Collecting for Peace: Memories and Objects of the Asia-Pacific War

Abstract

136 Akiko Takenaka Collecting for Peace: Memories and Objects of the Asia-Pacific War This essay begins with two images: a photograph and a poster. The photograph depicts a cluster of seemingly mundane objects: dust-covered bottles and bins, rusted tools and tool parts—many of them piled together in boxes, most of them without labels. I took the photograph in 2005 at the Haebaru Cultural Center in Okinawa. Haebaru Town was the central location for Japanese military field hospitals in the last months of the Asia-Pacific War, and the Cultural Center houses an exhibit of hospital -related material on the first floor, while a room on the second floor holds unmarked excess (Figure 1). The poster announces a 2005 joint project between the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the nuclear attacks on the two cities (Figure 2). It solicits donation of objects, photographs (iei), and memories associated with hibaku (literally , “recipients of the bomb”), a word used to describe people, objects, and buildings affected by atomic bombs. Many other museums throughout Japan exhibit similar kinds of objects: the material survivors of air raids and of atomic bombs, for the most part, but also items used to treat wounded Japanese soldiers or artifacts that survived a particular battle. Some objects, such as the charred lunch box from Hiroshima depicted on the poster, have become icons of the war. There are other iconic objects, particularly from Hiroshima, such as the clock that stopped at 8:15 or the scorched tricycle that belonged to Shin’ichi, a three-year-old boy who had been riding it when the bomb exploded. When placed prominently on display along with informative text, or when reproduced multiple times as photographs, the objects can create a lasting impression. But the Haebaru objects do not have that Figure 1. A view of a second-floor storage room, Haebaru Cultural Center, May 2005. Photograph by the author. Figure 2. Poster text reads, “Now is the time to tell us the truth of the bomb that scorched the boy’s lunchbox as well as his future.” Image from 60th Anniversary Project: Commemorative Exhibition for the 50th Anniversary of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. 138 Akiko Takenaka kind of significance. I had already seen some of these objects that day— not in a pile, but singled out, highlighted, organized, and labeled—in the exhibit rooms downstairs. The pile of similar objects upstairs thus seemed extra, redundant, unnecessary. Despite the request for more objects, recent special exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum suggest that the relationship between much of the newly acquired material and the bomb experience is becoming increasingly tangential. For example, many of the objects and photographs on display during a special exhibit mounted in May 2012 belonged to people who were born in Hiroshima but not physically present in the city on August 6, 1945. Yet the call for objects and memories still stands.1 In addition, the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims and the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims each owns a separate collection of photographs and personal narratives of the atomic bomb victims and continues to call out for more. Many Japanese museums associated with war memories also post such calls for objects and memories. Why continue to collect this material seven decades after the war’s end? This essay explores efforts to collect material (objects, memoirs, oral history narratives, visual representations, building survivors) associated with Japanese home-front memories of the Asia-Pacific War. Numerous flyers and announcements call for more objects, more first-person narratives ; websites request more stories. And it is not just museums that are collecting. Various nonprofit organizations, private groups, and individuals also create websites and e-mail lists to collect stories. There are multiple reasons for this continued effort at collecting; the incentive for collecting differs across generations and has shifted in the decades since 1945. The reasons are sometimes practical: according to one curator, public history museums often receive requests from local residents to accept objects that survived the war...