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Paper short abstract:

Based on a long-term case study on a local industrial heritage, this presentation describes the process through which a local Word Heritage building was transformed into boundary object, and examines how various actors have participated in a social translation of the World Heritage site.

Paper long abstract:

Industrial heritages across regional Japan are often revitalized as a symbol of local community. In post-industrial Japan, those heritages are no more remains of the past, but a symbolic object of collective memories of the community that seeks “regional revitalization (chiho-sosei)” against rapid depopulation and socio-economic stagnation. The registration of “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining” as a site of World Heritage by UNESCO in 2015 was a groundbreaking moment. It allowed us to witness how local industrial heritages obtained an international reputation by virtue of their “universal outstanding value.” Since then, the heritage has been employed locally, nationally, and globally as a symbolic landmark to conduct actual procedures for regional revitalization: community and cultural development, regional history education, launches of local business and even tourism. However, this multifaceted social process should not be considered an ideological reproduction of its symbolic “authentic values” directly connected with the history of the modern nation. They are, in fact, a mode of existence of dynamic translation connecting multiple actors in different ways. The local industrial heritage, accordingly, turned out to be an object that generated alternative networks and (dis)connections in local society.

Based on a long-term case study on a local industrial heritage building (built in 1899) located in a regional city of the northern Kyushu island region and listed in “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution”, this presentation describes the process through which a local Word Heritage building was transformed into “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer, 1989) beyond the national symbol. It discusses how various actors (including non-human objects and incidents) have participated in a social translation of the object, rather than strengthening its symbolic values as a national object, even though its recognition as a World Heritage building crucially affected this social process. Consequently, this presentation is not merely an inquiry about the deprivation of local memory by national or universal values, but rather seeks to highlight a new scale of recognition of cultural emergence of the object within Japanese local society.