The Yitzhak Rabin Center

Yitzhak Rabin (b. 1922) was Prime Minister of Israel from 1974 to 1977, and again from 1992 until his assassination in 1995 at the hands of a Jewish Israeli right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords.

Right: A bloodstained paper found in Rabin’s shirt pocket after his assassination, with the text of a song or poem called Shir Hashalom (A Song of Peace).

I was old enough at that time to have some understanding and appreciation of what had been developing – the peace agreements, the progress towards (maybe, just maybe?) a real, lasting, peace – and to have some appreciation of what his assassination seemed to represent. A hope cut short. I would not claim to know today, and most certainly did not have any knowledge back then, just what sort of man Rabin was: the fine details of his life and career; the nuanced, complex, ins and outs of the various cliques or movements within Israeli or Palestinian politics at the time; where exactly Rabin stood on each of various different political issues or what exactly he had or had not said, done, voted for in the past. I could not say then, and I cannot say now, the extent to which Rabin alone, or Rabin in particular, had just the right qualities to make these important steps towards peace come about, or whether the situation was moving in that direction anyway, and he just happened to be the one who happened to be Prime Minister at that time. But, the former does seem to be the standard narrative, the popular perspective: namely, that there was something special, something unique, about Rabin, that if he had lived he really might have been able to bring about peace, and that the hope of that happening died with him.

I was entirely unaware of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, a sort of combination museum / library / research center just a short walk from Tel Aviv University, until my father or brother mentioned it as a place to maybe think about visiting. And I would not blame anyone for assuming it to be skippable; I had little interest when my father and brother were first discussing it. But I am so glad that we ended up going, and frankly, I would strongly recommend it not only to anyone interested in gaining a more nuanced, complex, understanding of the history of Israeli politics, democracy, and society, from pre-1948 to today (or, until the late 1990s at least), but also to anyone interested in Museum Studies, museum design.

The Center turns out to be a pretty incredible museum. For its content: providing a more nuanced, complex, accounting of Israeli history than I’d ever been exposed to before, and in particular going deep beyond the typical black & white dichotomy of Israel and Palestine, or Jews and Arabs, to get into the Israeli left and right, the shifts in power between left and right over the decades; policies that were and were not popular; protests and demonstrations in civil society; debates and complex issues within Israeli society over religion, immigration, education, security, and a variety of other issues. Admitting and exploring wrongs committed by the Israeli government, and the shifts and changes, impacts and ramifications, and so forth connected with these. But it’s also an incredible museum for its technology – audio guide headsets that activate based on your location within the galleries, playing not just a few tens of sound recordings of curatorial narration, but rather, nearly 200 audio tracks – including diagetic music, audio for over a hundred historical video clips, and so forth, that set a mood, create an atmosphere of each time and place within the history, and explore a variety of themes, from the battlefield to cosmopolitan streets, from political speeches in the Reichstag, the Knesset, and the United Nations to television news reports, that just bring such a richness to the entire experience. And, as a museum serving visitors from a wide array of linguistic backgrounds, I thought it actually a pretty brilliant innovation, rather than having the videos play in any one language, they are silent without the audio guides – and with them, play in whichever language you select.

I wrote an earlier draft of this post that went through my notes on the exhibits, my notes on what I learned of Israeli history, year by year across the 20th century. It got rather lengthy, and my writing and thinking got into some quagmires about how to write about, how to represent, these events and these exhibits, amidst Israel’s history, and its very existence, being as fraught and controversial as it is. And all the more so amidst the current political situation, as a far-right government works to carry out reforms which many say are authoritarian, dangerous to the foundations and future of Israeli democracy, damaging to the rights of women and gender/sexual minorities, in order to enable the easier pursuit of theocratic and right-wing agendas.

But while I cannot help but to let slip my politics, my chief intention in this post is not to assert a political argument, but rather, simply from the perspective of a museum visitor, a tourist / traveler, a historian, and someone interested in Museum Studies, I primarily just wanted to share about this museum experience I had. Politics aside, I believe The Yitzhak Rabin Center exhibit galleries are a great model for how other museums could organize themselves, with their proximity-sensor-linked audio guides, and telling a narrative of national history that is nuanced and complex, open about problems and troubles in the country’s history.

^{Black panels summarizing or marking off different periods of history, each with a new clip of audio narration which plays as you step in front of each new section.}

Where other museums, books, videos, might represent the story of the modern State of Israel in wholly laudatory or villainizing terms, in the Rabin Center museum, we learn a far more complex story, of ups and downs, victories and defeats; of the ways in which Israelis built a state that is a beacon of freedom and democracy in the region, and the ways in which they fell short. We learn of struggles and tensions between religious and secular, of progress and setbacks in gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, and of discrimination and inequalities between Jews of different ethnic or racial backgrounds, as well as of course between Jews and non-Jews. We learn of protests and demonstrations, media critiques, and social movements. We learn of political scandals, how Rabin resigned from leadership in the Labor Party and from candidacy for the position of Prime Minister in 1977, and about how popular sentiment regarding how the government and the military handled the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to dramatic shifts in Israeli politics: how Israel has never been always one thing – socialist, liberal, progressive, conservative, traditionalist – but rather, that in the late 1970s, “for the first time in history, Israel had a center-right government” with new agendas. As in any other free and democratic country, politics shifted left and right over time.

We learn about the many moves and efforts for peace, about the complexities and difficulties involved, the disagreements and debates. We learn about times when the Israeli government forced Jewish settlers to withdraw from, to abandon, settlements in areas such as the Sinai, as part of efforts to make peace with neighboring states such as Egypt, and the divides this created, revealed, or exacerbated within Israeli society, and we learn about times when such withdrawals led not to peace but only to continued or increased violence. We learn about dreadful acts committed, at times, by the Israeli government or IDF, or elements therein, and we learn about massive protests, within Israeli civil society, against them. And we learn about a diversity of views on what Israel means or represents, how the state should be and how it should behave; a diversity of views on the settlements or the “Occupation,” and on how Israel should address the challenges it faces. Beyond simply left or right, we are presented with a glimpse into the complexity of many of the issues Israel (and in many case, any country) faces.

We learn, too, about the various victories and setbacks in the pursuit of peace, about the hope for peace that the 1993 Oslo Accords represented, and about how extremists on both sides prevented peace from being achieved, not only at that time, but in preceding decades and down to today as well.

^{The final room in the galleries is this memorial-style space, with lights flickering on the surface of a pool of water, at the bottom and center of a circle, surrounded by videos of Rabin’s funeral.}

Contrary to popular narratives that all too often frame things in very black-and-white terms – for or against “Israel,” as if “Israel” is all one thing – we learn in the Yitzhak Rabin Center a lot about civil society, about protests and political tensions within Israel, and about political shifts over time. The current situation shows very clearly, I would think, that “Israel” is not just a single actor, with a single set of political aims or positions, but that this has changed over time – e.g. with the current government being decidedly more right-wing than its predecessors, with different aims, intentions, attitudes, positions – and that there are millions of Israelis who disagree strongly, powerfully, with those attitudes, positions, and agendas.

