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Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War

Remembrance and War-related Sites in
Contemporary Japan
a
Jung-Sun N. Han
a
Division of International Studies, Korea University , Seoul ,
Republic of Korea
Published online: 13 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Jung-Sun N. Han (2012) Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance
and War-related Sites in Contemporary Japan, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 42:3, 493-513, DOI:
10.1080/00472336.2012.687634

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 Journal of Contemporary Asia
Vol. 42, No. 3, August 2012, pp. 493–513

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War

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Remembrance and War-related Sites in

Contemporary Japan
JUNG-SUN N. HAN
Division of International Studies, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the formation of place-based war memories in contemporary
Japan by examining the Japanese grassroots movements to preserve war-related sites within the
local and national politics of ‘‘cultural property,’’ and the developments in which the Ichigayadai
Building No. 1 in Tokyo and the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Com-
plex in Nagano are conserved to recall the memories of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Both
places embody the war of aggression carried out by Imperial Japan in the twentieth century.
The Ichigaya site was home to the Imperial General Headquarters during the war. The Matsush-
iro site refers to gigantic underground shelters and tunnels built at the end of the war to relocate
the Imperial General Headquarters of the Ichigaya site. Both sites gained social and national at-
tention in the 1990s by raising questions of how to convey memories of suffering caused as well as
suffering experienced to the next generation. By introducing the struggles to conserve war-related
sites, I argue that contemporary Japan’s public memory-making and -remaking processes are
shaped by contestants to reclaim places.

KEY WORDS: Heritage, cultural property, war-related site, conservation, war memory

Over the last two decades, as Huyssen (2000: 26) has observed, memory has emerged
as ‘‘a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe.’’ In Japan,
memories of war and defeat in particular have emerged as a key public issue since the
late 1980s. To be sure, war remembrance has been one of the central themes of
Japanese social politics throughout the post-war period (Jager and Mitter, 2007; Orr,
2001; Seraphim, 2006; Yoshida, 2005). While creating a deep chasm between
progressive and conservative camps, however, the social politics of remembering has
been considered mainly in domestic terms and has largely erased the transnational
aspects of war memories, providing fertile ground for collective amnesia about
Japan’s wartime infliction of suffering in Asia.

Correspondence Address: Jung-Sun N. Han, Division of International Studies, Korea University, Korea
University Anam-dong, Seongbuk-Gu, Seoul 136-701, Republic of Korea. Email: jsnhan@korea.ac.kr

ISSN 0047-2336 Print/1752-7554 Online/12/030493-21 Ó 2012 Journal of Contemporary Asia

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2012.687634
 494 J-S. N. Han

Yet, there has occurred subtle changes in Japanese war remembrance since the late
1980s. Spurred in part by the restructuring of regional and global political economy
wrought by the end of the Cold War, the changes proceeded at three levels. First,
Japan’s war memories, especially those related to World War II, have become
increasingly transnational. On the one hand, Hiroshima memories, just like
Holocaust memories, have come to circulate at the global level, transcending
national boundaries, to prevent nuclear warfare or to confront recurring genocidal
politics around the world. On the other hand, accompanied by the economic and
political achievements of many Asian countries, Asia has emerged as an assertive
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actor in redrawing the Japanese memory landscape. Unlike the earlier ‘‘memory-
scape,’’ in which Asia was largely marginalised, the contemporary Japanese effort to
remember the war is marked by the growing presence of Asia (see Conrad, 2003;
Fujitani et al., 2001; Gluck, 2007).
Second, the contemporary redrawing of Japanese war memories shows increasing
dependency on material objects and built environments. This dependency has a
generational dimension. As the people who experienced the war are passing away,
war memories are disengaging from people and attaching themselves to things and
sites. The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a mushrooming of war-
related museums in the form of ‘‘peace’’ museums and memorials, collecting and
exhibiting things from the wartime period. It is reported that there existed 113 peace
museums and exhibition sites in 32 prefectures by the late 1990s (Smith, 2002: 36).
This leads to the third aspect of the war memory surge. To borrow Pierre Nora’s
(1989: 14) phrase, the ‘‘materialization of memory has been tremendously dilated,
multiplied, decentralized, democratized’’ in that many local communities and non-
governmental groups have become active in preserving memories of their particular
experiences, creating a vibrant terrain of vernacular memories. Vernacular memories
are often framed as narratives that are pitted against official histories. Places, as the
locality of emotional attachment and the container of shared memories, provide the
material continuity for structural formations and transformations of the dynamics
between official history and vernacular memory.
This paper examines the surge of war memories attached to places in Japan in the
1990s by tracing the process and the nature of recent war remembrance and identifies
agents of such remembering by focusing on social movements to conserve war-
related sites. Although the centrality of place in making and remaking both
individual and collective memories has been pointed out (Casey, 1987), there are few
studies that delve into multi-layered connections between experiencing places and
remembering war in post-war Japan. A few exceptions are studies on the Hiroshima
and Okinawa sites (Figal, 2001; Yoneyama, 1999). Although struggles to conserve
these sites are complex, in the end they function to materialise suffering experienced
by the Japanese rather than suffering caused by Imperial Japan.
By introducing grassroots movements to conserve war-related sites that contain
memories of suffering caused, I argue that the dynamic public memory-making
process in contemporary Japan is also moulded by the conflicts and negotiations to
reclaim places and built environments at the social level. The grassroots effort to
incite memories of suffering caused will be examined within the context of re-
configuring official history to domesticate disruptive war remembrance. For this
purpose, I will first discuss the grassroots concern manifested in the development of
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 495

the ‘‘archaeology of war-related sites’’ in relation to the formation of the Japanese

Network to Protect War-Related Sites. Such developments will be examined within
the politics of ‘‘cultural property’’ to delineate state and society relations in
reclaiming war-related sites. Second, I will compare social movements to conserve
two war-related sites, Ichigayadai Building No. 1 in Tokyo and the Matushiro
underground complex in Nagano Prefecture. These sites are directly related to
suffering caused in the sense that the former was the place where the Imperial
General Headquarters was located during the war. The latter refers to the
underground shelters and tunnels built by foreign forced labour in preparation for
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moving the Imperial General Headquarters of Ichigaya to inner Japan.

