Dark tourism serves a purpose beyond pandering to morbid curiosity
Anyone who has watched the recent Netflix series Dark Tourist may have been left with the wrong impression of dark tourism.
In the New Zealand documentary series, journalist David Farrier travels the world searching out the macabre and visiting places associated with death and suffering.
In the episode devoted to Southeast Asia, for instance, he seeks out a shooting range in Cambodia at which it’s possible to shoot living cows and, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, he observes a traditional Toraja funeral, which involves animal slaughter and the exhumation of human corpses. In Japan, Farrier visits Tomioka, evacuated during the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, and suicide hotspot Aokigahara.
The series suggests that dark tourism is undertaken by a certain type of thrill seeker – macho, daring, sometimes looking for fun in the least obvious of places.
However, the author of a new book on the topic is keen to stress that the “dark” in the term dark tourism should refer to the sites themselves rather than to any morbid curiosity a visitor might have; the nature of their histories, the inescapable reality of what occurred there and the educational value in their preservation.
“So anybody who visits sites associated with such dark histories is, by definition, a dark tourist, whether they know it or not, regardless of any special motivation or deeper psychology,” says Peter Hohenhaus, whose book, Atlas of Dark Destinations, was published in October.
It is important that such sites are preserved for future generations, Hohenhaus says, invoking 20th century philosopher George Santayana, who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“The fact that more memorial museums are being opened around the world confirms there is a real demand for such commemoration,” the author says.
“In some instances, this can even be part of a whole nation’s psyche, with Rwanda and its genocide memorials being the clearest case. These are national memorials that play a part in defining the nation, as it were.”
Alternatively, such sites can offer a counterpoint to the information available at national memorials, and two Japanese examples of this can be found in Hohenhaus’ book.
The first is the small, privately run Centre of the Tokyo Raids and Fire Damage, which documents the destruction and death caused by Allied firebombing of the capital in March 1945 (this probably killed more people than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
The second is Nagasaki’s Oka Masaharu Memorial Peace Museum, which tells the story of the forced Korean and Chinese labour worked to death at the now World Heritage-protected Hashima Island.
Hohenhaus starteddark-tourism.com in 2008 and the Atlas of Dark Destinations provides information on 300 sites that can be found on the website. He has not yet visited Hong Kong and so no sites in the city appear in the book, but plenty of examples from across Asia are included. Alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese entries include the Yasukuni Jinja, the Tokyo shrine to the nation’s war dead, including convicted war criminals, that is the focus of outrage in Asia whenever high-ranking politicians visit it.
The legacy the Soviet Union has left Central Asia includes a number of dark sites.
The KarLag Memorial Museum offers a look into Soviet imprisonment in Kazakhstan. The brutality of the gulag system and forced labour is graphically depicted in photos and life-size models, but also highlighted is the scientific work undertaken by famous inmates, celebrated as Kazakh success stories.
Elsewhere in the country, the vast swathes of remote steppe contaminated during nuclear bomb testing offer another example of the lasting impact of the Soviet years.
Easier to visit are the sites in Vietnam covered by the book. In the country’s south are the Cu Chi tunnels, where tourists can crawl through a subterranean complex once used by fighters during the American war, as Vietnam calls the 1955-1975 conflict in the country, and widened to allow easier access to foreign guests.
The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, in Hanoi, is on most visitors’ itinerary to the Vietnamese capital.
Chernobyl and the Cold Warera missile silos at Pervomaisk are among several Ukrainian sites listed on www.darktourism.com, but Hohenhaus issued this update on February 24: “Russia has launched a military invasion of Ukraine and I’m left speechless. Needless to say, tourism in Ukraine is for now impossible. So all Ukraine texts on this website are currently outdated.”