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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Andrew Gordon
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A sidebar controversy to the intense debate of 2015 on how Japan's leaders would mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II sparked my interest in the phenomenon of “dark tourism,” defined in brief as touristic interest in sites associated with death, disaster and atrocity. The practice of dark tourism, with focus mainly on the creation of dark tourist sites and the messages they convey (or fail to convey), is the concern of the three papers to follow.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 17 , Issue 6: Special Issue: Dark Tourism and the History of Imperial and Contemporary Japan , March 2019 , e1
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2019

References

Notes

1 The Japan Conference claims about 40,000 members nationwide, including roughly 60 percent of the members in the House of Representatives (mainly from the LDP). Its agenda includes constitutional revision and aversion to apology for Japanese colonial rule or conduct of World War II. For more on this organization, see Tawara Yoshifumi “What is the Aim of Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-Right Organization that Supports Japan's Abe Administration?” Translated by Asia Policy Point, Senior Fellow William Brooks and Senior Research Assistant Lu Pengqiao. Introduction by Tomomi Yamaguchi. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus Volume 15, Issue 21. Number. November 01, 2017.

2 For the text of the statement, see here.

3 “Kōfu no dōmei hikō to satsugai” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, April 17, 1897, morning edition, p. 1. “Hashima tankō no fuon,” Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, April 20, 1897, morning edition, p. 2.

4 Mizuno Hiromi, “Rasa Island: What Industrialization to Remember and Forget,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2017. Miyamoto Takashi, “Convict Labor and Its Commemoration: the Mitsui Miike Coal Mine Experience,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2017). Several other fine accounts of the 2015 controversy have appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal with particular attention to the most famous mine, Hashima (or Gunkanjima, “Battleship Island”). William Underwood and Mark Siemons, “Island of Horror: Gunkanjima and Japan's Quest for UNESCO World Heritage Status,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2015). Takazane Yasunori, “Should ”Gunkanjima Be a World Heritage Site? The forgotten scars of Korean Forced Labor,“ The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 13, issue 28, No. 1, July 13, 2015. David Palmer, ”Gunkanjima / Battleship Island, Nagasaki: World Heritage Historical Site or Urban Ruins Tourist Attraction?“ The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 16, issue 1, No. 4, January 1, 2018. Understandably these articles generally focus on the responsibility for the curators of these sites to come clean on the wartime history. They do not discuss in any detail the fact of, or the relevance of, a longer dark history of labor (and an arguably ”bright“ history of resistance) at these places.

5 In preparing the summary of existing scholarship in this section, I benefited greatly from research assistance of Hirokazu Yoshie, now an Assistant Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.

6 A.V. Seaton, “War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815-1915,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1999) pp. 130-158.

7 A.V. Seaton, “Guided by the dark: From thanatopsis to thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1996) pp. 234-244.

8 John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, “JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1996) pp. 198-211.

9 John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (Hampshire, UK: Cengage Learning, 2010).

10 Carolyn Strange and Michael Kempa, “Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2003) pp. 386-405.

11 Philip Stone, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre related Tourists Sites, Attractions, and Exhibitions,” Tourism, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2006) pp. 145-160.

12 Noureddine Selmi, et al., “To What Extent May Sites of Death be Tourism Destinations? The Cases of Hiroshima in Japan and Struthof in France,” Asian Business & Management (2012). C. K. Lee, et al., “Thanatourism or Peace Tourism: Perceived Value at a North Korean Resort from an Indigenous Perspective,” International Journal of Tourism Research (2012). See also, for examples, Lindsey Freeman, “Theme Parks and Station Plaques: Memory, Tourism and Forgetting in Post-Aum Japan,” in Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape (2014) and Eun-Jung Kang, et al., “Benefits of Visiting a ‘Dark Tourism’ Site: the Case of the Jeju April 3rd Peace Park, Korea,” Tourism Management (2012).

13 Shingo Ito, “‘Dark Tourism’ Grows at 3/11 sites,” The Japan Times, March 6, 2016.

14 木村至聖、産業遺産の記憶と表象−「軍艦島」をめぐるポリティックス、京都大学学術出 版(2014)。 鈴木淳、編] 史跡で読む日本の歴史 : 近代の史跡、Vol 10, 吉川弘文館(2010)。 井 出明、編「ダークツーリズム・ジャパン」。.

15 井出明、編、「ダークツーリズム・ジャパン」 Vol. 2 (2016).井出明、「ダークツーリズム： 悲しみの記憶を巡る旅（東京：幻冬舎、 2018) 。井出明「ダークツーリズム拡張―近代の再構築」 （東京：美術出版社、, 2018)。.

16 James B. Gardner and Paula Hamilton, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Public History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

17 Lennon and Foley, Dark Tourism, p. 11.