• Contested Heritage in East AsiaColonial Memory & Technology Sites
• Johannes-Geert Hagmann

Public history, history of technology in East Asia, memory sites, difficult history

In 1988, a historical concept entered the political arena, when the French minister of culture Jack Lang designated the historic French brasserie Fouquet's on the Champs-Elysées a "site of memory" (lieu de mémoire). Since then, the concept has had a remarkable career, even entering the lexicon of the World Heritage organization UNESCO.¹ At the time, historian Pierre Nora, the originator of the idea, criticized its political misuse.² In coining the term lieu de mémoire ("sites of remembering"), Nora wanted to highlight the symbolic dimension of tangible sites (monuments and landscapes) and intangible objects (festivities and rituals), offering a window into how history and collective memory shape each other. Nora had misgivings about how his academic term was being misused in public debates. This exemplifies how social actors seizing "sites of memory" have allocated, translated, and transformed the concept.

A memory site is not created when a historian identifies it. Collective shared knowledge is required. Many people and institutions shape such sites: individuals, political stakeholders, civic rights associations, and corporations. Memory—whether collective or individual—is connected to emotion, as the protest movements against public statues in the year 2020 have demonstrated. Public memorials have the power to evoke strong, passionate, and sometimes even violent reactions.

Some historians argue that visiting designated sites requires a form of sensibility and "literacy": an ability to understand or read whose memory is being addressed. Any such sensibility is subjective: meanings change [End Page 547] over time and among groups, even though such sites often do not change physically. There is a further complication. While public heritage sites loom large in peoples' everyday lives, memories connected to exhibits can become dislocated from their spatial and temporal context. If built on historic sites, however, museums codify the public approach to their history, as the following articles show. In countries with a colonial past, historians can carefully identify sites and histories that are indelibly shaped by the national experience of colonialization. Public emotions should not be overlooked if we want to understand how these sites came about.

This public history section focuses on the history of technology through three Northern Asia sites in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our authors highlight three different public heritage sites: in Japan (a museum), Korea (an industrial site), and Taiwan (a railway park). These settings, which at first may seem unconnected, share a common theme: local sites conveying the complex and contested narratives of technology in Northeast Asia's recent history, during colonial expansion and war. All three have been shaped by Japanese imperialism at home or in its former colonies (South) Korea and Taiwan and demonstrate how imperial and colonial heritage sites have preserved, appropriated, and changed in meaning. A key question is how various groups chose to use the space once owned by imperialists and colonial masters: who writes the public narrative? Building a museum to explain the history is a deliberate choice, as in the Japan and Taiwan cases. Appropriating the space (particularly valuable real estate) often ends up "concealing" a difficult past. Such negotiations and contestations about the past are ongoing in our modern societies.

In his article on the Noborito Laboratory Museum, Daisuke Konagaya guides us to a site not many people knew about, currently on Meiji University campus, one hour southwest of central Tokyo.³ On these premises, the Japanese Army conducted "clandestine warfare" research with biochemical weaponry and spying technology during World War II. There is a great deal of historical research on science and technology in Japanese warfare, including the ensuing atrocities. Yet the surprising preservation of the Noborito site and the installation of a museum merit a closer look. Recognition of the historical importance of this site did not stem from academic historians or government-led research committees but from local residents' engagement in public history. The example of the Noborito Laboratory Museum reminds us that contributions to historical memory often arise from initiatives outside the professional field of history, like Kiev's Chernobyl museum featured in Technology and...