Postimperial Reuse: The Photography of Shitamichi Motoyuki

Abstract: The afterlives of imperial and colonial architecture are unpredictable. Surveying the remnants of the former Japanese empire for example, we encounter a wide variety of reuse. In South Korea, a former colonial bank becomes a museum to colonial oppression. In Taiwan, the shattered gates of colonial shrines are reassembled to memorialize the Japanese presence. And in Japan, imperial monuments take on new names to celebrate postwar peace. Sometimes buildings are obliterated from the record or subject to slow, incremental reuse that obscures imperial provenance. Such volatility makes historicization difficult. As evidenced by the relative lack of colonial structures in mainstream histories of Japanese architecture, this volatility also makes difficult history easy to ignore. While architectural historians continue to struggle with the empire's legacy, artists such as Shitamichi Motoyuki have produced important visual supplements. Over the past two decades, Shitamichi has surveyed Japan and its former colonies in search of postimperial reuse. He has discovered inventively reused military architecture in Japan and vestiges of Shinto shrines in the former colonies. He has also performatively reused military architecture in Japan to showcase the ease with which so-called difficult heritage can be transformed. This article argues that his work simultaneously uncovers a lost lineage of Japanese architecture and theorizes the ways that imperial provenance is contested by regional politics and individual memory.