Difficult heritage diplomacy? Re-articulating places of pain and shame as world heritage in northeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The recently increased interest in transnational, serial nominations for UNESCO World Heritage status and comparable forms of official recognition demonstrates the critical role of heritage as diplomacy. There are both opportunities and challenges, nevertheless, when treating difficult heritage as diplomacy, such as in the case of colonial prisons embedded in memories of punishment and imprisonment across borders. In a study of two defunct prisons in Seoul and Lushun, both of which were part of the Japanese-occupied territories, we illustrate the dynamics of an ongoing cross-border collaboration towards a joint nomination. We trace how heritagisation involving China and Korea has unfolded amid the ever-shifting geopolitics in northeast Asia, exposing the multilateral nature of heritage as diplomacy. In a region where geopolitics remains difficult, difficult heritage may even become heritage off diplomacy when other diplomatic challenges arise.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage diplomacy
• UNESCO World Heritage
• difficult heritage
• Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison
• Seodaemun Prison

Acknowledgments

We appreciate all those who assisted our research and those who kindly shared with us their knowledge to support this project, especially the director and curators of the Seodaemun Prison History Hall and those at the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison Museum. Special thanks to Dr. Kim Wol-bae who provided great help in our field research in Lushun.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a detailed analysis see Ahn (2008).

2. Significantly, the first group of visitors were from the North Korean Military (dated 30 January 1977).

3. These themes were as follows: The investigation of the value of modern prisons in East Asia and comparative research on modern prisons (2014); Seodaemun Prison and Lushun Japan-Russo Prison seen as the value of world heritage Site (2015), and the value and use of Modern Prison (2016).

4. See Hirsch (1997) for the development of the post-memory concept.

5. South Korea, the Observatory of Economic Complexity. [Online available] http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/kor/ (accessed date: 31 December 2017).

6. In the forum held on 2 November 2017, the authors were asked by the participants about the possibility for Korea to work with Taiwan over a new collaboration on penal heritage for world heritage nomination. Since Taiwan is not United Nation member, the possibility is slim. The conversation, however, exposes the multilateral nature of heritage as diplomacy (Personal note, 2 November 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science, Taiwan; National Science Council (grant number 105WFA0152078), and by the Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-LAB-2250005) and Pony Chung Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Shu-Mei Huang

Shu-Mei Huang is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University. Her research interests include postcolonial urbanism, trans-nationalization of care and space, and dark heritage. She has carried out research into defunct prisons built by the colonial regimes in several East Asian cities, including Taipei, Seoul, Singapore and Lushun. In collaboration with Hyun Kyung Lee, she is preparing for a monograph on the remembering of punishment in post-colonial Asian cities (contracted with Routledge). She is author of Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong:Two Systems,One City (2015, by Lexington Books).

Hyun Kyung Lee is a post-doctoral research fellow on the Academy of Korean Studies-funded research project “Beyond the Cold War, towards a community of Asia” at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge and the International Center for Korean Studies, Kyujanggak Institute, Seoul National University. Her research interests include difficult heritage (post-colonial/cold war heritage), trans-national heritage networking, and the role of UNESCO programmes in East Asia. In collaboration with her Taiwanese colleague Shu-Mei Huang, Memory and Punishment: Heritage and De-commissioned Prisons in East Asia on the remembering of punishment in post-colonial Asian cities is forthcoming from Routledge. She is the author of Difficult Heritage in Nation Building: South Korea and Post-conflict Japanese Colonial Occupation Architecture (2018, by Palgrave Macmillan).

Hyun-Kyung Lee

Hyun Kyung Lee is a post-doctoral research fellow on the Academy of Korean Studies-funded research project “Beyond the Cold War, towards a community of Asia” at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge and the International Center for Korean Studies, Kyujanggak Institute, Seoul National University. Her research interests include difficult heritage (post-colonial/cold war heritage), trans-national heritage networking, and the role of UNESCO programmes in East Asia. In collaboration with her Taiwanese colleague Shu-Mei Huang, Memory and Punishment: Heritage and De-commissioned Prisons in East Asia on the remembering of punishment in post-colonial Asian cities is forthcoming from Routledge. She is the author of Difficult Heritage in Nation Building: South Korea and Post-conflict Japanese Colonial Occupation Architecture (2018, by Palgrave Macmillan).