About the Creator

Dr Christopher Gerteis is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the History of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research concerns the twentieth-century Japanese institutions that sorted people into governable categories. His digital work brings the same question to heritage, asking which pasts an institution records and which it leaves out.

Critical heritage

From 2020 to 2024 he was co-PI of the Hashima XR Project, in which a transnational team of historians, architects, designers and educators used videogame design tools to reconstruct the mid-twentieth-century coal-mining community of Hashima (Gunkanjima), a UNESCO-listed former mine. The reconstruction centred everyday life on the island while holding open the histories of wartime coerced labour that official heritage narratives exclude. The project was funded by the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the SOAS Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. In July 2023 it held a public symposium in Nagasaki. The VR reconstruction was never released. Simulating Silence, a learning resource for educators and heritage professionals, now documents both the reconstruction and the obstacles that kept it from release. His article 「選択的記憶と戦略的忘却：日本における歴史の商品化と産業遺産」 (“Selective Memory and Strategic Forgetting: The Commodification of History and Industrial Heritage in Japan,” Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental Culture 186, 2024) builds on that work.

Digital heritage

The Shōwa Digital Asset Archive began as a spin-off of the Hashima XR Project, turning from a contested industrial site to the vernacular heritage of postwar Japan. He has spoken on serious game design for the digital humanities, including a keynote at the annual conference of the Center for a Chinese Cultural Metaverse, National Chengchi University, Taipei, in December 2023. He also writes on history and video games in the Substack Past Meets Pixel.

Computational humanities

He builds open-source research software for Asian studies. His MCP servers open CiNii Research, J-STAGE, the National Diet Library, the Korea Citation Index, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar to AI-assisted bibliographic discovery. They are now combined in a single server, bibliograph-mcp, archived on Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.22307233). Each search returns its own record so that a reader can run it again: “A search you cannot re-run is a claim your reader cannot check.” His article “Writing Against the Machine: Computational Authorship and Historical Writing” (History 111, 2026, 442–459, open access) introduces the term “stochastic history” and distinguishes between the transmissive tasks and the interpretive core of historical writing.

He holds a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship for 2026–2027, and his book Japan’s Unfinished Empire: Origins and Afterlives is in preparation.

Contact: christopher.gerteis@soas.ac.uk · www.christophergerteis.net