Newsletters and Essays

Conflicting Discourses in Interpreting Contested Heritage: The Role of Diverse Communities in Fostering Dialogue for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation (June 14, 2025 at Waseda University)

Dear all participants from around the world, and esteemed scholars who have long dedicated yourselves to the study of UNESCO World Heritage and cultural heritage in general, thank you very much for coming to Building 3 of Waseda University, despite the unfortunate weather of rain today. This international conference on Contested Heritage is co-organized by ICOMOS, Our World Heritage, the Institute for International Studies at Seoul National University, and the Center for International Reconciliation Studies at Waseda Univerisity.

The term “Contested Heritage” may not be a familiar one. It refers to sites that have been inscribed as World Heritage, recognized as shared heritage of humanity, yet are marked by deep disagreements over their meanings and interpretations. Precisely because of these tensions, such heritage demands a sensitive and carefully considered presentation, one that respects the shared emotions and collective memories that shape each society involved. It must be a form of presentation that invites dialogue between experts and citizens, and which aspires to be both creative and resilient to critique. This, I believe, is how we might best define the heritage we discuss today.

Today, we are joined not only by distinguished researchers who have studied World Heritage for many years, but also by scholars who examine the perspectives of those who engage with heritage, and the social fabrics that connect them.

As for myself, my own research lies at the intersection of International Relations and History. I focus particularly on the ways national collective memory, shared unconsciously among citizens, interacts with universal values upheld as international norms. In concrete terms, I have studied colonial rule and the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea after World War II, attempting to discover possibilities from the past and link them to new, creative oppotunities for the future.

I deepened my own interest in this field when I realized that issues surrounding cultural heritage can be approached not only from the perspective of how they are exhibited, but also from the standpoint of those who engage with them, that is, the viewers.

The perspective of the viewer refers to the frameworks that unconsciously shape how individuals perceive cultural heritage. These include elements such as collective memory, as well as universal values like human rights and human dignity, and the broader framework of international norms. In short, it is the national lens through which individuals interpret cultural heritage.

Even if a museum curator possesses a global standpoint, the institution itself inevitably operates within a national framework. This includes financial constraints and institutional responsibilities, which make it difficult to completely avoid responding to nationally rooted meanings and expectations.

Obviously, democracies across the world function through national representations, and taxation is also organized at the national level. Security policies and large-scale technological investments that shape the future are likewise carried out through the framework of the nation-state.

The late Benedict Anderson, a scholar at Cornell University, famously argued that nations are “imagined communities.” She suggested that the emotional attachment people feel toward their nation did not arise solely from the rise of print capitalism, but also from major transformations within broader cultural systems, such as religion, bureaucracy, and political legitimacy. Her work traced how nationalism spread across the globe by focusing on these cultural shifts.

Anderson’s key insight was that, in the modern era, an age in which time came to be seen as homogenous and mechanical, flowing from past to present, and present to future, national languages were imagined as having originated in ancient, even mythical times. Moreover, these languages came to unite vast and otherwise disconnected populations. The daily influx of information in these languages served not only as a common knowledge base, but also as a source of emotional connection, binding individuals together into a national community.

Could it not be said that cultural heritage plays a role akin to that of language? For those who have long studied cultural heritage, this may be a self-evident truth. Cultural heritage have been preserved and exhibited with utmost care as national treasures, treasures of the people. In this sense, much like language, they have continually stimulated the national imagination. In the age of nationalism, cultural heritage can be understood as existing in front of us as the heritage of the nation.

And yet, as a historian living in an era of globalization, I cannot help but believe that within certain cultural heritage lie possibilities that transcend the nation. Cultural heritage that contain memories which may not have been comprehensible to people living within the paradigm of the nation-state, these may in fact be what we now call “contested heritage.” Naturally, there are cultural heritage that relate to a nation’s own painful historical experiences, and it is important to recognize these as symbols of empathy for the suffering of others. However, we are increasingly witnessing the ways in which such heritage can inadvertently inflame nationalistic sentiments centered around victimhood and blame.

In order to move beyond this situation, we might consider another possibility: to see contested heritage as reflecting events and collective memories that helped to constitute national identities in the first place. By doing so, we may historicize our own national perspectives, cooling our emotions and enabling dialogue. This very act of historicization, I believe, reflects the process by which individual human rights, understood as inborn and universal, have come to be collectively articulated through the rights of citizens. This is also a point emphasized by the German sociologist Hauke Brunkhorst in his work The Creation of Human Rights.

If we look back at the long trajectory of human history, we find slavery, colonialism, and war. It was out of these unimaginable conditions that human beings began to awaken to their identities as members of a “nation.” In other words, new nations emerged and rose up in resistance to systems of domination and suppression led by other nations.

Since the success of the American Revolution, which inspired the French Revolution, the idea that human beings are born free and equal has gradually shifted, from a universal ideal of human rights to an issue of equal rights within the nation. This reinterpretation led to a tension between equality and discrimination, within nations and between them. In this sense, human rights became entwined with nationalism, spreading from Western Europe to South America, from South America back to Eastern and Central Europe, and eventually to Asia and Africa.

By the mid-19th century, industrialization and conscription had enabled European peoples to construct modern nation-states. These states competed, expanded as imperial powers, and eventually waged world wars. In the wake of these conflicts and the waves of decolonization that followed, the entire globe, including Asia and Africa, came to be organized under the framework of the nation-state.

It was within this global history that certain cultural heritage were chosen, deliberately or unconsciously, as triggers for national collective memory. These became our national heritage. However, when cultural heritage are associated with histories of conflict, oppression, or colonial rule, especially those that involved friction or violence between nations, they remain sites of deep interpretive conflict, driven by divergent national memories.

In today’s era of globalization, those of us engaging with contested heritage must seek to uncover the new possibilities that lie hidden within cultural heritage. By doing so, we may find a path toward building a shared future. It is, after all, human beings who excavate, arrange, and display cultural heritage. But these individuals remain members of massive national communities—and continue to entrust critical powers over security and the economy to sovereign states. In this context, cultural heritage remains constrained within national interpretive frameworks. Or at least, that is how it appears to me.

As we move into the sessions that follow, I trust that the discussions to come will further deepen and expand upon the themes we have raised today.

I would like to conclude my welcome remarks by expressing my firm belief that UNESCO World Heritage represents a significant step toward elevating cultural heritage, long protected within national frameworks, into something truly universal, something that can be embraced as the shared cultural heritage of all humankind.

Through today’s symposium, I sincerely hope that the fields of World Heritage and cultural heritage studies, together with research on nationalism, conflict, and reconciliation, will intersect in meaningful ways, granting new and constructive significance to the conflicts surrounding cultural heritage. By engaging with these contested sites, we may come to historicize our own time and lift human society to a new level of understanding and coexistence.

I wish for today to be a meaningful day for each and every one of you, a moment to reflect on the era of the nation-state, while simultaneously envisioning a future in which a global society might emerge beyond national boundaries. May you find inspiration, new insights, and perhaps even a sense of shared purpose in our discussions.

I greatly look forward to your presentations and thoughtful dialogue throughout the day. Thank you very much for your participation.(As a reference, I invite you to learn more about the International Reconciliation Studies Project based at Waseda University by visiting the following website:
https://memory.w.waseda.jp/en)