War-related Sites and the Politics of Cultural Property in Post-war Japan

Memory is condensed into place. Place is a particular part of space. Places are
differentiated from spaces ‘‘because they involve a concentration of our intentions,
our attitudes, purposes and experience’’ (Relph, 1976: 43). People gather in specific
places, and use them for dwellings, workplaces and other human activities. Such
places gain a use value which can be characterised by historic development of
physical settings and their cultural meanings, and residents’ daily lives and their
psychological attachments to the place. At the same time, the place is a product in
the sense that it can be exchanged in a market as a commodity (Logan and Molotch,
1987). Moreover, places are ‘‘multi-sold,’’ in that the ‘‘same physical space can be
sold simultaneously as different products to different users,’’ which in turn entails
‘‘multi-interpreted’’ places, meaning that ‘‘the same locations can be simultaneously
interpreted in different ways to different consumers’’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth,
1996: 25). It is this dual nature of place-bound products that creates ‘‘dissonance’’ or
‘‘inherent openness that makes deliberate intervention both possible and necessary’’
in place-products. Given the multiplicity of interests, meanings, and values attached
to a place, the goal in managing place-products is to reach an ‘‘acceptable level of
incongruity’’ among various interests and discourses (Tunbridge and Ashworth,
1996: 10).
Long-term use of a place by an individual or groups generates emotional and
spiritual, as well as material, stakes in the place, turning the place into a heritage site
while activating the place’s primary ‘‘containing’’ role. The role of containing is
derived from the ‘‘place’s inherently sheltering role – its capacity to have and hold
memories, to hold them together’’ (Casey, 1987: 203). Moreover, places that are
associated with experiences of dramatic or unique qualities or events of great
significance possess ‘‘high imageability,’’ a term that Lynch (1960: 9) used to refer to
a ‘‘quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong
image in any given observer.’’ This trait can trigger a chain of intense memories,
often becoming contested terrains of competing interests, experiences, and meanings.
War-related sites, perhaps more than other places, play the role of evoking potent
memories loaded with horror and honour, entailing political struggles over what to
remember and protect. Furthermore, ‘‘networks of such places,’’ as Hayden (1996:
78) has observed, ‘‘begin to reconnect social memory on an urban scale.’’ In other
words: ‘‘Networks of related places, organized in a thematic way, exploit the
potential of reaching urban audiences more fully and with more complex histories.’’
 496 J-S. N. Han

To maximise the power of place in recalling and reconnecting war memories, civil
groups in Japan began to pay attention to the remains of modern wars. As 60 years
have passed since the nation’s defeat in World War II, the remains of bomb shelters
or munitions plants around the nation, for example, are gaining new value as
cultural property and heritage. While there were only four war-related cultural
properties in 1997, the number reached over 130 by 2007 (Asahi Shimbun, 2 July
2008).1 Promoting public interest in war-related sites, activists and scholars are
organising associations and publishing articles and books under the rubric of
‘‘archaeology of war-related sites’’ and have organised the Japanese Network to
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Protect War-Related Sites (hereafter, the Network).

The Network was organised in 1997 to re-connect war-related places in an attempt
to redraw the landscape of war memories. The organisation was a network of
various civil and academic groups, including associations and organisations, such as
the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex Preservation
Association, the National Association of Cultural Property Preservation, the
Association of History Educators, and the Research Association of Archaeology
of War-Related Sites (Sens o iseki hozon zenkoku netto waku, 1997).
According to the Network, ‘‘war-related sites’’ refer to ‘‘the remaining structures
and sites related to Japan’s wars of aggression in modern times.’’ Such sites include
‘‘built environments within and without Japan that were produced to execute
Japan’s aggressive wars.’’ These war-related sites are limited to the structures built
‘‘from the early Meiji period when the modern military system was created to the
early Showa period when the Asia-Pacific War was concluded’’ (Sens o iseki hozon
zenkoku netto w aku, 2004: 23-4; also see Obinata, 1998). Reasons for conserving
such sites are that:

Memories of war are being transplanted from person (hito) to object (mono) as
there are less and less people who experienced the war. If we lose war-related
sites and documents that are the witness of the war, we are also losing the value
of peace in our time and will have no direction for the future. Moreover, by
researching and conserving war-related sites in and around Japan, we will
disclose the reality of war and represent them to ‘speak for peace.’ In this way,
we will contribute to the building of peace for the future. (Sens o iseki hozon
zenkoku netto w aku, 2004: 11.)

Hence, the purpose of the organisation is to:

investigate, research, and record the truth of wars in modern and contemporary
Japan, to preserve war-related sites as historic sites or cultural properties, and to
promote connection and conference of individuals and groups who contribute
to peace by sharing our purposes. (Sens o iseki hozon zenkoku netto waku,
1997.)

Sharing the purpose, one of the participating groups in the Network is the Research
Association of Archaeology of War-Related Sites. Okinawa looms large in the
development of the archaeology of war-related sites. It has been pointed out that the
terms ‘‘war-related sites’’ or the ‘‘archaeology of war-related sites’’ were first used in
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 497

1984 by a scholar named T oma Shiichi, based in Okinawa Prefecture. He proposed

archaeological research on caves and trenches in Okinawa as an effective tool for
recording the tragic reality of the Battle of Okinawa, the only ground war between
Japanese and US forces fought on Japanese soil that resulted in the death of one-
third of the island population. Stimulated by T oma’s proposal, academic interest
in war-related sites has increased and archaeological investigations of about 130
war-related sites and remains have been carried out. One of them was a co-
research project with Chinese scholars in 1993 to investigate the sites of Japan’s
aggressive war in China. In 1997, the archaeology of war-related sites was
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accepted as a legitimate sub-discipline by the Japanese Archaeological Association

during its Okinawa Convention (J ubishi and Kikuchi, 2002: 2; Shimabukuro,
1999: 72-8).
Experiencing the only ground battle fought on home islands of Japan, Okinawans
have developed post-war peace discourses heavily derived from their wartime
experiences of violence as well as post-war experiences as host to a US military base.
A practice of promoting ‘‘peace education’’ in Okinawan terms was to network the
war-related sites in such a way as to remember the ethnic discrimination and the
civilian loss. Criticising the commercialised sightseeing courses of war-related sites
that promote the official narratives of remembering the battle as loyal sacrifice of the
Okinawan people for the Japanese empire, concerned Okinawans organised their
own peace courses of the remains that recalled the harsh realities of the war (Figal,
2001; Murakami, 1998). These local initiatives also materialised the partial
preservation of the remains of the Haebaru Army Hospital Underground Trenches.
The trenches were built in 1944 to prepare for the air raids and attacks of the US
forces (J
ubishi and Kikuchi 2002: 276-7). The site was to become the first war-related
site designated as ‘‘cultural property’’ by the town government in 1990.
Designating modern war-related sites as cultural property or ‘‘cultural property of
shame (fu no bunkazai)’’ (It o, 1994), so that they could get the necessary protection,
however, was not a simple process but rather a multifaceted development. The
process reveals the conflict between grassroots activity and state control on the issues
of conservation and development, that is, between the goals of increasing use values
of places for the community and those of maximising exchange values of places in
the market. Regarding the war-related sites, the conflict is embedded in the politics
of how to define ‘‘cultural property’’ (bunkazai).2 According to the Agency for
Cultural Affairs, the term ‘‘(tangible) cultural properties’’ collectively refers to
‘‘cultural products with a tangible form that possess high historic, artistic, and
academic value of Japan’’ (Agency for Cultural Affairs, 2011). In order to gain the
attributes of ‘‘cultural properties,’’ it is necessary for the war-related sites to gain
‘‘high historic, artistic, and academic value.’’
In redefining cultural properties, the groups that called for the preservation of
modern war-related sites had to redraw the temporal scope of cultural properties
because the application of the Cultural Properties Protection Law was convention-
ally limited to artefacts produced before modern times (Ikeda, 1994; Obinata, 1993).
For example, grassroots movements to conserve one of the wartime underground
shelters, the Matsushiro site in Nagano Prefecture, had to deal with the
administrative convention of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. The agency assumed
that at least the period of ‘‘one hundred years’’ should pass for an artefact to be
 498 J-S. N. Han

