HashimaXR is not a finished game.
It is a teachable moment.
HashimaXR began as an extended-reality (XR) historical learning experience set on Hashima (Gunkanjima), a former coal-mining island off Nagasaki now widely encountered as a ruin, tourism object, and UNESCO industrial heritage. It became, instead, a public lesson in how historical representation is governed. The central proposition of this resource is simple: immersive reconstruction is never neutral infrastructure. When an environment appears complete, its omissions can feel natural, making silence appear as historical truth rather than a produced condition. HashimaXR therefore approaches XR as historiography, a way of making historical claims through access, pacing, constraint, and the careful refusal of closure. This site is designed for teaching and structured public learning, whether you are working with secondary students, undergraduates, museum audiences, or professional heritage practitioners. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre n.d.; Gerteis and Mihalopoulos 2025)
What this site is for
This is not a substitute for a textbook chapter, and it is not a showcase for technical achievement. It is a guided encounter with a contested site, and with the institutional conditions that shape what can be publicly said about labor, empire, and industrial modernity. You will move through short modules that pair a claim with sources and an activity. The goal is to help learners do three things that are often separated in heritage discourse: to situate Hashima in time and place, to recognize how interpretive authority is made, and to identify how omission is produced procedurally (through scope control, reputational risk, partnership conditionality, and the political economy of cultural legitimacy), not only rhetorically.
How to use this resource
Learners and general visitors: proceed in sequence from The Case to Why Unreleased.
Educators: start with What You Will Learn, then download the Educator Pack and select one activity per session.
Workshops and professional training: pair How Heritage Works with XR as Historiography, then run the “archive of obstruction” exercise.
-
This resource discusses coerced labor, colonial governance, wartime mobilization, and institutional silencing. It treats these as forms of labor embedded in juridical, economic, gendered, and postcolonial structures of power. Please plan facilitation accordingly.