Why the Island Is Silent
Reframing the Prototype as a Node in a Distributed System of Refusal
In the autumn of 2022, our team launched a website for a digital heritage initiative called the Hashima XR Project. At first glance, the site resembled a conventional prototype showcase: teaser trailers, interface mockups, scripted voice samples. It promised an immersive reconstruction of Gunkanjima—also known as Hashima Island—a coal-mining community turned post-industrial ruin turned UNESCO World Heritage site.
But unlike most digital heritage projects, this one never became playable. Visitors could preview a possible experience, but they could not enter it. The simulation remained incomplete. No build was released. And the virtualized island mining community—rendered in geometry and placeholders—stayed eerily silent.
This was not a technical failure. It was an ethical decision.
The Hashima XR Project set out to document the visual layers of the island and complex cohabitation of laboring populations: Japanese supervisors, Korean colonial subjects, and Korean and Chinese wartime mobilised labor (possibly some Chinese prisoners of war, though this is unconfirmed and requires further research)—all living and working within a space roughly 480 meters by 160 meters (0.063 square kilometers).
As the project progressed, however, institutional pressure mounted not to engage with the topic of non-Japanese labor before 1945. This has been the response of Japanese heritage practitioners since Hashima Island became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015, when the South Korean government criticized the island’s designation on the grounds that Korean and Chinese forced laborers were used there prior to and during World War II.
Local heritage partners pushed for simplification. Sponsors discouraged emphasis on colonial or coercive labor systems. A potential key stakeholder proposed a non-disparagement clause that would have rendered large portions of the narrative off-limits. At that point, the question was no longer how to proceed, but whether proceeding was possible without compromise.
We stopped building the game. But we didn’t abandon the project.
From Simulation to Counter-Archive
When we launched the project website, it presented a vivid vision: sample narratives, trailer footage, and preview imagery of what an immersive experience might look like. The prototype itself was minimal—little more than a navigable shell—but it gestured toward an ambitious framework. Visitors encountered a virtual world in the process of formation.
What they could not see was that development had already begun to unravel.
As the narrative scope expanded to include the complex work-life configurations that defined Hashima during its industrial peak—across civilian, colonial, and wartime mobilised labor categories—disagreements emerged. Local collaborators voiced increasing discomfort with the project’s attempt to include a labour dimension due to the professional and social ostracization they were facing. Ultimately, funding lapsed, support dissolved, and the build froze.
We did not choose to stop in protest. We were stopped—gradually, materially—through a series of refusals external to the design itself.
Yet rather than conceal this suspension, we began to reframe it. The project’s unfinished status became an object of analysis in its own right. Were the fragments of the project—the unused scenarios, the narrative logics never coded, the historical questions left unanswered—the archaeological remains of the material history of Hashima Island that has been decoupled from its status as UNESCO heritage site, tourist attraction, and political lighting rod par excellence in Korean–Japanese relations?
Refusal Is a Form of Design
In heritage practice, incompletion is often seen as a failure: a technical hurdle, a funding shortfall, a logistical misfire. But the Hashima XR invites a different reading. Its incompleteness is testimony to a history that has become unrenderable because people, both in Japan and Korea, are not ready to listen to alternative voices.
The remains of our efforts are a fragmented record of competing pressures, withdrawn commitments, and unfinished work. It is the archaeological remains of an attempt to record via XR technology the heterogeneity and multiplicity (plurality) of a social reality that has been decoupled from the Hashima UNESCO heritage site because Japanese narratives under-contextualise the issue of labor while Korean narratives over-contextualise Korean victimhood (See Jie-Hyun Lim, Global Easts. Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, 2022).
What Comes Next?
The Hashima XR Project is not over. Its form has changed.
We are now exploring how best to present the project’s unfinished components—not as a playable simulation, but as a curated evidentiary structure. This may take the form of an annotated design dossier, a scholarly article, or a public-facing web archive. Each mode would document not only what we attempted to build, but also what we encountered: institutional constraints, historiographical tensions, and the infrastructural limits of heritage production.
What began as an immersive heritage experience has become something else entirely: a study in obstruction, an index of refusal, and a methodological provocation. We do not offer completion. We offer the trace.
If you want to understand why the island is silent, do not look for what was said. Look for what has been made unspeakable.