Memorial Hall Research Articles

Between the Emergency and the Everyday

Abstract This article tells the history of Miyagi Prefecture’s tsunami memorial halls, built following the 1933 Shōwa-Sarniku earthquake and tsunami, to grapple with the challenges of using memorials and collective memory to build resilience to future and recurring threats. The article takes the halls themselves as its main protagonists, following their memorial life cycles from their early conception, to their first lives as tsunami memorial halls, to their varied second lives after being repurposed, and finally to their steady destruction. Using insights from environmental history, memory studies, and critical disaster studies, the piece argues that the rise and fall of the tsunami memorial halls resulted from the incommensurability of human and geological timescales. It shows how the memory of and resilience to long-term seismic threats, which the halls tried to promote, gave way to a focus on everyday concerns at the human scale. These everyday concerns, caused by long-standing socioeconomic struggles and exacerbated in wartime and postwar Japan, led communities to shift the kinds of resilience they pursued with the halls. The article presents the memorial halls as a cautionary tale for those who use memory as a tool of resilience, arguing memorials themselves need to be made resilient to changing social and environmental conditions over deep time scales.

Modern and Contemporary Architecture in Datong, Shanxi Province - Brief Introduction to Datong Planning Exhibition Hall

This study focuses on the history and cultural heritage of the Datong Exhibition Hall , a representative building constructed in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution period. Initially established as the "Mao Zedong Thought Forever Memorial Hall," the exterior design of the Datong Exhibition Hall resembles the Great Hall of the People, reflecting the architectural characteristics and achievements of that time. The exhibition hall has undergone multiple transformations, serving as a political exhibition venue, commercial space, cultural exhibition hall, community center, party activity center, and talent employment center. Through chronological narration and diverse research methods, this study meticulously traces its historical evolution, architectural features, cultural heritage, and social impact. The findings highlight its aesthetic value and significant historical importance for studying the history and culture of that period. Furthermore, as a cultural heritage site, the Datong Exhibition Hall bears witness to the social environment and political backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, embodying the historical memory and traditional culture of Datong City. In the future, it will continue to provide cultural experiences for citizens and serve as an important window for researching the architecture and culture of the Cultural Revolution period.

Report on Visit to the Kurabo Memorial Hall

Report on Visit to the Kurabo Memorial Hall

Analysis of Tourist Experiences at Dark Tourism Sites in Kinmen: Clustering Analysis of Motivations, Emotional Responses, and Satisfaction

Dark tourism involves visiting sites associated with death, disaster, and major historical tragedies. Kinmen, Taiwan, known for its history of multiple wars, features notable dark tourism sites such as Mount Taiwu, the Guningtou War Museum, and the 823 Memorial Hall. These sites currently offer educational significance about historical events, but visiting them often triggers complex emotional responses. This study explores tourist experiences at these sites, focusing on motivations, emotional reactions, and the relationship between satisfaction and psychological stress. The study surveyed 348 visitors and used clustering analysis to group their travel experiences. The results identified three types of visitors: History Enthusiasts, War Memorialists, and Exploratory Curiosity Seekers, each with distinct motivations and emotional responses. Emotions experienced include sadness, shock, fear, and unease, closely related to the content and atmosphere of the sites. While overall satisfaction is high, many visitors report being "satisfied but not happy." The study suggests targeted strategies to enhance dark tourism experiences, such as providing emotional support, emphasizing commemorative value, and offering ethical education. Recommendations for site management include addressing emotional needs and balancing educational significance with emotional impact.

The Status Quo and Problems of Red Cultural Sites in the New Era and Their Exploration Paths: Taking the Luxi Region as an Example

Red cultural site is the carrier of red culture, containing profound revolutionary history and value of the times, we should deeply excavate the intrinsic potential of red cultural sites, pay attention to the ontological protection of red cultural sites, develop and improve the red cultural innovation projects, and strengthen the red culture itself and supporting the construction. This paper takes the old revolutionary area of Luxi as an example, conducts field investigation and visits based on the local county records and party history materials, and investigates a total of five red cultural sites and memorial halls in Luxi, focusing on the actual achievements and problems exposed in the protection and development of the current red cultural sites, to provide references and thinking for the protection, development, and innovative utilization of red cultural sites in the new era of our country.