Like every other country on the planet, Israel has its problems, internal and external; the black marks on its record, the spots where it should have done, should have been, better, and the areas where it fails to live up to its ideals. The Rabin Center museum does not shy away from showing this, with vulnerability and honesty. If there is one thing I learned from this museum, perhaps above and beyond everything else, it is that Israel is a normal country. Israel exists beyond the controversies, beyond the headlines, beyond “The Conflict.” It is a country where millions of people, like people anywhere else in the world, worry about taxes and education, about jobs and unemployment, about climate change and women’s rights. It is a country where politics takes place like anywhere else, left and right, domestic and foreign, arts and culture, society and economics. It is a country that struggles to live up to its ideals, that strives to do better for its people, and that works to negotiate agreements with its neighbors.

Israelis are fighting right now to keep their democracy, to rescue their country from a dangerous rightward swing, and to set it back onto a path of trying to do better, to be better, to become better. I hope that, for the sake of all the people living there, the world can learn to see them with compassion and humanity, rather than with ire, and to recognize that they too, like everyone else in the world, deserve prosperity and happiness, self-determination, and freedom and safety from those who would see them displaced, persecuted, eradicated.

^{Protestors in Tel Aviv, June 10, 2023. Photo my own.}

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The Brand New Tsushima Museum

Tsushima 対馬 is a really interesting place. Halfway between Korea and Japan, it was ruled for hundreds of years by the Sо̄ samurai house 宗家, retainers to the various successive shogunates *and* by the late 16th c. if not earlier, vassals to the kings of Joseon 朝鮮 (Korea) as well. Unlike the Shimazu house 島津家 of Kagoshima 鹿児島, who conquered the kingdom of Lūchū (Ryūkyū) 琉球 and then treated it in some respects as a vassal state, including by bringing Luchuan embassies to Edo as part of their retainer band and/or simultaneously as representatives of a foreign kingdom under the Shimazu’s sway, by contrast, the Sо̄ did roughly the reverse. Though certainly powerfully protective of their special status as intermediaries with Korea, they were retainers or vassals to both the Tokugawa shoguns and the Korean kings, and so they escorted Korean embassies to Edo less as a display of power than as a fulfillment of obligations of service.

A Korean embassy procession (18th-19thc), as depicted in Tsushima nikki 対馬日記 (replica), on display at the Tsushima Chôsen Tsûshinshi History Museum. Photo my own.

Though the island had been ruled by samurai houses for centuries upon centuries, if I recall correctly, I believe that Joseon officials, scholars, poets, etc. regularly wrote of the island as being fundamentally Korean territory, stolen from Silla or Paekche. And come the late 19th century, Tsushima, like Ryukyu, Ezo (Hokkaido), and several other locations, became a contentious borderland, with Russians and others testing the shogunate to see if it would defend the idea of Tsushima being fully Japanese territory; the Sо̄, understandably, were out of their depth against this threat and begged the shogun to strip them of their fief – that is, for the shogunate to take over Tsushima and deal with the issue themselves.

A view of Tsushima from the jetfoil ferry, just after leaving Izuhara port. Photo my own.

A location like this… I’ve always thought about how the Sо̄ – and their retainers, and others from the island – might perhaps feel a strong sense of ownership and/or belonging to this island, and a conceptual or cultural distance from mainland Japan. I guess in a way it’s a bit hard to put into words what I mean; and, to be honest, the idea I’m trying to get at could honestly go for a wide range of other domains (regions, prefectures), and not only in Japan but in almost any country. Still – I always imagined a sort of feeling of difference when thinking about places like Tsushima, Kagoshima, Matsumae, though again it could apply just as easily to almost anywhere else. This idea of one’s domain as one’s own, distinct, separate territory – “home” – as contrasted with the feel, the vibe, not to mention the climate (and flora and fauna and so forth) of Edo or Kyoto. Coming to Tsushima feels like I’m visiting a particular family’s personal domain, in a way that visiting Fukuoka, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, does not.

That said, how does it actually feel? Well, Tsushima is a massive island, and since I had only 24 hours on the island, and no Japanese driver’s license, I stayed in a rather small, walkable, central downtown part of Izuhara 厳原 – the main port city, home to the current modern City Hall and to the former castle seat of the Sо̄ house. So, I can’t say what the rest of the island feels like. But, just from walking around town, visiting temples, shrines, castle ruins, etc., I have to say, I’m actually surprised to feel like it doesn’t feel all that different from some … for lack of a better word, generic, mainstream, mainland Japanese feeling.

A view of a section of Izuhara Town. Photo my own.

When I visited Kagoshima, or islands in the Inland Sea (Hiroshima prefecture), each of those two places felt very distinct. Felt like I was really experiencing the vibe of a different side of Japan, a different region. And Amami О̄shima and Okinawa of course all the more so. Going from Tokyo to Yokohama, Kamakura, Kyoto, Osaka, each of these also had their own distinctive feel. Izuhara… surprisingly… doesn’t. Or, didn’t, to me, in my personal and very limited one-day experience of the island. I dunno. Felt, really, not all that different from other parts of Kyushu or slightly rural / small-town mainland Japan that I’ve been to. Not precisely the same as Wakayama or Utsunomiya or Hikone, of course, but shades of difference rather than a more fully distinct, unique, Tsushima vibe.

Nevertheless, of course, I am very glad and excited to have visited there.

Trying to remember what other towns it sort of reminds me of. The walk from the port terminal into town reminded me of some slightly more rural parts of mainland Kagoshima I’ve been to, and parts of Naze or Kasari-chо̄ on Amami, where you’re walking in an area that really is meant for cars, and you’re wondering how much farther it’ll be before you get to a more properly walkable area with a denser collection of shops, etc. But, on Tsushima, I knew from Google Maps that it would be only a 10 minute walk. And then, bam, there it was – a main street with a large supermarket, post office, banks, a real “city center” sort of feel – like being in Fukuoka City, or any random part of Tokyo, just, smaller. Confined to a much smaller area.

Walking out past that area, it starts to feel like a lot of former castle-towns, or former post-station towns, that I’ve been to. A mix of traditional and modern architecture, dense but not super dense. Hard to know the right way to put it into words. Kind of quaint and touristy in some small sections, and very ordinary urban in some other sections, and then just quiet and “I don’t think there’s anything really to see farther out this way.”

One of the old samurai residential streets in Izuhara; remnants of stone walls, and (original?) wooden gates give the neighborhood some quaint, traditional vibes. Photo my own.

While not being able to drive out further on the island is a bummer, the historical center (I shouldn’t call it “touristy”; I’ve seen literally *one* touristy shop selling souvenirs, postcards; that’s it) is thankfully very walkable. I was nervous about the timing, since I couldn’t get a jetfoil ferry over there from Hakata any earlier than one which arrives on Tsushima at 12:45pm; and I couldn’t get one back that leaves any later than 13:25pm. So I literally had just an afternoon, and a morning – nothing even approaching two days on the island, even though I stayed overnight. But, nevertheless, I was able to walk from the port to the center of town in about 10 mins; from there to the new Museum, the only slightly older Korean Embassies Museum 朝鮮通信使資料館, and the Banshо̄-in temple in about 10-15 mins; from there to Chо̄ju-in temple, where the famous Tsushima foreign relations official Amenomori Hо̄shū 雨森芳洲 is buried, in another 15 mins or so… And, my “hotel” for the night was also only about 5-10 min walk from the center of town. I actually rented a room at one of the town’s historic temples, and in terms of how new and nice the room felt, and the amenities and so forth, it was certainly as nice as any hotel I’ve stayed in.