designated as a cultural property. Consequently, the underground complex was

considered ‘‘too new’’ to be categorised as a cultural property by the agency. It took
almost five years for the local conservation movement to achieve conserving and
opening of about 500 metres of underground shelters (Obinata, 1993; Obinata,
2000).
Indirect, yet unmistakable, impetus to enhance the value of war-related sites as
cultural properties came from the introduction of ‘‘Modernisation Heritage’’ as a
kind of Important Cultural Properties in 1993. The term refers to the pieces of
historic architecture and other structures of the modern period, from the late
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Tokugawa period to the end of World War II, which contributed to the
modernisation of Japan (It o, 2000). The types and styles of modernisation heritage
vary, including ‘‘house and public structures, civil engineering structures such as
bridges and dikes, and installations such as fences or towers’’ (Agency for Cultural
Affairs, 2011). The change in categorisation increased the possibility for modern
war-related sites to be designated as cultural properties by extending the time span to
include place-products of the nineteenth and twenties centuries.
A three-year investigation, carried out by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, started
in 1990, resulted in the introduction of the new category (J ubishi and Kikuchi, 2002:
24-5). Yet, the conservation of modernisation heritage also has long-term origins
that can be traced back to the 1960s. In facing the accelerated economic development
of the 1960s which entailed the deterioration of the environment and the destruction
of traditionally built environments, such as temples, shrines, castles and other
historic sites, concerned local residents and citizens began to organise themselves,
first regionally then nationally, to preserve both natural and built environments.3
It was the preservation movements for traditional buildings developed in the late
1960s and onwards that set the stage for the movements in the 1980s to conserve
public structures or civil engineering structures of modern times. Converging with
these social forces of promoting the use values of places by protecting traditional and
modern historic sites, the grassroots movement that arose in the 1990s to conserve
war-related sites articulates an end in itself, namely, the commitment to peace by the
‘‘initialisation of memory (kioku no shokika)’’ – ‘‘the returning to the original stage
of memory (kioku no genshoki e no kaiki)’’ (Matsumoto , 2001: 149).
A conservation achievement, albeit not without irony, was making the war-related
site of the Atom Bomb Dome in Hiroshima a historic site in 1995 and listing it as a
World Heritage site in 1997. Located at the corner of the Peace Memorial Park, the
Dome, originally named the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, was
built in 1915 and miraculously survived the atomic blast of 1945. Since the Hiroshima
city government’s decision to preserve it in 1966, various local and national movements
have pressured the central government to designate it as a historic site (Naomi, 1993;
Utaka, 2009). The national government has repeatedly turned down the popular appeal
to make the building a cultural property, claiming that ‘‘even the newest historic site
belongs to the mid-Meiji period, and it is necessary to examine whether . . . [the Dome]
is consistent with the conventional standard of ‘designating objects that have widely
appreciated and established values’’’ (Asahi Shimbun, 16 June 1994).
With the 50th anniversary of the bombing approaching, the renewed awareness of
the need to conserve the Dome as a national historic site gained public support.
Promoted by ‘‘nuclear universalism,’’ the idea that Hiroshima’s nuclear experience
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 499

has a ‘‘universal referentiality’’ and must be remembered from the transcendent

(Yoneyama, 1999: 15), the local movement to conserve the Atom Bomb Dome was
enmeshed in the nation-wide effort to make the place a monument to world peace by
authenticating the dome as a World Heritage site (Asahi Shimbun, 20 May 1995). In
facing the popular appeal, the Japanese government co-opted the notion of
‘‘universal referentiality’’ in the following justification when it nominated the dome
for inscribing on the World Heritage list:

Firstly, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Atom Bomb Dome, stands as a

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permanent witness to the terrible disaster that occurred when the atomic bomb
was used as a weapon for the first time in the history of mankind. Secondly, the
Dome itself is the only building in existence that can convey directly a physical
image of the tragic situation immediately after the bombing. Thirdly, the Dome
has become a universal monument for all mankind, symbolising the hope for
perpetual peace and the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons on earth.
(UNESCO, 1995.)

The nomination was approved at the 20th session of the World Heritage
Committee held in Mexico in 1996, but not without reservations. The Chinese
delegation expressed its reservations in the following words:

During the Second World War, it was the other Asian countries and peoples
who suffered the greatest loss in life and property. But today there are still few
people trying to deny this fact of history. As such being the case, if Hiroshima
nomination is approved to be included on the World Heritage List, even though
on an exceptional basis, it may be utilised for harmful purpose by these few
people. This will, of course, not be conducive to the safeguarding of world peace
and security. For this reason China has reservations on the approval of this
nomination. (UNESCO, 1996.)4

As seen in the case of remembering the Atom Bomb Dome, the Japanese state has
nationalised the universalist understanding of atom bomb suffering and monumen-
talised atom bomb victimhood by enlisting the Dome as a World Heritage site. This
has made the Japanese people susceptible to the commonsensical desire to repress the
memories of Japan’s wartime brutalisation of other nation’s people in the Asia-Pacific
region.5 It is precisely this ambivalent aspect of post-war Japanese remembrance of
the Asia-Pacific wars that has made some Asians question the designation of the
Dome as a World Heritage site. If preserving the Dome in Hiroshima embraces
the politics of victimhood to displace the memories of suffering caused, conserving the
Ichigayadai Building in Tokyo and the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General
Headquarters Complex in Nagano employs the politics of shame to bring the
memories of suffering caused back in contemporary Japan.

