What You Will Learn

This teaching resource is organized around durable historical and methodological competencies rather than around a single “story” of Hashima. The aim is to help learners recognize how contested pasts are governed in public, how evidence and omission relate, and why immersive reconstruction can intensify authorized narratives unless constraint and refusal are treated as interpretive methods. By working through these modules, learners encounter Hashima as a site where industrial modernity, empire, labor regimes, and postwar memory are co-present, and where questions of interpretation are not ancillary but constitutive of what the past can be made to mean.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the sequence, learners should be able to do the following with confidence and specificity.

  • Situate Hashima in time and place. Identify key historical pivots that connect industrial extraction, company governance, and wartime mobilization to postwar heritage-making and tourism.

  • Explain how heritage becomes authoritative. Describe how institutions, intermediaries, and interpretive regimes stabilize certain narratives and treat others as “controversy” or “politics.”

  • Practice evidence discipline. Distinguish what different source types can establish, what they cannot, and how omissions are produced and maintained.

  • Analyze XR as historiography. Treat immersive environments as arguments made through perspective, pacing, access, mechanics, and constraint, not as neutral “visualization.”

  • Understand refusal as method. Explain why non-release can be an ethically and historically responsible outcome when institutional conditions would require erasure, misrepresentation, or non-disparagement constraints.

Who this is for

This resource is designed for secondary and university teaching, museum and heritage education, public programming, and professional training in digital heritage and interpretation. The modules assume no prior specialization in Japanese history, but they do assume a willingness to treat the politics of memory as an empirical problem, not a rhetorical add-on.

How to teach with this site

Select a pathway that matches your teaching time and audience. Each module includes a claim, a short contextualization, key terms, and an activity.

One-session seminar

  • Read: The Case (skim)

  • Teach: How Heritage Works

  • Close: Why Unreleased + one activity (either “Interpretation audit” or “Archive of obstruction,” depending on time)

Two–three sessions

  • Session 1: The Case + Labor, Empire, and Evidence

  • Session 2: XR as Historiography + design activity

  • Session 3: Why Unreleased + discussion and short reflection assignment

Professional workshop

  • Start: How Heritage Works (interpretive regimes and risk framing)

  • Then: XR as Historiography (authenticity vs interpretive accountability)

  • Core exercise: “Archive of obstruction” with structured debrief.

Downloadable materials

If you are teaching, begin with the Educator Pack, which mirrors the site sequence and includes lesson plans, worksheets, and an evaluation instrument designed to document learning change.

Download Educator Pack (PDF)

  • Some learners will arrive with strong assumptions about UNESCO, “heritage,” and historical “balance.” It can be useful to foreground two distinctions early: first, between surface authenticity and interpretive accountability; second, between the existence of multiple narratives and the equivalence of their evidentiary standing. The activities are designed to keep discussion anchored in sources, mechanisms, and consequences rather than in abstract positioning.

Cite this page

The Hashima XR Project. 2025. “What You Will Learn.” Accessed December 19, 2025. https://thehashimaxrproject.org/what-you-will-learn/.