereignty, 13, 32, 79, 84n, 187, 193; territorial sovereignty, 13; cultural sovereignty, 53, 57 space: sacred space, 68, 76–80; space for consignation, 68; colonial, 88, 90, 98; commemorative, 38, 68, 143, 147, 173; cultural, 180; divine, 70; memorial, 27, 40, 74, 157; mnemonic, 29; space, public, 72, 97; ritual, 64, 66; symbolic, 42, 72; spaces for the spirits, 145; spaces for vernacular memories, 124; spaces of consumption, 90, 92; ceremonial, 96–97; demilitarized/ denationalized, 148 spectacle, 5, 72, 172 spiritual repatriation, 37. See also human remains spring and autumn commemorative rituals, 76 stakeholder, 17, 144–45, 149, 198, 204 state formation, 15, 24, 49 Straits Settlements, 103, 107. See also British Empire Strategic Trust, 36. See also South Seas Mandate; South Seas Mandate Sugihara Chiune, 174

Sugimoto Tomonori, 24 Suh, J. J., 5, 24 Sun Yat-sen, 74, 76–77, 217 Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), 51, 56, 127, 218; Allied Trustees, 192; MacArthur, Douglas, 35, 51, 71 surveillance, 88, 91, 93, 95, 99, 123, 136 Syngman Rhee, 192–93. See also South Korea Taisho era: Taisho Democracy, 126 Taiwan: Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), 73, 78; Keelung River, 69; Meiji Bridge, 69–70; National Martyrs’ Shrine, 18, 64–68, 70–80; Taipei, 18, 64–74, 76–80; Grand Hotel Taipei, 18, 66, 71–72, 79; Taiwan Jinja, 68–73; Taiwan Strait, 66, 78; waishengren (mainland Chinese), 78. Yuanshan, 18, 64–68, 70–74, 76, 79–80. See also Chinese Civil War; Republic of China (ROC); Republic of China (ROC) Taiwanese, 1–2, 16, 18, 64, 69–70, 77–79, 152, 234. See also benshengren (Inigenous Taiwanese) television, 1, 90, 113, 202, 219–20; China Central Television (CCTV), 113, 202; Korean Broadcast Station (KBS), 203, 205; South of the Ocean (Xia Nanyang), 113; NHK, 10, 211, 219, 230; Taiga drama, 10; The Road to World Heritage Registration, 219 Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD), 5, 24, 199, 204, 207 textbooks, 6, 15, 24, 54, 102, 211, 220, 229, 231. See also Asia-Pacific War Thai-Burma Railway, 146; Hellfire Pass, 146 Thought Offense Probation Act, 136. See also preventive detention centre Tōjō Hideki, 150 tourism: cultural tourism, 180, 203; dark tourism, 8, 23; depoliticized tourism, 77; ecotourism, 103; grey tourists, 148; heritage tourism, 93; tourism and

Index 247 development, 85, 93; tourism promotion, 180, 214. See also Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, 202. See also South Korea Toyama Mitsuru, 216 Toyotama Prison, 126, 142 transitional justice, 78–80 trauma: national trauma, 20; trauma and Asia-Pacific War, 98, 144, 188, 191, 211; trauma and atomic bombing, 144; trauma and remembrance, 144; trauma and Southeast Asian Chinese, 113; traumatic and historic events, 98, 188, 191, 211; traumatic experiences, 98 Tuck, Eve, 15, 24, 47, 63 Tunbridge, John E., 8, 24, 105, 113–14, 123, 148, 162 Uchida Ryohei, 216 United Nations, 36; UN Headquarters, 158; UNESCO Asia-Pacific Award of Excellence for Cultural Heritage Conservation, 92; UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW), 5, 11–12, 20, 166, 170, 182, 212–13, 221, 224; UNESCO heritage listings, 12; UNESCO World Heritage, 11, 125, 201, 214, 219–20, 229; World Heritage Site (WHS), 125, 170, 189, 201, 212–14, 219–20, 229 United States (US): Hawai’i, 36, 43–44, 60–62, 122, 162, 224 Urakami Cathedral, 125, 142. See also Nagasaki Uzzell, David, 8, 24 victimhood, 1–2, 4–6, 8, 13–14, 16, 86, 105–6, 110–13, 116, 119, 125, 171, 191, 211–12, 215–16, 222, 224–25, 227–28. See also victimhood nationalism Victor, Robert, 23, 62 Vietnam, 115, 119, 137, 153; Vietnam War, 137; Vietnamese refugees, 103, 115, 123 wajin (ethnic Japanese), 48–49, 52–59

Wang Pei, 21 war crimes trials, 126, 148, 151–52. See also Tokyo War Crimes Trial; Yokohama War Crimes Trials War of Patriotic Resistance against Japanese Aggression, 13. See also Asia-Pacific War Waterton, Emma, 12, 24, 145, 162 wétiko psychosis, 59. See also settler consumption of indigeneity White Australia Policy, 151–52. See also racism Winter, Tim, 3, 8, 24, 126, 155, 174, 186, 188, 200, 207 Wonder Nippon, 214, 227. See also Abe Shinzo World Monuments Fund (WMF), 177–79; WMF Watch List, 178 World War I, 5, 32; ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), 4, 21, 145, 160. Gallipoli, 4, 145. See also Australia; New Zealand World War II: 1st Marine Division, 36; 81st Infantry Division, 36; Allied Forces, 145, 153; Anti-Japanese War, 66, 72–73, 77, 79, 198; Australian Military Force, 151; Battle of Midway, 150; Battle of Peleliu, 27–32, 36, 39–40, 42; Bloody Nose Ridge, 40; internment camps, 105; Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 126; US Army, 127, 150; US Marine Corps, 40. See also Asia-Pacific War; Bloody Nose Ridge; Manila American Cemetery; Japanese Empire, war crimes Xingzheng Yuan (Executive Yuan), 74, 78 Yamaguchi Yuka, 213, 231 Yang Biao, 210, 231 Yang Cho-cheng, 72 Yangmingshan Grass Mountain Royal Guest House, 71 Yao Wen-ying, 74 Yao Yuan-jhong, 74–75, 80

248 Index Yokohama War Crimes Trials, 151–52. See also war crimes trials Yoon Bong-gil, 189, 198–99 Yoshida Hatsusaburo, 70 Yoshihisa, Prince Kitashirakawa, 68 Yoshikazu Kondo, 155, 160–61 Yoshinori Shirakawa, 189 Yu Gwansun, 194 Yuan Shikai, 77 Yuanshan Recreation Club, 72 Yuanshan Zhonglieci, 77 Zemperini, Louis, 150 Zhonglieci (martyrs’ shrine), 64–65, 74, 76, 79–80 Zhongyang Street, 180. See also Jewish heritage Zhu Rongji, 196 Zwigenberg, Ran, 5, 11, 24, 125, 142, 222, 231