Conserving the Cultural Heritage of Shame: Comparing Ichigaya and Matsushiro

Both the Ichigayadai Building No. 1 (hereafter Building No. 1) and the Matsushiro
underground complex embody the war of aggression that Imperial Japan carried out
 500 J-S. N. Han

in the twentieth century. The Ichigaya site was the nerve centre in prosecuting the
war against Asia and the Allied powers. During the war, the site occupied by
Building No. 1 housed the Army Cadet School in 1937 and the Imperial General
Headquarters, the War Ministry, and the General Staff Office in 1941. The
Matsushiro site refers to a gigantic complex of underground shelters and tunnels
constructed under the three mountains of Z ozan, Maizuru, and Minagami in
Nagano. They were designed to relocate the Imperial General Headquarters of the
Ichigayadai as well as the imperial family and other state organs, including ministries
and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), in preparation for the impending
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‘‘Final Battle’’ in the main Japanese islands. The total length of the tunnels for
underground shelters reached about ten kilometres and the construction took from
November 1944 to August 1945 under the code name, ‘‘Matsushiro Warehouse
Construction’’ (Aoki, 2008; J ubishi and Kikuchi, 2002: 183-5; Sens o iseki hozon
zenkoku netto w aku, 2004: 174-6). The construction was managed by the
Nishimatsu Construction Company and the Kajima Construction Company, using
primarily Korean forced labourers. Some 7000 Koreans were mobilised for the
construction and an estimated 1000 died from malnutrition, accident and execution.6

The Ichigaya Case

In the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in the war, the fortune of the Building No. 1
dramatically changed. When the US military forces requisitioned the facilities, the
auditorium of Building No. 1 was remodelled as a courtroom to stage the
International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally known as the Tokyo
Trial, from 1946 to 1948. When the facilities were returned to Japan, the place
provided a home to the Eastern District Army Headquarters of the Ground Self
Defense Force (SDF). The site gained social attention when the novelist Mishima
Yukio carried out a ritual suicide at the site in 1970 (see Yamaguchi, 1972).
Building No. 1 barely escaped destruction in 1987 when the then Defense Agency
decided to relocate its main offices from the Roppongi district to the Ichigaya
district. The decision was made against the backdrop of spiking land prices in central
Tokyo as a result of the ‘‘bubble economy’’ (see Douglass, 1993: 91). It has been
reported that the Defense Agency spent 274 billion yen to build the new complex in
Ichigaya, the largest central government office ever built in Japan, and that the cost
was financed by the 480 billion yen in proceeds from the sale of the Roppongi
property (Japan Times, 23 April 2000; Kyodo News International, 3 February 2000).
In Roppongi, what followed the Defense Agency’s relocation was the new urban
redevelopment to create an entertainment complex including office, residential,
commercial, hotel and leisure space.
The movement to conserve Building No. 1 was organised in the early 1990s when
the public discovered the plan to relocate the Defense Agency at the expense of
Building No. 1. To preserve the historic site, a movement emerged that embraced
odd bedfellows: the conservative and the progressive camp. The alliance between the
two camps was temporary since their preservation goals differed, soon transferring
the contention on to the Diet floor between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and
the then Japan Socialist Party (JSP). The conservatives were the first to react to the
plan. An ex-member of the Air SDF, Kurabayashi Kazuo, took a lead in organising
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 501

the Association to Conserve Ichigayadai Building No. 1 (hereafter Conserve

Association) in 1991. One of the reasons to preserve the building was ‘‘to make it
clear that the (Tokyo) Trial was the violation of international laws and that the trial
was imposing victor’s justice’’ (Asahi Shimbun, 14 September 1991). On the other
hand, progressives began to organise themselves into the Citizens’ Meeting to Reflect
the Relocation of the Defense Agency (hereafter Citizens’ Meeting) in 1993. The
Citizens’ Meeting was a group of people living nearby the bases of SDF, critics and
professors who claimed that the building was a ‘‘living witness to Showa history’’
and must be conserved and open to the general public in order to teach the horrible
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lessons of war (Astra, 1995).

While making strategic alliances to organise demonstrations for preservation, the
Conserve Association and the Citizens’ Meeting respectively worked with politicians
of the LDP and the JSP to pressure the Japanese government. Itagaki Tadashi of the
LDP was active in the Upper House committee sessions in 1993, delivering speeches
that emphasised the need to conserve the building. Itagaki was a son of General
Itagaki Seishir o, who was charged as a Class A war criminal in the Tokyo Trial and
sentenced to death in 1948. As the advisor of the Japan War Bereaved Association,
Itagaki Tadashi had also been active in denying the government’s recruitment of
‘‘military comfort women’’ during his father’s war by saying that there was ‘‘no
objective proof’’ of the government’s involvement and that ‘‘military comfort
women’’ were ‘‘not a historical fact’’ (Tokyo Kaleidoscope, 7 June 1996). Since the
problem of ‘‘military comfort women’’ has ‘‘imaginative power’’ as well as real
power to galvanise international criticism of Japan’s wartime crimes, right-wing
nationalists have been extremely sensitive of the issue (Hein, 1999). Arguing that the
military comfort women issue was largely framed by a ‘‘Tokyo Trial view of
history,’’ conservatives interweaved the issue of conserving the site with a project for
overcoming that view of history.
At the 128th Diet sessions in 1993, Itagaki Tadashi argued that conserving
Building No. 1 was fundamental to preserving the ‘‘basis of our nation.’’ What he
meant by this was that Building No. 1 needed to be preserved in order to re-
remember the Tokyo Trial in such a way as to be freed from ‘‘the Tokyo Trial view
of history.’’ According to him, the Tokyo Trial view of history is the ‘‘curse’’ that
‘‘unjustly’’ condemns Japan as the ‘‘enemy of peace’’ and ‘‘enemy of humanity.’’
(Itagaki, 1993).7 The ‘‘curse of the Tokyo Trial view of history,’’ as referred to by
Itagaki , is based on the idea that the trial was essentially ‘‘victors’ justice,’’ in which
justice was meted out by the political expediency of the victors, not by the legal
principles of international laws (see Minear, 1971; Totani, 2008; Yoshida, 2005).
Conservative nationalists are the most vociferous advocates of the notion of
‘‘victors’ justice’’ with a goal to wipe out the memories of suffering caused. In arguing
that the victor nations arbitrarily punished Japanese leaders for crimes they had not
committed, the advocates cited the dissenting opinion written by Justice Radhabinod
Pal, the Indian Tokyo Trial member as the authoritative legal opinion (Brook, 2001).
Welcoming Pal’s dissent, the notion of ‘‘victors’ justice’’ had been persistently
promoted by conservatives through their activities of translating and publishing Pal’s
dissenting opinion (Totani, 2008: 224-9). Mixing Pal’s dissent with the belief that
Japan waged a defensive war against Western powers to liberate Asia from Western
imperialism, the reactionaries deny documented facts like the Nanjing massacre or
 502 J-S. N. Han