The ‘darkest history’ must live: narrating Sino-Japanese relations through museum geopolitics

While scholars have increasingly focused on the intersectional analysis of tourism and geopolitics, the material and affective dimensions underlying the geopolitical implications of tourism remain underexplored. This paper analyses the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (MH-VNM-JI) in Nanjing, China, focusing on how it sustains and intensifies geopolitical narrations of militarism, fascism, and massacres inflicted by Japanese invaders during WWII through the creation of an affective environment while enacting dark tourism experiences. Drawing on the recent debates on the geopolitics of tourism, affective geopolitics, and the materiality of geopolitics, this paper delineates how the MH-VNM-JI significantly shapes popular geopolitical relations between China and Japan by engineering visitors’ affective experiences and, by extension, geopolitical subjectivities. The MH-VNM-JI serves not only as a static tourism infrastructure that transmits fixed and dogmatic geopolitical knowledge through its exhibits but also as a dynamic space that actively preserves and transforms Sino-Japanese geopolitical knowledge through the structuring of tourists’ embodied and affective experiences. In this vein, this study also contributes to the broader research agenda of exploring the connections between museums, tourism, and geopolitics.

자료와 연구는 어떻게 문학관의 컨텐츠가 되는가?

This article was written for two purposes in the discourse and theoretical un derstanding of the historical characteristics of Korean society, which has been appropriated and interpreted by a young poet named Yoon Dong-ju according to the times. First, it intends to record the construction process and planning inten tions of Yonsei University’s Yoon Dong-ju Memorial Hall, which opened in 2020, and then function as a reference material for field workers, related researchers, and visitors of the Literature Memorial Hall. Second, through the case of creating exhibition contents at the Yoon Dong-ju Memorial Hall, I want to examine how the Literature Memorial Hall implements the concept of ‘larchiveum’ by linking ‘data-research-exhibition’. In order to strengthen the ‘authenticity’ of the place as a space that has been used for different purposes for a long time is reborn as a memo rial hall, it was necessary to balance the spirit of ‘poetry’, the materiality of ‘data’, the social identity of the ‘poet’, and the historicality of ‘space’. And to emphasize the role of an integrated space called larchiveum, the concept of ‘cultural medi ation space' was added. The Literature Memorial Hall mediates ‘writer-bereaved (donor)-researcher-reader/public (viewer)’ and mediates literary texts composed of letters through other sensory representations and experiences. In that texts are submitted in a specific social arrangement, the Literature Memorial Hall is both a media in itself and a space of possibility to enable new practice. In other words, through case analysis of the exhibition planning intentions, processes, and results of the Yoon Dong-ju Memorial Hall, we tried to examine how the Literature Me morial Hall connects “material-research-exhibition-event” as a “cultural medium space” with “larchiveum”.

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

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.

Case Study on Architectural Heritage Conservation Taking Lu Zuofu Memorial Hall as an Example

Through the Lu Zuofu Memorial Hall and architectural heritage related literature research, the background of Lu Zuofu Memorial Hall and the architectural layout of the function of a brief introduction, and then analyze the Lu Zuofu Memorial Hall "protection and reuse" repair and protection methods, as well as Lu Zuofu Memorial Museum will be a combination of cultural display, ideological education, cultural experience and tourism and so on. Analyze the "protection and reuse" protection method of the real needs and with the former planning after the assessment of the renovation and protection of the concept of combination.

The reproduction of imagination: how do non-experiencers remember history?