The entrance to Temple Stay Seizanji – a beautiful guesthouse as clean, newly remodeled, well-apportioned as any hotel. Photo my own.

One point, for anyone thinking of visiting – while the city center is not by any means devoid of banks, a post office, one singular FamilyMart, a Docomo store (where I was able to rent a portable cellphone charger), and so forth, and while all of these are with very easy 5-10 walk from the center of town, I realized very quickly that, unlike in Kyoto or Tokyo or other places, you can’t just walk and expect to run into them. In big cities, I will usually just head to a given temple, museum, or other site, and expect that I will reliably hit a convenience store or at least a vending machine along the way. Not so in Izuhara. Going from the main tourist info center to the Museum, to Banshо̄-in, you will encounter zero cafes, zero convenience stores, zero ATMs, I’m not even sure there are any soda vending machines (until you get to Banshо̄-in), unless you intentionally go and walk 5 mins in the opposite direction, deeper into the real center of town, to get to those destinations.

But, back to talking about the sights:

Hyakugangi 百雁木 stairs up to the Sо̄ family graves at Banshо̄-in. Photo my own.

Visiting the Sо̄ family temple of Banshо̄-in and getting to see the graves of each of the successive heads of the family, and many of their wives and children, was very cool. It’s something like this that I think makes me feel especially strongly that feeling of this being their domain. And while the fact that lords’ wives and children (and the lords themselves, especially when they were children) typically spent an extremely significant portion of their lives in Edo and not “home” in the domain complicates this, nevertheless, there is this feeling that Tsushima is where the ancestors’ graves are, where the family “home” castle and home domain is. The mountains, the rivers, the docks, the particular temples and shrines and town streets that are “home” to someone from Tsushima. Of course, there’s the complicating factor again of the question of just how often a lord – or any other particular individual of any status – actually walked those streets, or visited those ports, or those temples or shrines. But, let’s not get ourselves distracted. It’s the feeling that comes with knowing, and seeing, those ancestral graves here, on Tsushima, in/atop the earth of this island, at Banshо̄-in and not at some temple in Kyoto – the Banshо̄-in, the Banshо̄-in temple that means so much to the Sо̄ family and which most people not from Tsushima would never have heard of. The Kaneishi castle which was home to so many generations of Sо̄ family heads, their wives and other relatives, their retainers and officials and their staffs… The Kaneishi castle that felt like home to so many – and like an intimidating, impressive, center of power to so many others – and which, again, was utterly unknown to so many more.

Restored main gate of Kaneishi castle (left), and the new Tsushima Museum (right). Photo my own.

Today, there is even less of that castle than I might have expected. The main gate has been restored, and looks very cool and iconic. But beyond it, there is (unless I missed something?) more or less nothing to be seen. At Fukuoka castle, at least, there are stone walls and moats, and one can walk around and see signs denoting what buildings used to stand where, and what portion of the castle grounds you’re now in. Not so much at Kaneishi.

The Tsushima Museum. Photo my own.

What there is, however, is the brand new Tsushima Museum 対馬博物館, which opened literally less than a month ago – April 30, 2022. I had heard about it, somehow, and – not as if I was going to zoom over there anyway, in the middle of a pandemic, and amidst various other trips that I did end up making over the past several years – I waited and watched, and paid attention, so that I could be sure that when (if) I ever did go to Tsushima, it would be after they opened.

One of a number of tables, seating areas at the Tsushima Museum. Not sure if this is just totally open for free use by the public, but some other similar areas are. If I by chance lived in town, I can imagine coming here and using it as just a cool place to sit and work. If they allow food/drink. Photo my own.

It’s a gorgeous, impressive, building. Looks great inside and out, I feel. A distinctive, dark, style – this was definitely a choice – but I think it works. Sleek, looks and feels very new. Feels to me like a cool, very compelling place to want to have meetings, or just to spend time. If there were a café or something, I’d definitely see it as a place to just go and enjoy the atmosphere, to either sit and read/work or to talk with friends… there are several spaces in the building with chairs and tables in beautiful nooks that could be great for this, if only there were a café serving food and beverages.

The permanent exhibits galleries were, as might be expected, very sleek, new, very contemporary-feeling. As much as I wish I were more expert at gallery design, I don’t really quite have the eye for what exactly to note, what exactly was or wasn’t innovative or up-to-date reflective of the newest trends. But it certainly felt sleek and new to me.

I am so glad the Museum allowed photos in the permanent galleries. I did buy a catalog, but even so, so happy to have been able to take and keep all these photos, remind myself not just of the items but of the views and spaces and experience of walking through it. And to be able to share these images with you.

First gallery: Prehistory

Several of the galleries featured “open storage” style displays, which allow visitors to not just look at a very few items selected out to be highlighted, but rather a larger number of items, all at once. For prehistoric and other archaeologically excavated artifacts, I think this is particularly wonderful, as it gives a sense of the number/volume of items discovered, the wealth of finds, as well as the variety.

The exhibits begin, as we might expect, with the earliest periods of prehistory. I was surprised to read that, even though much evidence has been found of human settlement on “mainland” Kyushu, and in Korea, i.e. both north and south of Tsushima, going back tens of thousands of years – including some of the oldest pottery in the world, dating back roughly 10,000 years ago – no such evidence has been found on Tsushima: nothing older than about 7300 years ago. A really interesting question and mystery; surely if people found their way from the continent (Korea) to the Japanese islands so many tens of thousands of years ago, you would think they would have settled Tsushima as well. And we must remember, this is a span of tens of thousands of years we’re talking about – even if the island wasn’t settled 10,000 years ago, or if it was and then the settlement died out, why wouldn’t new people come and settle there (again) ten or a hundred or a thousand years later? Tons of time, tons of opportunities for settlements to happen – and from what little I understand, I can only presume that they did – and yet, for some reason, no evidence has yet been found. I loved the way they represented this with an empty display case, rather than with no display case at all (and just solely text).

The galleries also included a small number of videos and animation screens, and a few hands-on activities, such as getting to lift and sense the weight of an ancient (Kofun era) sword or printing your own real and imposter seals, helping make the exhibits feel, if not “innovative,” then still certainly fresh, cool, contemporary. It may be difficult to tell from these static, flat, photos, but the aesthetic mood or atmosphere in the galleries was actually very cool. It looks dark in the photos, perhaps, but it was certainly well-lit enough to make your way around, and to see everything well enough; while some museums are rather well-lit, and some dark enough (for conservation reasons) that you can’t really see the works properly, at the Tsushima Museum, the darkness functioned (for me at least) to give everything just a bit of a sense of mystery and a sort of air of impressiveness, while still being well-lit enough that you could make your way through the galleries and see the works clearly enough very easily. I quite liked the choice.

