An Uncanny Architecture of Cultural Heritage: Representations of the Japanese Occupation in Harbin, China

We explore heritage expressions of the legacy of Japanese Manchukuo in the city of Harbin, China. The assemblage of objects in Harbin (including the Unit 731 germ warfare site, the town plan and buildings from the Manchukuo period) appropriate historical memories in order to shape antipathic occupation identities and narratives of conflict. Yet Harbin was also the site of a utopian vision for Manchukuo, epitomised by its architecture, infrastructure and urban plan. The Japanese occupation-period banks, shops, etc represent an uncanny architecture which vacillates between past and present, but which remains opaque to the gazes of those who pass. Official Chinese accounts of the War of Resistance to Japan have evolved through periods of 'benevolent amnesia'; patriotic education; anti-Japanese activism; favourable economic portrayal; to current re-recasting of Japan as aggressor and perpetrator of atrocities, against which the heroic martyrs and revolutionaries of the Communist Party gained victory and created modern China. Current heritage practice in Harbin is reliant on the documentary impulse of textual reports, photographs and artefacts in museums and heritage plaques on buildings as evidence of historical 'truths'. However, while heritage may promote the representation of a particular version of history by state-sanctioned institutions, it may also be a resource that can challenge and redefine values and identities. The angle of vision might be displaced, recognising the epistemological uncertainty about how past events may be understood and that some events, humans and non-humans, are rendered silent by current heritage practices. We suggest that place could be regarded as a relational assemblage – a milieu - rather than as an isolated container. If the Japanese occupation could be regarded not as a localised 'thing', taking place, for example, at Unit 731, but as an unfolding process, arising from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns (Springer, 2011), then codifications of violence as the exclusive preserve of particular cultures (the Japanese) on particular people (Han Chinese) become less tenable. A displaced angle might suggest that the streets of Harbin, the texts in the museums, are less 'tools of memory', telling or reminding visitors of a story, but as 'tools of productive thinking' (Lord, 2007) through which multiple stories unfold. We offer brief introductions to the spheres of occupation heritage and red tourism in China. After contextualising the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo (1932-1945), we present stories from Harbin. We suggest that a relational milieu approach to cultural heritage has the potential to go beyond current practices aiming to (re)awaken memories and emotions of victimhood at the hands of the Japanese occupiers. A milieu approach could look beyond museum walls and heritage plaques, both to the broader Japanese town plans, infrastructures and buildings of the city and to the lives of others – Chinese, Korean, Russian and Japanese – who also became victims of the occupation and its aftermath, both in China and in Japan. We suggest in conclusion that a seemingly settled expression of the legacy of the Japanese occupation of Harbin has the potential to become a cultural heritage expression of understanding rather than of antipathy