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Paper short abstract

Since 1976, Nara’s temple and palace reconstructions, including Kōfuku-ji and the Heijō Palace gates, reshaped the city’s landscape and visualized Heijō-kyō’s peak. These structures and related media mediate historical knowledge, heritage, and craftsmanship in education and public discourse.

Paper long abstract

The temple reconstruction projects underway in the city of Nara since 1976—initiated with Yakushi-ji Temple—now comprise a total of three locations and nine structures that have significantly reshaped the city’s monumental landscape, encompassing both religious buildings and secular complexes such as the Imperial Palace. The kondō of Kōfuku-ji Temple, completed in 2018, represents the most recent major religious reconstruction and has had the most pronounced impact on the everyday urban experience of Nara’s inhabitants. In the secular sphere, the latest structure to be completed is the Great South Gate (Daigokumon) of the Heijō Imperial Palace (Heijō-kyū) finished in 2022, which will be followed in March 2026 by the reconstruction of the Eastern Pavilion (Higashirō).

These newly erected structures visually materialize the period of greatest prosperity of Heijō-kyō, the old name for Nara, for contemporary Japanese audiences and have gradually come to stand in for that past in educational contexts, including school history textbooks, university-level monographs, and publications aimed at the general public. Equally significant are the videos, infographics, and animations produced by the institutions supporting these reconstruction projects, which demonstrate how digital media have become a primary vehicle for disseminating these architectural forms and the historical narratives that accompany them. Through an analysis of photographs, diagrams, and other visual materials employed to explain the reconstruction process, this paper examines how images mediate complex technical, historical, and cultural information. It argues that such visualizations play a crucial role in conveying ideas of continuity, craftsmanship, and cultural heritage, while simultaneously shaping pedagogical understandings of architectural knowledge and preservation practices and associating the city of Nara with a highly selective moment of its long history—one that appears particularly well suited to the objectives of contemporary social and institutional actors.