military comfort women established by the Tokyo Trial as ‘‘shameless lies that once
deceived the military court at Tokyo and elsewhere’’ (Totani, 2008: 234).
Although this conservative view continues to have resilience, there exist views that
the Tokyo Trial, along with the Nuremberg Trial, contributed to the transformation
of international law by making aggressive war a crime and by holding individuals
responsible for atrocities committed against prisoners of war and the civilian
population in wartime (Totani, 2008: 197-217). Coalescing with the intellectual
concern to reassess the place of ‘‘Asia’’ in Japan, there also exist critiques that point
out the limits of the Tokyo Trial, such as the omission of prosecuting Japan’s war
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crimes against Asian civilian populations. While acknowledging the Tokyo Trial’s
historical significance in putting wartime leaders on trial, the critics argued that the
trial has none the less contributed to a collective amnesia about Japan’s wartime
crimes against Asia (Totani, 2008: 246-62; Yoshida, 2005: 66-74).
Broadly referring to the legalist and the critical views of the Tokyo Trial as the
‘‘curse of the Tokyo Trial view of history,’’ Itagaki pointed out that the ‘‘curse’’ had
become pervasive in Japanese society. As a result, he continued, the Japanese people
had suffered from the loss of a ‘‘just view of history and pride in national history.’’
Itagaki (1993) then presented his own view as follows:

. . . these days the Great War is often remembered as the historical event that
triggered the rise of nationalisms in late-developers around the world.
Therefore, Building No. 1 must be conserved not only for the Japanese but
also for the world. I think the building has a world value as a living witness [to
history].

In other words, Itagaki was arguing that Building No. 1 must be conserved as a
monument to Japan’s war of ‘‘liberating Asian peoples from Western imperialisms.’’
Upper House JSP member It o Masatoshi argued for the conservation of Building
No. 1 from a different position. Introducing himself as a member of the post-war
generation, Ito claimed that ‘‘[we] need to cherish post-war democracy and current
constitution as the highest value.’’ It o continued, noting that he had ‘‘a quite
different view from Representative Itagaki,’’ saying that Building No. 1 must be
conserved in order to remember and reflect on Japan’s wartime aggressions and
crimes. He further claimed that Building No. 1 needed to be open to the public to
exhibit war-related objects and images so as to educate the next generation about the
war. Ito pointed out that ‘‘it makes a decisive difference in sensing the power [of
history] when one sees historical documents at the very historic site that has been
conserved the way it was’’ (Ito, 1993).
While confronting the demands to conserve Building No. 1 from both
representatives of the LDP and the JSP, the ministers in the committee were asked
to present not only their positions on the issue of conserving the building but also
their views on the Tokyo Trial in particular and the Asia-Pacific War in general. In
many cases, the ministers’ positions and views were ambiguous and inconsistent.
Pointing out the financial and technical problems in conserving Building No. 1,
government officials claimed that it was difficult to preserve the building. They none
the less agreed on the idea that ‘‘it is very important to hand down the historical facts
to the next generation.’’ However, their ‘‘historical facts’’ became highly abstract and
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 503

generalised ideas about wars; the Asia-Pacific War came to be remembered as a mere
‘‘foolish thing (orokana koto)’’ (Nakanishi, 1993). Director General of the Defense
Agency, Nakanishi Keisuke (1993), for example, remarked as follows:

In other words, I personally think that it is a very subjective, abstract, and

difficult matter to decide whether it is good for victors to judge losers or whether
it is possible to define aggressive war or just war.
Whether it is war of justice or war of aggression, however, war is a very
foolish thing (taihen orokana koto) to do in the sense that it destroys society and
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culture. Therefore, such a foolish thing should not be repeated . . .

Director General of the General Affairs Agency, Ishida K

oshir
o (1993), shared a
similar ambiguity in the following remarks:

I also have a very complicated feeling about [the Building No. 1] in that [the
building] was where the Tokyo Trial was held while at the same time the
building also hosted the Imperial General Headquarters [during the war] . . .
As written in our constitution, Japan renounces war. The so-called war,
whether being victors or losers, injures valuable human lives and causes
tremendous loss. Therefore, our resolution against any war should always be
based upon repentance and self-discipline.

In the end, Building No. 1 managed to survive, but not in its original form. A
limited part of the building was preserved as archives. The auditorium of the
building, where the Tokyo Trial was held, was moved and restored at the corner of
the newly established high-rise ministry complex as the Ichigaya Memorial Hall in
2000. Although the Ichigaya Memorial Hall is open to the public as JSP member It o
suggested, the way the hall is managed is not in accordance with what It o envisioned
but remains silent about the suffering caused. The Ichigaya Memorial Hall is a two-
storey building. On the first floor, the auditorium of Building No. 1 is restored. The
place exhibits floor, lights, benches and platforms used in the Tokyo Trial. Not all of
them are authentic although an effort was made to utilise original materials. In a
corner of the auditorium, military officers’ uniforms and their personal objects, such
as letters, stamps and the like, are exhibited. In the opposite corner, books written by
Radhabinod Pal are displayed in the showcase. They are: International Military
Tribunal for the Far East: Dissentient Judgment and a Japanese translation, Nihon
muzairon or Japan, Not Guilty (see Yoshida, 2006: 51-2). At the centre of the
platform, there is a placard that says ‘‘emperor’s seat (gyokuza).’’ On the second
floor, the exhibitions are the ex-office of the minister of the Army and the resting
room of the emperor during his visit.
The Ichigaya Memorial Hall materialises the ambiguous stands represented by
state officials. Fulfilling the function of memorialising the war dead, the exhibition of
things used by military personnel makes visitors uneasy about exploring the
propositions and causes of the war, let alone the suffering caused by Imperial Japan.
In fact, according to one visitor, the exhibition reminds him of the Y ushukan,
Japan’s oldest war museum annexed to the Yasukuni Shrine and designed to glorify
wars fought by Japan (Mori and Kang, 2004: 148-9; see also Hein and Takenaka,
 504 J-S. N. Han

2007: 87). Neutralising the contending narratives of victimised and victimising in

terms of ‘‘justice,’’ the Ichigaya Memorial Hall presents a comforting narrative of
educating the lessons of war by endowing authenticity implicated in a ‘‘universal
willingness to commemorate suffering experienced rather than suffering caused’’
(Lisle, 2006: 853). In sum, the conservation of Building No. 1 to recall the aggressive
war was compromised and hijacked by right-wing conservatives with the
acquiescence of state officials.