A 1469 temple bell, made in Japan with Korean stylistic features. Nationally-designated Important Cultural Property. Photos my own.

One item that was particularly interesting was this 1469 bronze temple bell. It was beautifully situated, with spotlights that really centered it and drew attention to it, and to a small bronze Buddha in the same room, making the two very clearly highlights of the exhibit. I would never have known or realized on my own, but as the gallery labels explain, this bell shows a combination of features of Japanese and Korean bells; and the labels further explain, or point out, a number of the differences in those features. Made me think back to the fact that some of the most famous historic bells in Ryukyu were made in Korea, and to want to take another look at them to see what features I can notice.

After seeing this, I then saw the famous Bridge of All Nations Bell 万国津梁鐘 on display at the Tokyo National Museum – cast in 1458, right around the same time as many of Okinawa’s most famous bells, and hung for centuries at Shuri castle, but I don’t think I ever realized before that it’s actually of Japanese, not Korean, manufacture. Brought up this photo of the gallery label from the Tsushima Museum, and was able to look at what features mark it as Japanese-style. Very interesting to be able to do. I’m certainly going to try to keep it in mind the next time I’m at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and have the chance to see some of those bells.

Next, there was a wonderful small section talking about the use of fake seals to help allow for a greater volume of trade. This was a major element of roughly c. 14th-16th century trade in East Asia, as regional governments – China, Korea, Japan – implemented various sorts of policies around legitimate, authorized, traders having to have the proper seals, or sealed documents, to mark them as being authorized traders and not smugglers, brigands, pirates. And so, with trade being at times so narrowly limited, and localities such as Tsushima relying heavily on trade to survive or prosper, there ended up being a lot of fake seals in use.

The actual seals on display at the Tsushima Museum were all replicas, but since the Kyushu National Museum doesn’t allow photos in their galleries, this was the closest I could get to being able to photograph the seals and gallery label content about them, and I really appreciated it.

The exhibits then moved on to also display a number of documents faked by Tsushima domain in the early years of the 1600s, during what has come to be known as the Yanagawa Incident. Eager to secure rapprochement and re-initiate friendly relations between Japan and Korea (or, that is, between the Joseon royal court and the Tokugawa shogunate, with the Sо̄ house as intermediaries) in the aftermath of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s devastating invasions of Korea in the 1590s, the Sо̄ forged a number of letters pretending to be from the shogun to the king of Korea, or vice versa. I need to read up about this more, learn more precisely the ins and outs of what happened, but in the end, if I remember correctly, Sо̄ house retainer Yanagawa Shigeoki was severely punished, but the Sо̄ were able to make like it was all his fault, done under their noses, something like that, and so they were able to keep their domain. Would have been hard for the Tokugawa to oust them, anyway, since it was the Sо̄ and the Sо̄ alone who had hundreds of years of experience and good faith in effecting relations with the Korean court. I’m not sure what role Korea might have played in actively petitioning the Tokugawa to allow the Sо̄ to stay – or not – but it’s a really interesting incident. And here we got to see on display not just some of the forged documents, but also a diagram – a sort of floor map or seating chart – showing how notable figures were arranged for the formal meeting in 1635 between Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, Sо̄ Yoshinari (lord of Tsushima), and Yanagawa Shigeoki, at the Shogun’s castle in Edo, to address this issue.

Seating chart for 1635 audience, at the Grand Audience Hall of Edo castle, granted by Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu to Sо̄ Yoshinari and Yanagawa Shigeoki (among others) to address the falsification of documents incident. Photo my own.

A video animation of a Korean embassy procession, and several procession scrolls on display in the Early Modern gallery. Photo my own.

This last gallery in the permanent exhibits – which I didn’t realize was the last gallery, already – was dedicated to the early modern history of the island, i.e. the history of Tsushima domain, and consisted chiefly of (1) a few beautiful displays of Korean embassy procession scrolls and discussion of the role of Tsushima in effecting Korean-Japanese relations in that period, and (2) an open storage style display of pottery and other artifacts found at the former site of the Sо̄ clan castles and mansions, and elsewhere.

I feel bad to be negative, and perhaps if I were a specialist in particular other periods or aspects of the history I might, actually, have felt the same way about those sections, but as an early modernist, I have to admit I was disappointed at how small, and brief, the early modern section felt. Thinking about the Kagoshima Prefectural Museum (Reimeikan) or the Fukuoka City Museum, the volume and density of information presented at those museums about those domains’ early modern history, from domain governance and economics to demography and social organization to local culture (prominent artists, poets, writers) to a chronology or brief biographies of each of the successive lords, to discussions of notable incidents in the history… By contrast, the Tsushima Museum felt like there was so much more they could (should) cover. Felt beautifully designed, impressive, enjoyable, but just too brief.

Still, just before leaving the galleries, there was one more display that was particularly interesting, describing the Sо̄ke monjo 宗家文書, or “Documents of the Sо̄ House” – an incredible array of over 100,000 original historical documents (and other materials?) pertaining to the history of the island, and in particular to the history of the Sо̄ house, its governance of the island, and so forth. These documents are today divided up between about six different archives, with about 80,000 items now held at the Museum on Tsushima, in a newly-established (or newly rehoused, at least) Nagasaki Prefectural Research Center for History of Tsushima, about 28,000 held in Seoul, and the remainder held at the Kyushu National Museum or at various institutes & museums in Tokyo. As with other similar document collections, historians are doing tedious but fascinating, incredible, vital work at gradually transcribing and publishing these texts, reading through them and making new discoveries that deepen our understanding of not just local Tsushima history, but the history of Korea-Japan relations, the history of domain-shogunate relations, samurai culture, and so forth throughout the medieval and early modern periods.

Leaving the galleries, one is then directed to a series of small displays about individual events or aspects of Tsushima’s modern history, including the abolition of the domain and incorporation of the island into Nagasaki prefecture in 1872; the Battle of Tsushima in 1905; the wedding in 1931 of Sо̄ Takeyuki to Deokhye, the daughter of the last kind of Joseon – which is actually really interesting, and something I did not realized had happened; and the beginning of reenactments of the Korean embassies in 1980.

And then the special exhibits gallery – a beautiful small exhibit, and if I lived here or were able to visit more frequently, I’d be genuinely and eagerly excited to see what themes they might cover in future; I’m sure many of them will be quite exciting. But it’s so small! I’m not sure the current (first) special exhibit has more than 15 or maybe 20 items in it. I’m hoping that maybe they have a second or even third special exhibits gallery that could accommodate a larger exhibit, but just isn’t being used for this one. I do think, if I remember correctly, there were some signs or closed-off doors, suggesting there is more space that just wasn’t being used at the time.

The remainder of the building is a gorgeous, impressive, airy space, with much of it given over to a massive lobby and to a number of small meeting rooms, lounges, and so forth, plus of course research offices, storage, and so forth. As a visitor, I cannot help but to think it a shame that so much of this space is taken up by this grand atrium, and not by more exhibition space. But, then, what do I know?

