The Tokyo Ghost Guides uncover the untold stories of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Students: UHI 2017 Cohort

Faculty: Dana Cuff, Ben Leclair

Collaborator: Waseda University Keigo Lab

In preparation for the spring 2017 fieldwork in Tokyo, students participated in a series of evening seminars and workshops led by core faculty Dana Cuff, Maite Zubiaurre, and Benjamin Leclair, learning about the urban and cultural history of Tokyo. Specific focus was given to understanding how Tokyo has been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over time. This culminated in a final term project where students investigated sites of memory and erasure connected to key locations from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and created short visual and textual records of these sites using a number of different methods. These pieces, collected in the beautiful wooden box (pictured) and displayed in cityLAB, encompass the first part of the 2016-2017 year’s collective project, a Tokyo Ghost Guide, that will document erasures related to the upcoming 2020 Olympics.