The Matsushiro Case

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While the Ichigaya case shows the historical preservation movement within the
contest between progressive and conservative activists, the Matsushiro case reveals
the cleavage among progressive groups rooted in locality. Although the Matsushiro
site began to gain national and international attention in the 1990s, local movements
to remember, publicise and conserve the underground complex developed much
earlier with a focus on suffering caused. These local movements were composed of
three different yet not unrelated sub-currents.
The first sub-current is developed around the local organisation called the
Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex Preservation
Association (hereafter Matsushiro Preservation Association). Inspired by a group of
students from a high school in Nagano, the Matsushiro Preservation Association
was organised in 1986. The students petitioned the local government to conserve the
underground shelter by making it a historic site (Figure 1). The students’ activities
were grounded in the local atmosphere sensitive to suffering caused. By the late
1960s, the students of Shinsh u University had already organised a Korean Cultural
Study Group to investigate the forced Korean labour used to build the underground
complex. It is said that the study group was inspired by the work of Park Hunshik, a
professor at Ch osen University, entitled The Record of Forced Taking of Koreans
(1965). In the meantime, Wada Noboru, a children’s author from Nagano, published

Figure 1. Matsushiro underground tunnel.

 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 505

a non-fiction book entitled The Fortress of Sadness based on research on Korean

forced labourers (Aoki, 2008: 254-5).
Awakened by these activities, concerned local citizens organised the Matsushiro
Preservation Association to lead the movement for conserving and opening the
underground complex to the general public. From the early history of the
Matsushiro Preservation Association, many activists were middle-school and high-
school teachers. Many of them were also the members of the Japan Teachers Union,
which since its establishment in 1947, was critical of the conservative Ministry of
Education on the issues involved in education in general and history textbooks in
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particular. The first president of the Matsushiro Preservation Association, Aoki

Takaju, used to be a high-school social studies teacher, who later became a professor
at the College of Nagano Prefecture. The secretary-general of the Matsushiro
Preservation Association in 2011, Kitahara Takako, was one of his students and was
also a teacher. The office of the Matsushiro Preservation Association, Kib o no Ie, is
the old house of Professor Aoki (interview with Kitahara Takako, 26 January 2011).
The Matsushiro Preservation Association has also played a leading role in
organising and managing the Japanese Network to Protect War-Related Sites. It was
the Matsushiro Preservation Association that called for networking various isolated
local movements to conserve war-related sites, which soon developed into the
national organisation of the Network.8
The second sub-current is formed around the movement developed in the 1990s to
build a memorial stone for Korean victims during the construction of the
underground complex. The activists involved in the movement were particularly
inspired by an animation called The Cross of the Kim Brothers. The animation was
based on another non-fiction work of Wada Noboru published under the same title
in 1983. While promoting the nation-wide showing of the film, the concerned
activists researched the identity, number and conditions of forced Korean labourers
and organised a movement to erect a memorial stone to remember Korean victims in
1991. By 1995, the movement successfully raised two million yen and erected the
memorial stone nearby the entrance of an underground shelter under Mt Z ozan
(Figure 2). In 1995, the movement was organised into the Matsushiro Imperial
General Headquarters Memorial Stone Protection Association (hereafter Memorial
Stone Protection Association) (Harayama, 2009: 233-5).
A central figure in the movement to remember Korean victims is Harayama
Shigeo. By the 1990s, Harayama was deeply involved with the local movement to
conserve the underground complex. Also working as a teacher, Harayama once
acted as the head of Nagano Prefecture Teacher’s Union Executive Committee and
the vice-president of the Matsushiro Preservation Association. As a ‘‘patriot youth’’
(gunkoku sh onen), Harayama volunteered for the navy at the age of 16 in 1944 and
identified himself as a ‘‘perpetrator’’ (kagaisha). To him, the movement to remember
Korean victims was a way to ‘‘reduce sin’’ (tsumi horoboshi) (interview, Harayama
Shigeo, 25 January 2011). While fund-raising for the memorial stone, Harayama was
committed to the investigation and publication of the number of Korean forced
labourers who were both mobilised and died, their identities and the harsh working
conditions. Assisted by the Nagano branches of Korean Japanese associations, he
was able to track down and interview Korean survivors of forced labour or members
of the bereaved families, living either in Japan or Korea (Harayama, 2009: 236).9 To
 506 J-S. N. Han
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Figure 2. Korean forced labour memorial stone. Photograph by Jung-Sun N. Han.

this day, only the names of three Korean labourers and one Japanese who died at the
site are known.
The third sub-current is derived from the movement to build Another History
Museum, Matsushiro. The incident that triggered the movement occurred in 1991
when the local public found out that an old building nearby the underground
complex, used as a comfort women station, was to be destroyed.10 An Executive
Committee to Preserve Matsushiro Korean Comfort Women Station was formed
and began raising funds to preserve the building. The Executive Committee managed
to secure land near the entrance of the Z ozan underground shelter in 1995 and
changed its name into the Another History Museum in 1996. It was also around this
time that international society at last became aware of Japan’s wartime crime against
women and the existence of military comfort women. Several aging comfort women,
starting with Kim Hak Soon, came forward in 1991 to relate their horrible
experiences, spurring transnational movements to compensate these victimised and
aging women and to press the Japanese government for official acknowledgement
and apology for its wartime atrocities.
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 507

