I got off my nocturnal schedule and left early to visit the national museum of Japanese history outside of Chiba. I added an entry about the museum on my reference wiki. The grounds for the museum are on the old site of Sakura castle and it is surrounded by a very charming park. I ended up spending much less time than I expected I would and was able to go through its five large fixed galleries depicting various periods and themes in Japanese history in only a few hours. On the one hand I was impressed at how well done and clean the presentation of many things were. However, in the end, I was really disappointed to see how little attention modern Japan was given.
To be sure, the museum focuses a lot on folk culture, art, and many of the areas of Japanese history that students might not get to read about in detail in their textbooks. I actually thought it was refreshing that, while the museum was ordered roughly in chronological order, there was no silly march through Japan’s convoluted political history from one end of the museum to the other. There were interesting sections talking about the history of printing, on mountain farming techniques, images of monsters and spirits, and lots of huge models of villages, boats, and the houses of each period. Still, however, I was perplexed that the entire Showa period (1929-1989) was absent from the museum. This can’t be entirely explained by a desire to avoid portraying Japan’s most troublesome historical period. For example, the museum had an excellent audio/visual presentation on the Great Kantô Earthquake which clearly emphasized the horrible slaughter of thousands of Koreans in its aftermath. Yet, when we get to the end of the Taishô period, where the gallery focused on the rise of women’s magazines and movie theaters, I suddenly found myself at the exit of the gallery. There, a single section of a wall with a rather boring set of a dozen pictures of average Japanese comprised all that there was for the Showa period. It was labelled, “Snapshots of Japan during and just after the Pacific War”. I tried to picture what message the board was sending to the visitor. The only impression I was left with looking at these pictures was that everyone seemed very busy.
One possible explanation for the glaring absence of this period is that the Showa Memorial museum can be found in downtown Tokyo and the museum thus felt that there was no need for a whole exhibit focusing on the period. However, as I already mentioned, that exhibit focuses almost entirely on the daily life and experience of Japanese during this period, and essentially leaves untouched any portrayal of the tumultuous events and other changes which were going on in these decades of national mobilization and war. That only leaves only the Yushukan museum and its frighteningly revisionist narrative to tell the story of Japan’s difficult 20th century on a macroscopic level. There must be another museum that I have neglected. If I find it, I’ll post about it here.
Hmm, that is really too bad… One problem of designing a historical museum for people who oppose Yushukan’s narrative might be that they oppose Yushukan’s style of presenting history (in other words, giving a strong historical opinion directly), but do not know how to present their view effectively in a different form.
Right, I know how incredibly difficult it must be to present it in a way which is sensitive to all the issues, but also the sentiments of their overwhelmingly Japanese visitors.