ABSTRACT In 1937, for a period of six weeks, the Imperial Japanese murdered approximately 300,000 people, including civilians, in Nanjing, China. This historical event is known as the Nanjing Massacre. As few survivors remain, studies on memory consumption can clarify how modern Chinese individuals remember this event. By writing the individual back into collective memory, this study identifies the importance of the Chinese state in fashioning individual remembrance of the Nanjing Massacre from the audience’s perspective. Specifically, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of remembrance and sites of memory, we analysed the interaction between memory consumers, memory representations, and memory makers. We focused on the relationship between visitors and the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders and how the state permeated this process. This study adds to the literature by offering an empirical study of memory consumption. Through participant observations and 23 semi-structured interviews with visitors, we found that education systems and media constructed visitors’ pre-existing memories of the Nanjing Massacre. During their visit, the prosthetic memories of the interviewees were reproduced and re-verified. After they left the Memorial Hall, visitors’ reshaped memories awaited arousal at a future time.

Public Memory, Architectural Language, and Its Configurational Relationship in the Memorial Museum: A Case Study of the War Memorial of Korea Using Space Syntax and Movement Tracking

Memorial museums serve as a record of the past and provide evidence of the past; moreover, they are a place for remembering the past and healing the present. In particular, their architectural language, such as movement through space, is actively involved in fostering public memory that implies a shared understanding of the past. However, it is hardly explained how public memory is configured in memorial museums, and how it is experienced by the act of moving around within the places. This study, hence, aims to investigate the configurational relationship between public memory and movement through space throughout an in-depth case study using visibility graph analysis as one of space syntax techniques, and movement tracking analysis. By examining the War Memorial of Korea, which is dedicated to commemorate sacrifices during the Korean War in memorial halls and chronologically describes wars in the Korean Peninsula, it was found out that a memorial museum works in a bifurcated way. Its spatial layout leads to a locally focused experience along a strongly structured commemorative sequence. On the contrary, it allows globally dispersed spatial experiences to take place along the integration core, suggesting both specific and wide-ranging themes and contents throughout their various exhibitions. Therefore, the locally focused paths elicit a commemorative experience by adding depth, whereas the globally dispersed paths bring about informal itineraries that start from their integration cores. It concludes that spatial configurations, as a non-verbal language, plays a role in transmitting the public memory.

Exploring the Guerrilla Warfare of the National Government Navy Behind Enemy Lines in the Yangtze River Basin during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression

Abstract The guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines of the national government is still a weak link in the study of the history of the war of resistance, and the naval guerrilla warfare on the Yangtze River is even less specifically discussed. This paper first analyzes the change in the national government’s naval operational thinking after the July 7 Incident and up to the Battle of Wuhan and divides the naval operations in the Yangtze River Basin during the period of total war of resistance into four stages. Then, combined with the ontology theory and taking various archives, museums, libraries, and memorial halls as sources, after fusing heterogeneous data, it adopts the relevant writings, notes, diaries, speeches, photographs, objects of the Navy’s Yangtze River Resistance as well as the results of the archive compilation formed later to construct the Navy’s Yangtze River Resistance Archives Knowledge Graph Model. After the reasoning and searching of the knowledge map, it is concluded that in 1938 and 1940, the Yangtze River Bray Guerrilla Group killed 950 and 3020 enemies, respectively, destroyed 20,400 tons and 118,400 tons of warships, strongly supported the Battle of Wuhan and two Battles of Xiangbei, and prevented the Japanese army from invading to the west along the river, and in 1940, it destroyed the Japanese large-scale transports and merchant ships of a total of 58,700 tons, which dealt a heavy blow to the Japanese army on the Yangtze River and the Yangtze River. Heavy blows to the Japanese water transport capacity of the Yangtze River delayed its front and rear troops, weapons, supplies, and transportation plans so that its ability to expand received a major limitation, unable to continue the attack on the Yangtze River west of Wuhan, to defend the safety of Chongqing and Sichuan. This paper makes up for the research gaps in the history of the National Government’s naval resistance and the history of guerrilla battles in the Bray of the Yangtze River Basin and provides a useful exploration of the combination of resistance history research and information technology.

