Current status and issues of the war heritage sites in Japan

Abstract

There are many heritage sites related to modern wars (hereinafter referred to as "war heritage sites") in many regions of Japan that are in danger of disappearing. War heritage sites are valuable actual objects and places that tell the history of a special past that will never happen again. However, they are difficult to evaluate from both historic and cultural aspects, and there are concerns that their disappearance will be accelerated the fading away of their history. In this study, we first organized the debate on the definition and scope of “war heritage sites” through the document investigation and described changes in protection. Next, we acquired data from local public bodies with “war heritage sites” via questionnaire, to understand the scope of the term and the trend of conservation. As a result, we clarified the diversity of “war heritage sites", thus allowing us to take a broad view of the target scope, and the "diversity of evaluation perspectives" to overcome the difficulty of evaluation, which is a bottleneck in preservation. In addition we made proposals to overcome difficulties of preservation and succession that are due to regional and financial circumstances.