Not sure what to say in conclusion, except that it really is a beautiful museum, and it was a pleasure to get to visit and explore Izuhara, and to finally see for myself first-hand a little bit of a taste of what this particular corner of Japan – this island situated between Japan and Korea, separated from the “mainland” islands, with its own fascinating distinct history – looks and feels like. I wish it might be easier, and cheaper, to be able to go visit again. I suppose I will keep my eyes on what temporary exhibits they’re doing in future, and try to take that as an impetus for when might be the right time to try visiting again. I hope I get to do so someday.

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Okinawa Times: Repatriation of Ryukyuan Remains Not Progressing

Thanks to Risako Sakai for sharing this article from yesterday’s Okinawa Times (17 Jan 2021) on Twitter:

There has been some progress in recent years in having universities and other institutions in Japan gradually begin to repatriate human remains (bones, etc.) in anthropology research collections back to Ainu communities; the Ainu situation still has its problems, with many universities having extremely poor records, poor management of the collections, and being very passive, half-hearted, and slow (if not outright resistant) to conduct proper investigations into the provenance of their collections or to begin the repatriation process at all; prior to Covid turning out world around, I witnessed protests outside the gates to University of Tokyo on exactly this point. Further, while some number of items have been returned to individual Ainu groups in Ainu Moshir (Ainu homelands, Japanese: Hokkaido), many have now been returned to the new National Ainu Museum Upopoy (opened in July 2020). Also known as 民族共生象徴空間 (roughly transated, “Ethnic Groups Coexistence Symbolic Space”), a name which makes me roll my eyes and want to throw up, Upopoy has come under considerable criticism for being very much a national project, run by the state as part of some effort to pretend to show the state cares about the Ainu people, while not actually giving them the power to tell their own story, not sufficiently asking for or properly responding to Ainu people’s requests or desires for what they want from the national government (and from the museum), and so forth. It is my understanding, and please correct me if I am wrong, that the national government and/or the Museum is (mis)representing the Museum as in some sense belonging to the Ainu people, and that therefore remains placed in the collective memorial structure 慰霊施設 are considered “repatriated.” This is in contrast to, for example, the National Museum of the American Indian (part of the Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, DC, which I’m sure has its problems and its criticisms as well, but which is at least run through extensive involvement of Native American staff, curators, input from Native American Nations who actually agree to and/or recognize objects in the museum as counting as being “repatriated”, and so forth.

But, to get to the point, whatever progress is gradually being made with Ainu remains, the Ryukyuan peoples are still not officially recognized as indigenous peoples by the Japanese state, and efforts to get universities to repatriate remains stolen from Ryukyuan gravesites are seeing more foot-dragging, more obstacles and difficulties, and little progress. I’m a little embarrassed to admit, even as I read bits and pieces here and there about the Ainu case, I didn’t really think about Ryukyuan remains that might also exist in such university collections, that were also excavated (tomb-robbed); I especially didn’t think that there would be remains explicitly identified as relatives of the royal family, robbed from known and named tombs, still in university collections today.

In any case, here is my rough translation of the Okinawa Times article above:

Repatriation of Ryukyuan Remains Not Progressing ー Japan Failing to Keep Up with World Trends

The use or return of human remains taken from gravesites in Okinawa and Hokkaido for anthropological research purposes is becoming a problem. In a lawsuit calling for the return of [the remains of] Ryukyu royal family descendants held by Kyoto University, the university has not made sufficiently clear the conservation status or details of how/when they were collected [i.e. provenance] of these remains. Lack of transparency and … [?] of the management [of these objects] is emblematic of the state of Japan amidst global trends towards continuing returns to indigenous peoples.

Anthropological Research Kyoto University Collects

In the field of Anthropology, which spread from Western Europe, research also continues to progress in Japan, and in the 19-20th centuries, human remains were collected all over the country. Whereas excavation of shellmounds predominated in the mainland, in Okinawa and Hokkaido, which were de facto colonized by the Japanese government, there was also grave robbing of gravesites which were the sites of reverence and worship.

The remains which are under contention in the Kyoto District Court were collected in 1929 by Kyoto Imperial University Assistant Professor Kanaseki Takeo from the Mumujana gravesite in Nakijin village [in the northern part of Okinawa Island]. The university, based on writings by Kanaseki indicating he had the approval of the Okinawa prefectural government and police at that time, emphasizes that “the proper paperwork/procedures were followed, so it was not a crime.”

However, a survey performed by Doshisha University professor Itagaki Ryūta suggests there is a strong possibility that most of the remains were collected on Amami Ōshima and Okinawa in 1933, by lecturer Miyake Muneyoshi, at the direction of Kyoto Imperial University professor Kiyono Kenji. The numbers assigned to his Ryukyuan remains match those of 25 out of the 26 items under dispute. Kyoto University has explained that “Miyake and Kanaseki had a close friendly relationship, so it can be thought that Miyake, too, would have gone through the proper procedures in the same fashion,” but they have not found detailed records of the collection of these items.

The plaintiff, Ryūkoku University professor Matsushima Yasukatsu, is indignant that “there is no registration ledger for these remains, so even Kyoto University cannot clearly say who collected them. This is evidence that their management is sloppy and that they have not sincerely investigated the details.”
In recent years, through the advancement of DNA analysis techniques, the information that can be gleaned from bone has expanded, and research into the origins of the Japanese people is flourishing again. The Anthropological Society of Nippon in 2019 submitted a written request expressing the principle that “ancient human remains are cultural properties belonging to the people of the nation which have academic value. They must be conserved and made available for research.”

The Anthropological Society of Nippon, Japanese Archaeological Association, and others that same year, regarding the Ainu people who are recognized by the state as an indigenous people, also formulated a proposal (or draft) of guiding ethical principles demanding that human remains for which there is a possibility that they were looted without agreement [from the Ainu people] not be used for research. Prof. Matsushima argues “it’s a double standard; it’s discrimination against Ryukyuans.”

Overseas, a movement for conducting thorough investigations and returning remains to indigenous or formerly colonized peoples is growing. Kyoto University’s collection also includes remains collected in Taiwan and Korea, but their conservation status is unclear. Prof. Itagaki pointed out that “compared to overseas it is a remarkably passive stance. Kyoto University must be transparent, immediately conduct investigations, and discuss the methods for repatriating the remains, etc., in earnest.”


(inset box, left) Repatriation Problem
In the late 19th century, scholarship measuring the size and shapes of skulls in order to learn the state of development [process, advancement] or superiority or inferiority of different races spread, and the remains of people from various ethnic groups were collected. In a Ministry of Education survey, twelve universities in 2018 held more than 1500 items of Ainu human remains. Trials have resulted in objects being repatriated to Ainu groups in the regions they were taken from, or being placed in a memorial structure at the Ethnic Groups Coexistence Symbolic Space (Upopoy). Surveys of the conservation status or [possibility of] repatriation for remains collected in Okinawa, Amami Ōshima, etc. are not progressing.

Glad to have learned about this. My thanks again to Sakai-san for re-tweeting about this. I have yet to read anything else about it, so I won’t go on and on speculating or commenting further, but will just leave this here for now.

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Asians Represent Podcast: Ainu Representation in Museums

Attus and ruunpe traditional-style Ainu robes on display at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Feb 2013. Photo my own.

