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Paper short abstract

While Kyoto is promoted to tourists as tranquil, ancient and premodern, modern war and conflict have transformed the city, leaving major war memorials. I will trace Kyoto’s modern development and several such memorials to explore how war and conflict have been utilized and excluded in tourism.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary tourism promotion of Kyoto differs little from the city’s designation more than 1,200 years ago as the “Capital of Eternal Peace and Tranquility” (heiankyo). Clichéd images of serene shrines, graceful traditions and verdant nature place Kyoto in an eternally peaceful, premodern past dislocated from modern international turmoil. Tourism marketers have no shortage of assets to help perpetuate this portrait: a plethora of Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and gardens; symbols of Japanese culture such as flower arrangement and tea ceremony; and buildings that have seemingly remained unchanged from premodern times. Despite these images, and the hopes of its founders, Kyoto has been ravaged by fire, earthquakes and war, and transformed by the global forces of modernization. Among the symbols of ancient Kyoto, however, exist memorials to international and domestic wars. In this paper, I will draw on my research into a number of such places, including Ryozen Kannon, a Buddhist memorial to the dead of WWII, the Mimizuka mound for those slayed in Japan’s 16th century invasion of the Korean Peninsula, and Kyoto’s Gokoku Shrine, which is both a precursor to the national Yasukuni Shrine and encompasses a major cemetery for the dead of the bakumatsu civil war. Alongside the urban transformation of Kyoto, I will trace the modern histories of these sites and explore the ways war and conflict have been variously utilized and excluded from Kyoto tourism.

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Paper short abstract

How do Japanese cities assetise historical iconicity and reconstructed heritage? This paper discusses two large reconstruction projects (the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki), analysing the reconstructions as strategic mobilisations of past iconicity to boost city attraction values.

Paper long abstract

In light of today’s global boom in landmark architecture, urban megaprojects, and reconstructions of cultural heritage buildings, this paper analyses two large-scale reconstruction projects at iconic historical locations in Japan: the Heijō Palace in Nara and Dejima in Nagasaki. Since the 1990s, the two projects have recreated long-lost built environments, gradually transforming and musealising the sites and giving rise to thorough reform and transformation of the surrounding urban fabric. The paper traces involved agents’ motivations to reconstruct from early-phase experimental efforts to legitimise the sites’ protected status to present-day politico-economic mobilisations of past iconicity to boost city attraction values. Doing so, it links the two unfolding projects to issues of urban boosterism, heritage production, and the facilitation and commodification of tourist experiences of past realities. Approaching the reconstructions as contemporary heritage in traditional guise, the paper argues that both sites revolve materially, spatially, and thematically around the master-metaphors of flow, growth and intercultural connectivity that characterise the present age. Elucidating processes of authentication and intersections of ideological and economic interests in and around the two sites, the paper asks in what ways Japanese cities assetise historical iconicity and reconstructed heritage under post-industrial conditions marked by globalisation and intense culture-economic competition.

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Paper short abstract

Up to the 1980s, postwar heritage preservation efforts in Japan mainly focussed on “traditional“ architecture. In the last decades, however, modern architecture has claimed more attention. Here, a new heritage narrative reinterprets the buildings as a sign of genuine Japanese modernity.

Paper long abstract

# Preserving Modern Architecture in Japan

Up to the 1980s, postwar heritage preservation efforts in Japan mainly focussed on apparently “traditional“ architecture, such as temples, castles, and the ubiquitous minka in the countryside. The Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō), in charge of heritage policies, promoted a narrative of the past that aligned well with the nihonjinron. In the last decades, however, modern architecture has claimed more attention. Due to the bubble economy in the 1980s, boosterism endangered many Meiji-, Taishō-, and Shōwa-era buildings. Historians of architecture and civil society groups opposed plans to tear down historic buildings such as Tokyo station and pushed the agency to reformulate its policies. Simultaneously, modern architecture garnered more interest in Western countries, too, thus stimulating the agency further to preserve modern architecture in its heritage programs. The agency began to catalog modern architecture, such as schools, office buildings, factories, bridges, canals, etc. In the next step, many of these edifices and structures received national heritage status.

At the same time, the narrative of heritage preservation started to shift. The agency, as well as local actors, increasingly stressed genuine Japanese roots of modernity. The newly emerging heritage narrative reinterpreted modern buildings as a signature for the Japanese ability not only to adapt to international standards but to creatively forge a contemporary style based on germs reaching back more profound than the Meiji Restoration and the rapid intensification of contact with the West. Thus, currently, “vernacular modernity” and “modern vernacularity” compete as readings of modern architectural heritage in Japan, as my quantitative data and qualitative case studies show.