The Another History Museum is profoundly influenced by transnational

development and is committed to reveal, remember and transfer ‘‘history from the
viewpoint of the ruled and victimised’’ by conserving not only the underground
complex but also the comfort women station in Nagano. In 1998, the group opened a
small history museum on the secured land. The museum is designed ‘‘to easily learn
and to collect information’’ about the history of the Matsushiro underground
complex and the issues of war and gender (Figure 3). The museum exhibits tools and
photographs to introduce the harsh conditions of forced labour. It is also intended
‘‘to be used for meetings between Japan and South Korea, Japan and North Korea,
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and local and national people’’ (M ohitotsu no rekishikan, 2004: 40-2).
The members of the Another History Museum are motivated not only by the
comfort women but also by a woman of local origin named Yamane Masako
(interview, anonymous member, Another History Museum, 25 January 2011). Born in
1939, Yamane Masako was a daughter of a Korean man who worked on the
underground complex and a Japanese woman. Surviving the war and defeat, all of her
family members, except Masako, were sent to North Korea in 1960. Masako decided
to stay in Japan at the last minute. She moved to Tokyo and tried to wipe out all her
past, including her ethnic origin. It was her encounter with Wada Noboru’s work, The
Cross of the Kim Brothers, which converted Yamane into a devoted activist, digging
out and publicising the stories of Korean forced labourers and comfort women in
Matsushiro to the end of her life in 1993 (Higaki, 1991; Yamane, 2000: 432-7).
All three sub-currents of local movements to conserve the Matsushiro under-
ground complex belong to the progressive camp in Japanese society. They all share
the belief that the heritage of shame must be conserved and that the legacy of
suffering caused needs to be remembered. To achieve this goal, all three groups
commit to the education, research and publication of the history of the underground
complex. For example, the Matsushiro Preservation Association is making a great
effort to train and educate informed volunteers to guide visitors to the area. Thanks
to active local civic movements, the underground complex gained not only national
but also international attention. Data provided by the Matsushiro Preservation

Figure 3. Another History Museum, Matsushiro. Photograph by Jung-Sun N. Han.

 508 J-S. N. Han

Association show more than 100,000 people visiting every year during the last
decade. This was a dramatic increase from around 1500 per year in the mid-1980s
(Higaki, 1991: 58). To meet the growing number of visitors, the Matsushiro
Preservation Association holds regular ‘‘classes for training guides for Matsushiro.’’
The vice-president of the Matsushiro Preservation Association, Ato Mitsumasa,
proudly pointed out that the percentage of guides provided by the Matsushiro
Preservation Association to the total number of visitors increased from 14.7% in
2001 to 24.7% in 2010 (data provided by the Matsushiro Preservation Association;
interview, Ato Mitsumasa, 26 January 2011). Members of the Another History
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Museum also put emphasis on holding regular meetings for studying and researching
local history. The number of visitors to the history museum run by the Another
History Museum reached 8000 per year for the last three years (M ohitotsu no
rekishikan, 2010).
All the activists, regardless of their associations, firmly believe in the power of
places and things to convey past experiences to subsequent generations because
places and things are perceived as somehow recreating ‘‘the past as it happened’’ in
the here and now. The assumption is that ‘‘history told by things’’ (mono ga kataru
rekishi) is truthful and objective and, therefore, by implication particularly suitable
for telling and revealing the history of the ruled and victimised (Kuro, 2010). It is
also believed that ‘‘learning by experience’’ (taikensuru), such as being in the
underground complex or lifting a tool used by forced labourers, leads oneself ‘‘to
think using one’s own head’’ (jibun no atamade kangaeru) (interview, staff member,
Another History Museum, Matsushiro, 25 January 2011). In other words, unless one
learns by experience the past cannot be ‘‘clearly known’’ (pinto konai) (interview,
Shimamura Shinji, Matsushiro Preservation Association and the Network, 26
January 2011). Putting its trust in the power of place, the Matsushiro Preservation
Association is especially active in pressing the local government to designate the
underground complex as a historic site. The activists are particularly concerned
about the fact that the underground complex is administered by the sightseeing
section of the Nagano city government and, therefore, about the possibility of the
complex being utilised as a mere tool to promote tourism. It is reported that the city
is acknowledging the site only ‘‘as a facility for sightseeing’’ but not as a historic site.
The logic flows as follows: ‘‘the underground shelter was not used for the Imperial
General Headquarters. The place has never been used for the purpose and ended as a
mere plan’’ (Higaki, 1991: 45).
The three sub-currents are not converging into one movement, however. There
exists subtle discord among them on how to achieve the common goal. For example,
Harayama Shigeo, the secretary-general of the Memorial Stone Protection
Association, who once acted as the vice-president of the Matsushiro Preservation
Association, no longer works with the Matsushiro Preservation Association. When
Harayama was raising funds for the memorial stone for Korean victims, he collected
donations from the Nishimatsu Construction Company and the Kajima Construc-
tion Company, which made use of Korean forced labour. The Matsushiro
Preservation Association, however, considered the donation morally unacceptable
(interview, Harayama Shigeo, 25 January 2011 and members, Matsushiro
Preservation Association, 26 January 2011). While the incident was a direct trigger
for their separation, there are also ideological differences. The Matsushiro
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 509

Preservation Association is perceived as having close ties with the Japanese

Communist Party, whereas Harayama has ties to no particular political parties. The
largest group among the three, the Matsushiro Preservation Association, is criticised
for its ‘‘factionalism’’ (t
ohasei) and intolerance of various kinds of local and civil
movements. Sharing the critique with Harayama, the anonymous member of the
Another History Museum pointed out that such ‘‘factionalism’’ only weakens the
strength of social and local movements and that overcoming ‘‘factionalism’’ is a
challenge within the progressive movements to conserve the underground complex
(interview, Harayama Shigeo, 25 January 2011 and anonymous member, Another
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History Museum, 26 January 2011).

The ongoing movement to conserve the underground complex and comfort
women station in Matsushiro, Nagano is devoted to making the shameful history of
wartime Japan come alive. Deeply rooted in the particular local experience of
discriminating against and inflicting suffering on Koreans under Japanese imperialist
rule, the activists associated with the three sub-currents are determined to make the
place of shame speak for itself. Although these local movements are tenacious in
their pursuit to conserve the heritage of shame, they none the less remain largely
marginalised in the politics of cultural property in the sense that the Matsushiro
underground complex has not yet been designated as a historic site either by the
central or local governments.

Conclusion
As the generation of victims, perpetrators and eyewitnesses have nearly all passed
away, the struggle to reclaim war-related sites has become an urgent issue, and the
social politics of remembrance is increasingly enmeshed in the conservation
movements both at the national and local levels. The development of conservation
movements for built structures in general can be traced back to the local initiatives of
the 1960s to preserve historic and natural built environments. Yet, the civic
movements to conserve war-related sites during the 1990s can be distinguished from
earlier developments in that they have the specific goal of incorporating physical
signs of modern Japan’s aggressive wars into contemporary Japan’s war
remembrance. The war-related sites have become the sites of memory war.
By producing war memories attached to places, the conservation movement for
war-related sites highlighted the dissonant nature of place-products. The process, on
the one hand, contributed to the weakening of the memory-nation nexus within
Japan by recalling vernacular memories of suffering caused as well as memories of
suffering experienced. On the other hand, social movements to redraw the national
‘‘memoryscape’’ by conserving war-related sites incited renewed official strategies to
contain vernacular memories of war and defeat within the tendentious narrative of
victimhood. The central government’s designation of the Atom Bomb Dome as a
historic site so as to inscribe the dome on the World Heritage List is the prime case.
Conserving the Atom Bomb Dome was appropriated by the state to obfuscate the
memories of suffering caused and to evince memories of suffering experienced in the
guise of ‘‘safeguarding’’ world peace and security.
The conservation of Ichigayadai Building No. 1 in Tokyo and the Matsushiro
Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex in Nagano are permeated
 510 J-S. N. Han