I recently came across a podcast interview with Ainu Museum Studies scholar Marrianne Ubalde (Hokkaido University), talking about “Ainu & Japanese Identity.” The broader podcast series this is from is called Asians Represent. I haven’t listened to any of their other episodes yet, but I gather the focus is largely on the representation of Asian people and cultures in popular culture – especially in tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Certainly sounds interesting.

The whole podcast episode was quite interesting, and I encourage a listen, but I wanted to share some thoughts on just one bit of what they talked about during one portion of the conversation. The question of where indigenous peoples should be represented in museums.

At the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) – I suppose the main podcast host is based in Toronto – what small display of Ainu objects they have is, apparently, not located within the Japan gallery, but in a completely separate part of the museum, amongst objects representing indigenous cultures of “Africa, The Americas, and Asia-Pacific“; basically, more or less the whole world outside of Europe. (Canadian First Nations are represented in their own, separate, gallery.)

I was fortunate to get to visit the ROM myself for the first time last summer. It’s a pretty great museum, even if the Japan gallery, on the ground floor in a relatively central part of the museum, is surprisingly small compared to the adjacent China gallery, and compared to how much space Japan gets at many other major museums. Sadly, I don’t think I made it to this “Africa, The Americas, and Asia-Pacific” gallery; I wish I had.

The conversation on the podcast critiques this separation of the Ainu from the Japan gallery chiefly through the perspective of saying that by doing so, the museum is reinforcing Japanese nationalist and Nihonjinron myths of Japanese cultural and ethnic homogeneity; it effectively erases indigenous peoples and multiethnic / multicultural diversity from the “Japan” presented by the museum to its visitors. And it instead segregates out the Ainu into this separate space, one which is arguably hierarchically lesser insofar as it is located in a rather different part of the museum and one wonders how many (how few) visitors make it to that “Africa, The Americas, and Asia-Pacific” gallery.

Very interesting to have this pointed out, since actually one of the things I was most impressed with in the China galleries at the ROM was the emphasis on multiethnic and multicultural histories in China. Though small, the China galleries devote several glass cases to the Liao dynasty, ruled and populated primarily by the ethnic Khitans – a horse-riding nomadic people of the steppes who adapted/adopted a lot of Han (Chinese) culture, but who definitely were their own separate state with their own language and customs and so forth. And the exhibit doesn’t shy away from talking about Khitan “innovations,” or the “unique character” of their ceramics and other cultural products. Further labels touched upon the ethnic and cultural diversity of China overall in other periods, as well. I was particularly surprised and impressed to see the ROM devote one display to the histories of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in China. All three have had significant presences in China, going back centuries, and yet it’s so rare that we see them discussed at any length even in textbooks let alone in museums.

So, it’s odd that the Chinese galleries would include such an emphasis on diversity and the Japanese galleries would not.

But, I’m not sure I’m ready to so quickly scoff at the museum’s decision to place the Ainu elsewhere, outside of the Japan gallery; I think the question of whether this decision is woefully and obviously problematic is actually more complicated than it perhaps appears at first.

I can appreciate the pro-multiculturalism argument, that says that we should actively and explicitly push the narrative that Japan is itself multiethnic, multicultural, that Ainu people exist and exist within Japan. That they too are Japanese and deserve to be recognized and “seen.” I get that. Especially amidst stereotypes all too common in the cases of indigenous peoples around the world, misconceptions that the Ainu belong to the past, that they no longer exist. Exhibits focusing on and emphasizing Ainu life and culture today, amidst modern, contemporary, Japanese society, do really good and important work, placing Ainu traditions into a context in which they can be recognized as being no more “backward” or “primitive” or “stuck in the past” than (Wajin) Japanese traditions.

Photo from “Master: An Ainu Story,” a photo exhibit by Adam Isfendiyar at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London, Nov 2018. Photos of the exhibit my own.

But, what about the anti-colonial argument that says that the Ainu people and their culture are separate, and that by placing them within the category of the colonizer – that is, within the Japan gallery – it reinforces that they somehow belong to the Japanese state or the Japanese nation, that their cultural beauty is part of “Japanese culture” and contributes to the greatness and beauty (incl. multiculturalism) of “Japan” or of “Japanese culture”? There are Japanese ultranationalists who continue to promote the idea of Japanese cultural + ethnic homogeneity, and there are plenty of people in the general population who as a result of the particular character and content of state education, mainstream media, and so forth have been educated/socialized into thinking similarly and not knowing any better. But there are also imperial apologists and so forth who use assertions of a multiethnic Japan to advance notions of the superiority of the Japanese state or of Japanese culture. They say that “Japan” is made greater, better, by the cultures within it, including the Okinawans and the Ainu, and perhaps more problematically they talk about how these people are made better by their incorporation into Japan, repeating the same imperialist (colonialist) tropes of how the colonizer brought modernity and technology and infrastructure and modern medicine and modern amenities and quality of life and so forth to these people, and educated them and elevated or refined their culture, and took care of them …. So, this too is a problematic set of discourses.

Even among the most well-meaning of instructors, curators, cultural bureaucrats, etc., there can be inevitable, unavoidable, problematic implications in including or excluding groups like the Ainu or the Okinawans. If you say that Ainu and Okinawan sites are “National Treasures” or “National Heritage,” or if you push to get them designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites or UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage inscribed as belonging to “Japan,” well, arguably it’s better than not recognizing them at all, which would be an act of erasure and of dismissing or denying the cultural value or validity and historical significance of Ainu and Okinawan history and culture. But, this also inevitably raises problematic associations with the idea, again, that these sites and cultural practices belong to Japan, or are part of what makes Japanese history and culture so vibrant, so significant, so valuable as “world heritage.” It raises awareness about these indigenous or minority peoples but it also helps advance or promote the colonizer – the Japanese state, the Japanese nation, and its cultural status or cultural agendas on the world stage. It elevates the Okinawans or the Ainu, but it simultaneously allows the colonizer nation to be elevated and celebrated as well, contributing to notions of Japanese benevolence or beneficience towards Okinawa and the Ainu, and/or notions that their struggles or experiences of discrimination are solely in the past.

Returning to the question of where Ainu artifacts should be displayed in the museum, I tried to think about comparative examples, and what might ring positive or negative to me about those. If we think about, for example, Hawaiian history or Hawaiian culture, I think the complexity, the difficulties, are evident there just the same. I don’t like to see Hawaiʻi erased, overlooked, ignored when talking about people or places or cultures of the United States. Because they are Americans, and being there is part of being in the US. If you say “life in the US is like X,” well, that only goes for some places and not others. And especially when so many on the conservative / Republican side of the scale insist on forgetting about or even denying the Americanness, the valid citizenship and valid Americanness, of people from Puerto Rico, Hawaiʻi, and elsewhere, it is important to assert clearly and strongly that this is America, too, and these people are Americans, too.

So I wouldn’t necessarily want to see Hawaiʻi excluded or omitted from some “American history” gallery. And quite frankly, if more Hawaiian art were included in American art galleries, I think that could be a pretty cool strong statement, much like the way the Brooklyn Museum includes so much African-American, contemporary Native American, and other artworks representing a very diverse United States.

