In recent years, Japan has won World Heritage status for four industrial sites: the Iwami silver mine, the Tomioka silk filature, the cluster of Meiji Era Industrial Revolution sites of coal mining, ship building, and iron and steel production, and the Sado Island gold mines. In this talk Professor Gordon will examine a portion of Japan’s modern industrial heritage that has not been officially recognized: the monuments memorializing wartime foreign laborers brought to Japan under varying degrees of coercion between 1939 and 1945. These monuments are “dark” in three ways. They commemorate and mourn the negative heritage of war. Many are located well off the beaten path. And many of the sites of this labor, including mines, were located underground. Although these sites are triply dark and neither UNESCO nor the Japanese government has designated them as official sites of heritage, they are surprisingly numerous. Professor Gordon will examine the process of curating this dark heritage and the messages it conveys, with a comparative look at the way German heritage sites treat their similarly dark heritage.

Andrew Gordon is the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History at Harvard University. His teaching and research focus primarily on modern Japan. In 2011, while serving as director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Gordon led the Institute in founding the Japan Disasters Digital Archive, a digital archive project that aims to preserve the vast array of digital records concerning the March 11, 2011 disaster in Japan and its aftermath. The archive makes those records available to a global community of citizens, students, and scholars.  He is currently working on the public history of Japan’s industrial heritage in relation to local, national and global institutions (UNESCO). He gives particular attention to shuttered energy industries, including coal mines with their negative heritage of wartime labor exploitation and the recent emergence of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant as a site of negative heritage.