The Integration Strategy of ACGN Culture and Changzhou’s Patriotic Memorial Halls: A Study on Narrative, Symbolism, and Communication Pathways

The Integration Strategy of ACGN Culture and Changzhou’s Patriotic Memorial Halls: A Study on Narrative, Symbolism, and Communication Pathways

Influence of Artificial Light on Visitors' Emotional Arousal in Memorial Space: A Case Study of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

Influence of Artificial Light on Visitors' Emotional Arousal in Memorial Space: A Case Study of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

A new trend in war museums

As the role of museums becomes broader nowadays, it has more social responsibilities. The war museum, a conditioner of public memory, has a new trend of focusing on the current life and the future instead of just stating the truth. It seems to become more audience-centered in curatorial strategy or audience activities. The visitor-centered strategy is applied well in UK war museums like the Imperial War Museum, while it should be improved in Chinese war museums like the Memorial. Hall of the Victims of Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. Based on the theory and practice, the paper discusses the following main aspects: the new trend of war museums, the case study of The Memorial Hall of the Victims of Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in China, and the Imperial War Museum North in the UK, based on the contract between the two case museums in interpretation strategy and the situation of memory work. It will see the current situation of display and memory work in the Memorial Hall in Nanjing, which reflects the Chinese war museums, as well as the future landscape of the Memorial Hall in Nanjing, China.

Soft and resilient: When embroidery encounters narrating the Nanjing Massacre in the Memorial Hall

ABSTRACT The paper engages directly with ‘Xuefang Liang’s Embroidery Art Exhibition’ held at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders as a departure point for investigating the narrative presentation of the Nanjing Massacre through artistic practice. The exhibition uses embroidery images to tell the stories of foreigners who established the Nanking Safety Zone to protect and help refugees during the Nanjing Massacre. The materiality and cultural significance of the embroidery art is used to enrich and better interpret the meaning-making space of the trauma narrative. Meanwhile, embroidery exhibits, as the material expression of the human factors in intangible cultural heritage, are critical to generating emotions from intimate contact between objects and people. Further, the visitors’ prior sensory memories facilitate the embodiment of emotions, which in turn provides ways to strengthen the visitors’ ability to derive meanings from museum engagement.

Masakra nankińska 1937–1938 jako źródło chińskiej narodowej traumy kulturowej

NANKING MASSACRE 1937–1938 AS A SOURCE OF CHINESE NATIONAL CULTURAL TRAUMA The Nanjing massacre is today one of the most important historical events for the Chinese national identity, however, until 1982, the topic of the massacre did not enjoy much interest. This paper, using Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma and the example of the Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, shows how the Chinese authorities gave the initially unknown massacre the rank of a national trauma. Symbolic representation, trauma narratives, and the institutionalization of trauma were crucial in this process.

The application of KANO Model in the design of cultural creative products

Abstract In order to improve visitors’ satisfaction with the red cultural creative products of Fang Zhimin Memorial Hall and promote the dissemination of Fang Zhimin’s red revolutionary spirit, in this essay, the KANO model research method is used as the basic framework and the visitor data is used as the basis to explore the innovative design preferences and perceptual demand elements of visitors to the red cultural creative products of Fang Zhimin Memorial Hall. In view of the cultural attributes of the red cultural creative products of Fang Zhimin Memorial Hall, in this essay the visitors’ preferences and preferences are used, and the three-level method of cultural research theory is used to establish the design points of cultural creative products. Finally, a series of cultural creative products as the material carrier of Fang Zhimin’s red revolutionary spirit are designed and studied to promote the diversified development of red culture.

Analysis on Party History Learning and Education in Revolutionary Memorial Halls

Analysis on Party History Learning and Education in Revolutionary Memorial Halls

Thermal and Environmental Design for Human Comfort in Japanese-Designed Architecture in Thailand

These multiple case studies investigate thermal and environmental architectural details unique to the Japanese-designed educational facilities in Thailand, namely [1] King Mongkut Institute of Technology Ladkrabang 's Auditorium and Memorial Hall, [2] Lecture Halls, [3] Kasetsart University's Central Laboratory, [4] Thammasat University's Institute of Japanese Studies, and [5] Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment’s Research Center. Data sources include archival records, site surveys, and interviews. The findings reveal various design strategies, such as double-layer walls, complex roofing design, specific orientation, and water features that contemporary sustainable building designs may adopt to increase thermal comfort while reducing energy consumption.