Pacific Hall at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, a gallery focusing on Pacific Island cultures outside of Hawaiʻi.

But at the same time, can you imagine a Pacific gallery that’s missing Hawaiʻi, Tahiti, and tons of others because those are each represented in the American, French, etc. galleries? Nonsense. Can you imagine what a tiny, marginalized representation they would get, off in one corner? Don’t get me wrong, an exhibit on Francophone art, or art from the current or past French Empire, or an exhibit on the history of that empire, that really pays attention not only to the French perspective but also to the deep, rich, histories of Tahiti, Vietnam, North Africa, etc., could be fascinating. I certainly enjoyed seeing the Morocco sections of the Delacroix exhibit that one time I went to the Louvre, and I could easily imagine a corner on Gaugin and Tahiti within a more general “Art of France” gallery potentially being quite effective and interesting. But, to subordinate these vast cultures – cultures unto themselves, peoples with their own histories – into being some small marginal part of the history and culture of the peoples who colonized them? If that’s the only representation they’re getting in the museum, my thought is no thank you.

There is so much that can be explored and shown, so much to be shared, taught, conveyed, in a Pacific Islands gallery that highlights the interconnections between Pacific cultures as well as their incredible diversity.

And so, while I absolutely understand the criticisms of having the Ainu artifacts displayed so totally separately from the Japan gallery – and those are indeed valid criticisms, and I do think there’d be great value in having at least some of them displayed there, in the Japan gallery – I’m not sure it’s necessarily such an easy slam dunk to identify their placement alongside Native cultures of the Russian Far East and Alaska as colonialist or otherwise wholly problematic. The Ainu are their own people, with their own history and culture, and while it is certainly valuable and important to emphasize their modernity and their membership in Japanese society – that they exist, that they are Japanese citizens, too, and that their presence and voices matter; that they are no less Japanese citizens, no less members of Japanese society than anyone else – at the same time, I think it’s important to be wary of the ways in which we might inadvertently lend credence to narratives which overlook or erase the coloniality of the situation, and which use Ainu and Okinawan bodies, artifacts, histories, practices to raise up the Japanese nation, Japanese history, Japanese culture – in short, “Japan” – essentially allowing “Japan” to take credit for and gain the benefit, in terms of cultural prestige, for that which, to put it bluntly, the Empire of Japan stole by force.

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How Do We Do Better?

Way back in 2014, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco invited artist Chiraag Bhakta to produce an installation artwork for their exhibit on Yoga. The piece, which Bhakta ended up calling #WhitePeopleDoingYoga, was meant to critique the colonization and appropriation of Indian culture.

Right: A sign at the San Francisco airport.

This past October, Bhakta wrote in a Mother Jones article entitled The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” about the museum seeking to appropriate, whitewash, and “dilute” his installation. In the piece, he indicates that lead curators, education staff, and others expressed that “they wanted something innocuous like #PeopleDoingYoga, without the word “white,” because the term “white people” could be “offensive” to museumgoers, donors, and staff. During our initial meetings at the museum, they told me to “turn down the volume” of my critique.” They also suggested that he eliminate a “shrine” Bhakta had designed in which white people would occupy the spaces that should belong to Hindu deities. Mother Jones’ editors indicate that “museum reps acknowledge[d in communications with the magazine] that there had been misgivings over the title and the installation in general, which they emphasize was intended to be “educational” rather than artistic.”

Bhakta goes on to talk about how Avery Brundage, the International Olympics Committee figure whose collection is at the core of that of the Asian Art Museum, was a horrific anti-Semite and racist. He writes that Brundage:

was “the preeminent American apologist for Nazi Germany,” in the words of author Jeremy Schaap. In the ’60s, the Olympic Committee for Human Rights, a group protesting racism in sports, demanded Brundage’s removal as the Olympics president. The committee had exposed his ownership of a country club in California that excluded Jewish and black people from its membership. In response to a potential boycott by black athletes of the 1968 Olympics, Brundage notoriously said, “They won’t be missed.” (He had been instrumental in preventing a US boycott of the so-called Nazi games in 1936.) Brundage was “a racist down to his toes,” said Lee Evans, an American sprinter on the 1968 Olympic team. “A brutal, racist pig,” said a teammate, Marty Liquori. A “Jew hater and a Jew baiter,” was the verdict of Gustavus Town Kirby, delivered in a 1936 letter to Brundage himself.

As a Jew, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, but also simply as an American and as a human being, I am appalled to learn of Avery Brundage’s politics. And in light of this, appalled that the Asian Art Museum continues to have his bust and his picture and his name plastered all over the place.

This debacle over #WhitePeopleDoingYoga is far from an isolated incident. It is far from the first time that the Asian Art Museum and other major museums have made problematic decisions, done problematic things, have failed in their duty to lead and to educate. When it comes to engaging with other cultures (and with our own), museums should represent the best of us. They should be the ones to educate us about the problems of our wrong thinking, and to lead us into new understandings. Articles like these are an indictment of so much that is so wrong within the museum world, and it is so important that these things are critiqued and brought to light.

The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, in 2011.

Still, while articles like these, which say “you” or “they” ought to do better, ought to do different, are exceptionally valuable and important in their way, I cannot help but wonder where are the articles that say “how can we do better?” It’s one thing to say “Brundage was a Nazi apologist, a horrible person, and it’s offensive to have his name and face so ever-present in this space.” But it would be quite another to have an article that actually engages with this issue in a complex way: if Brundage is so horrible, then what’s the right way, what’s the best way, to address this? Do we take down all reference to him in the museum? Or would that just be setting the museum up for accusations of trying to hide or bury unsavory history and uncomfortable truths? Do we try to do the reverse, putting up more text (perhaps displayed prominently in the main lobby or near the entrance), more descriptions and explanations of who he was and why he was a horrible person, providing context and explaining definitively that the museum denounces such racist and antisemitic views, but then providing some kind of justification for keeping and using the collection anyway, to use it for progressive, educational, restorative purposes with aims of cultural/social justice? Or is the whole thing just so tainted that the best thing to do is to sell off or otherwise dispose of the collection entirely? It’s easy to point fingers, but as someone deeply interested in the museum world, who has devoted pretty much his entire adult life to the study of East Asian cultures and the pursuit of a career in that field, and as someone who cannot help but to be white but who wants to do the right thing when it comes to these sorts of issues and problems, we need to be discussing not only problems but also solutions. What are the solutions?

The Enola Gay on display at the National Air & Space Museum annex, with barely any context around it. A compromise.

