The Hashima XR Project

Project Overview

The Hashima XR Project (2020–2024) was an immersive public history initiative that explored Japan's industrial modernity and its contested imperial legacy made possible by generous funding from the University of Tokyo Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the SOAS University of London Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund, and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

Created by a transnational team of historians, architects, designers, educators, and cultural practitioners, the project used Extended Reality (XR) to interrogate how historical narratives are constructed, mediated, and remembered. By digitally reconstructing the island of Hashima, better known worldwide as Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) and a UNESCO-listed former coal-mining site, the project sought to challenge official heritage narratives that reactivated official silences embedded in state-sponsored memory culture.

From Research to Public Scholarship

The project's insights continue to evolve through two open-access Substack platforms that translate digital historiography into ongoing public dialogue:

• Past Meets Pixel
  Essays on XR ethics, design logic, and procedural historiography, including:
  Against Authenticity and Simulating the Past
• Japanese Modernity
  Commentary on modern Japan's cultural memory, historiography, and digital representation.

These platforms extend the project's intellectual footprint and sustain engagement with scholars, educators, and heritage professionals worldwide.

Design Ethos

Hashima XR was never meant to be a passive virtual tour. Instead, its designers treated immersive space as a critical interface where users could confront the political, emotional, and historiographical complexity of the past.

Design principles include:

• Procedural storytelling over linear narrative
• System-based modeling of historical constraint
• Ethical engagement with silence, absence, and ambiguity

Workshops in Tokyo and Nagasaki ensured the design process remained collaborative, reflexive, and rooted in cultural accountability. You can read more about this process in a short essay Why the Island is Silent.

Engagement and Dissemination

From 2021 to 2025, the project reached broad audiences across educational, heritage, and creative sectors:

• Workshops and public symposia in Nagasaki and Tokyo
• School and university lectures and demos in Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United Kingdom
• Gameplay trailer shared via QR-linked postcards and posters
• Over 20,000 visitors to the project website across Japan, the UK, Taiwan, and the US

These engagements positioned audiences not as passive viewers but as co-curators and active interpreters of contested memory.

Collaborative Impact

The project also served as a skills incubator for early-career professionals across fields such as:

• XR and game development
• Cultural heritage and digital archiving
• Narrative design and theatre translation

The team's integrated approach to mentorship, research, and public dissemination fostered creative pathways beyond the academy and into real-world applications.

Continuing Legacy

Though the funded phase ended in 2024, Hashima XR remains active through ongoing projects that include:

• Curriculum integration at universities in Japan, the UK, and Europe.
• Substack platforms, Japanese Modernity and Past meets Pixel, sustaining digital scholarship and dialogue
• A forthcoming textbook: Japan's Unfinished Empire
• The Showa Era Digital Archive, a prototyped spin-off focused on vernacular heritage from postwar Japan

Each component reflects the project's central commitment: to foreground memory as a space of contestation, affect, and ethical representation.