with contentions caused by remembering the place of humiliation and shame. The
Ichigaya case crystallises the conflict between conservatives and progressives
about what to remember between suffering experienced and suffering caused. By
employing the problematic notion of ‘‘victors’ justice’’ in remembering the Tokyo
Trial, the conservative camp managed to make the memories attached to the
Building No. 1 deliberately ambiguous on the issue of the military leadership’s
wartime atrocity and post-war responsibility. The Ichigaya site has thus become
a compromised war-related site, neutralising competing remembrances both at
the governmental and social levels and obscuring the memories of suffering
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caused.
Stubborn in evoking the memories of suffering caused, the Matsushiro movement
reveals an ongoing contention about how to conserve the heritage of shame.
It remains to be seen how the local movement to shelter the memories of suffering
caused will unfold. As for now, however, it seems that the dynamic competition
among three organisations that differ in both their ideological orientations and their
strategy is tenaciously sustaining the marginalised memories. In this sense, the power
of historic places in resisting the weathering of memory lies in such places’ capacity
to become the public space for people to network and to diversify and localise public
memories.

Acknowledgement
This research has been supported by many Japanese people concerned with conserving war-related sites.
The author is grateful to Mr Ikemoto Haruki, an ex-Jiji Press news reporter, for locating the record of
128th Diet sessions (1993) that is used for the research on the Ichigaya site. A Yomiuri Newspaper
reporter, Mr Kikuchi Yoshiaki, arranged the field trip to Matsushiro, Nagano and meetings with the
activists involved in the Matsushiro conservation movements. Last, but not least, the author is grateful to
Ms Kitahara Takako, the secretary-general of the Matsushiro Preservation Association, for a personal
guide on the site as well as for introductions to the members of the association and the Network to Protect
War-Related Sites in January 2011. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the author’s colleagues,
Il-Joon Chung and Cuz Potter, who provided constructive critiques, comments and suggestions.

Notes
1
In 2001, 70 war-related sites had been acknowledged as ‘‘cultural heritage’’ (bunkazai). Among them,
26 are recognised by the national government, four by the prefectural governments, 20 by city
governments, 18 by the town governments, and two by the village assemblies (J ubishi and Kikuchi,
2002: 27-8).
2
The term cultural property, bunkazai, had an international dimension from its birth in wartime East
Asia. The term began to appear in Japanese documents at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in
1937. The term was used, firstly, to identify and classify Chinese cultural products looted by the
Japanese military. Secondly, the term was circulated to create the image of the Japanese military that
was protecting Chinese cultural heritage. Yet the official use of the term bunkazai came only in the post-
war period. It was used to translate the English word ‘‘cultural property’’ when Japan promulgated the
Cultural Properties Protection Law in 1950 under the USA (Suzuki, 1996: 83-91).
3
Among the earliest grassroots movements to conserve historic and natural built environments appeared
in Kamakura, Kyoto, and Nara in the 1960s. Sporadic movements soon organised themselves into
nation-wide interest groups and citizens’ committees, such as the Association of Towns with Historic
Townscapes of 1973 and the Japanese Association for Townscape Preservation of 1974. The local
initiatives to conserve townscape succeeded in having the central government amend the Cultural
Properties Protection Law in 1975 by inserting the category of ‘‘Important Preservation Districts for
Groups of Historic Buildings.’’ On these issues, see Hohn (1997: 213-5).
 Conserving the Heritage of Shame: War Remembrance in Japan 511
4
The other nation that expressed reservation was the USA. The reason was that the USA was:
concerned about the lack of historical perspective in the nomination of Atom Bomb Dome. The
events antecedent to the United States’ use of atomic weapons to end World War II are keys to
understanding the tragedy of Hiroshima. Any examination of the period leading up to 1945 should
be placed in the appropriate historical context (UNESCO, 1996).
5
For example, memories of Koreans who were atom bomb victims are largely marginalised. Mobilised
and forced by Imperial Japan, some Koreans moved to Hiroshima as workers and soldiers and also
became atom bomb victims. For conflicts on how to remember Korean atom bomb victims, see
Yoneyama (1995).
6
Somewhere in between the mountains of Z ozan and Maizuruyama, the construction of a cave named
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kashikodokoro was also undertaken. The place was designed to hide the Three Sacred Treasures of
Japan (consisting of sword, mirror and jewel). According to the testimony of Yamaguchi Mitsuji, the
place was ordered to be built by mobilising only ‘‘pure Japanese,’’ meaning unmarried Japanese males.
For this construction, some Japanese young men from other regions, including Yamaguchi, were
drafted in July. The idea demonstrated the existence of ‘‘the undercurrent of discriminating against
Koreans and women’’ in pre-war Japan (Yamaguchi and Hara, 2001: 111-14). The place and plan are
also mentioned during Ms Kitahara Takao’s three-hour personal guide through the underground
complex in the morning of 26 January 2011.
7
To Itagaki (1993), the view was a ‘‘curse’’ against Japan since it produced unacceptable assumptions
that : (i) the war from 1928 to 1945 was an aggressive war; (ii) the war was led by militarists and
ultranationalists who deceived the Japanese people into the wrong war; and (iii) that the Japanese
people should not forget the war responsibilities.
8
It is said that the call was in part inspired by citizens’ movements in making the Atom Bomb Dome in
Hiroshima into a national and international cultural heritage (interview, Shimamura Shinji,
Matsushiro Preservation Association and the Network, 26 January 2011).
9
As a result of his research, Harayama edited a book of oral testimonies of both Korean and Japanese
people involved in the construction of underground shelters (Matsushiro daihonei rod osh
ogenshu
hensh u iinkai, 2001). Harayama also collaborated with Koreans and published a Korean translation of
Wada’s The Cross of the Kim Brothers in 2001. He continued investigation and revealed the multi-
layered structure of forced labour in which Koreans were ‘drafted’ through various routes. See a
research report by Harayama (2006).
10
The comfort women station was eventually deconstructed, but the materials were salvaged and secured
by the Another History Museum. It is a goal of the organisation that the station be reconstructed in the
future (interview, anonymous member of the Another History Museum, 25 January 2011).

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