Dark tourism goes underground: ghostly materialities of Japanese occupation in Datong, China

Abstract

In north China, memorial museums are often associated with the suffering of victims of the Japanese occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945). The Datong Coal Mine Massacre Site Memorial Hall affords visitors opportunity to bear witness to atrocities at the hands of the occupiers. At the 10,000 men pit (wanrenkeng), where over 60,000 miners perished, visitors gaze at the corpses of dead miners in two deep pits, at harrowing photographs of excavated remains and at unnamed spirit tablets in the memorial hall and on the hillside above. The research brings together the spectrality of absent presence with the Chinese tradition of hungry ghosts as social actors. Referencing the newly available North China Railway Archive of photographs taken by the Japanese of everyday life on the Datong coalfields, read through a lens inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman, we aim to enrich the state-authorised narrative of victimization and humiliation with narratives of individual people. The photographs summon the survival, or afterlife, of those depicted, sometimes smiling into the camera. We suggest that the photographic archive may afford identification of miners, enabling their lives to be honoured as well as mourned and their ghosts to be appeased. Collaborative development of a traditional Hungry Ghost festival could fold memorial sites together with intangible cultural heritage to offer visitors opportunity to commemorate both death and life through integrating history with culture.