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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses authentication of reconstructed historical buildings in Dejima (Nagasaki) and the Heijō Palace site (Nara). I argue that stakeholders generate authenticity for the reconstructed buildings by enacting two different types of authentication: a performative and a material one.

Paper long abstract

Historical reconstructions challenge clearcut ideas of authenticity. This paper analyzes reconstructed historical buildings in two iconic heritage sites in Japan: Dejima in Nagasaki and the Heijō Palace site in Nara. These buildings are neither materially old nor historically preserved but contemporary objects that were created deliberately to resemble other buildings that disappeared a long time ago. Given that they are not original, can such buildings be considered authentic? Or are they fake because they are recent recreations, and because they contain many details and design features based not on irrefutable historical facts but on expert conjectures and assessments?

Although the word “authenticity” is used often and casually in everyday conversation, it is neither an absolute nor indivisible quality; in practical reality it seems to come in different quantities or at different volumes. Furthermore, authenticity is neither inherent nor some kind of essence that emerges from a building in any objective, transcendental, or universal way. Instead, this paper considers authenticity a value claim, an ascription of a certain value or desirable quality onto a building, object, practice or other phenomenon. And so, instead of asking if historical reconstructions are objectively authentic or not, I approach the question of authenticity in reconstructed buildings by focusing on dynamic attributions of authenticity onto such buildings through stakeholder claims. Consequently, this paper analyzes the ways in which these buildings become objects of institutional and exhibitionary acts of authentication.

I argue that the two reconstruction sites in Nara and Nagasaki generate authenticity from two types of site-specific processes of authentication: a performative and a material one. While the former strategically frames the reconstructed environments as exhibitionary spaces of emotive engagement and trans-temporal convergence, the latter invokes the authenticity supposedly inherent in meticulously repeating the materiality and construction processes of the lost historical buildings. Finally, I round off my discussion of authentication by introducing what I call “the proto-contemporary:” a prevalent notion among reconstruction agents on the two sites that the reconstructions could in fact be considered more authentic than their historical counterparts.