The same goes for the matter of museums having to contend with the real or imagined demands of trustees, donors, and other stakeholders, and with the real or imagined expectations and attitudes of museumgoers (i.e. the public), not to mention the way the museum is represented in the media and seen or known or understood by the public more widely, i.e. even amongst those who aren’t regular museumgoers. I have heard countless anecdotes of tensions between curators and education department staff, or between curators and trustees, directors, etc., regarding exactly the same types of issues as are raised in this piece. Some people may find it offensive; some people might not understand the nuances/complexities of the message here; many people just want their stereotypical understandings reinforced. We’ve seen this when it comes to national(ist) American narratives about Pearl Harbor¹, Hiroshima^{1, 2}, and the Wild West¹ – the incredible pushback and difficulty that museums get when they dare to question the standard narrative on these events/periods and to offer alternative perspectives (i.e. those of the Japanese, or of Native American Nations, not to mention the Hawaiian people). But then we’ve also seen the criticism the museums get from people like the author here, when museums give in to that pressure, at all, when they compromise on a radical/ progressive/ antiracist/ anticolonial approach, and perhaps rightly so. I’ve heard of outside curators getting incredible pushback from museums when trying to bring a feminist critique to the Japanese “pictures of the floating world” genre which so romanticized the so-called “pleasure quarters” (read: brothel districts) of early modern Japan, and when trying to challenge the positive spin on samurai as cool, honorable, heroic, cultured, peaceful – trying to show how they were, in fact, warmongers. Audiences wouldn’t like it. It’s too shocking to their expectations. People come to the museum to relax, to enjoy, and to appreciate beautiful things, not to be attacked for their beliefs, attitudes, understandings. … Okay, so we know the problem. But instead of just pointing fingers and saying “white people,” how do we actually contend with this? Is the correct answer that museums should simply tell it as it is, hold nothing back, shove the antiracist / anti-colonial truth in people’s faces, like a giant middle finger to all the racists? Perhaps. Should museums boldly expel any staff or board members who are pushing stereotypical, culturally appropriative, colonialist approaches and practices, no matter how difficult that makes things for the museum financially or logistically? Perhaps.

But I’d love to see these things actually discussed, considered, rather than just boldly asserted. What is the right way forward? What is the best way to address these cultural, political, racial matters in a way that considers curators, museum staffers, etc. not as enemies or opponents, not as upholders of “white supremacy,” but as sympathetic human beings who are trying to do their best within a complicated circumstance of competing pressures and logistical challenges? How can “we” as artists, scholars, museumgoers, and museum professionals – not “us” (people of color, outsiders to the museum, critics) vs. “them” (the museums), but “we” as a single group of people with shared interests and attitudes – work together towards shared goals, to face these challenges, and to do better?

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Royal Ontario Museum

The Royal Ontario Museum

Visited the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto the other day. It’s an incredible museum, spanning not only history and art, but also natural history, and covering a considerable number of cultures. As with the British Museum, I really appreciated that the focus wasn’t exclusively on art as it is at so many US museums – on highlighting style, creativity, and beauty – but rather incorporated some treatment of the fuller cultures and histories of different peoples or different parts of the world. A special exhibit on ancestor worship and Chinese New Year absolutely featured beautiful objects, and some great videos and displays of how woodblock printing is done; indeed, I think I learned more about Chinese woodblock printing from this exhibit than I ever did in all my art history courses. It also included sketchbooks and other materials for how artists produced ancestor portraits – helping us to understand a bit more concretely or tangibly that artists produced portraits of clothed bodies in a relatively undifferentiated, non-personalized fashion, and then merely added in the more individualized depiction of the clients’ late loved one. But this exhibit was not strictly, or even primarily, about “art”; it was about ancestors and gods, about practices and customs, about traditions and beliefs, and I really learned something.

Going back downstairs to the regular permanent exhibition galleries, I found a China section that was particularly impressive. It begins with massive architectural elements and sculptures from a late Ming / early Qing dynasty tomb such as I have never seen at any other museum, and would not expect to see anywhere else outside of actually visiting China. This was wonderful – I am always on the lookout for the biases of what we think we know about a culture or a place, or how we envision it, based on the skewed body of materials available to us, as a result of the vagaries of what our museums have and have not collected and displayed (alongside myriad other aspects of media and popular culture, etc.). When all you know of China is paintings, pottery, lacquerwares, and not so much the architecture, because architecture is so big and so difficult to have brought over (or reproduced, replicated) here, you get a different perspective. So, in short, to see these tomb elements was just incredible. I understand that the question of who brought them over and when and how and why, and hoping it was done legally and ethically and so forth is a whole other matter…….. but, as a museum visitor, it was impactful.

A stone gate and altar table from the tomb of Zu Dashou (d. 1656), a Ming general who fought in the defense of the northern frontiers of the realm against Manchu invasions in the 1630s to early 1640s.

This focus on a broader approach to culture and history, and not only to “art” also meant that I got to see a few oracle bones, more so than I think I’ve ever seen before unless I’m misremembering, prominently displayed and with the inscriptions on them clearly visible. A small set of displays also featured “Chinese inventions,” providing visitors a very brief introduction to Chinese compasses and sundials, gunpowder weapons, and printing technology, things that an art museum like LACMA or the Metropolitan would likely generally skip over, except where it would fit into a fairly standard, mainstream, art historical narrative.

Two more things struck me about the ROM’s China galleries. One, they are filled primarily with tomb goods from the Han and Tang dynasties (among others), aweing in their sheer numbers and diversity. I’m not sure I can quite put my finger on it, but there was something about the way they were displayed that made them seem quite vibrant and interesting, not like the dry, old, feeling one can sometimes get about ancient archaeological finds. The richness and dynamism of these ancient periods came through, very much so.

Secondly, even if only in this and that corner of the exhibit, the ROM highlighted the ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of premodern China in a way few other museums do. The many cases of Tang dynasty ceramics of course gave this sense, with their ceramic figurines of bearded Central Asian merchants and travelers on camelback and so forth, and accompanying labels discussing the Silk Road and the multi-ethnic character of the Tang period. Another case, situated amidst the Song dynasty section, also displayed a number of Liao (Khitan) objects, and took explicit time and space to introduce visitors to the Khitan people (Liao dynasty) who ruled over part of “China” for a time, and their culture.

Above: a 17th c. Torah case from the Kaifeng synagogue in lacquered wood.

Perhaps most striking and incredible to see was a section dedicated to (a small portion of) the history of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in China. I do wish they might have spent a bit more time on the Hui, Uyghurs, and/or other groups within China. The way it was presented here – including also the display of a number of Tang dynasty figures of “foreigners” – seemed to be like a narrative in which “Muslims” are a single type of outside foreign person, who came to China like immigrants or expats. And while that may have been true in certain senses, e.g. the Muslim Indian Ocean merchants and Silk Road merchants who set up mosques in places like Xian and Guangzhou, there are also these vast regions of what is now included within the western portions of PRC territory, where distinct peoples such as the Uyghurs have always lived and have always practiced their own particular culture… It’s a rather different thing from the case of the Kaifeng Jews. It’s one thing to say that historically there were some mosques and churches here and there, and even a synagogue, and it’s quite another to acknowledge that there are entire Muslim peoples, entire regions, that were absorbed by China, and that could (and should!) constitute an entire exhibition unto themselves.

But, even so, to see this many artifacts and images relating to the history of Jews in Kaifeng is something I have positively never seen at any other museum, especially not within the context of a regular permanent exhibit on China. I did see a beautiful Torah scroll from Kaifeng once, on silk, on display at the British Library, but this was part of a special exhibit on Bibles and Qurans from around the world, and not one on cultural diversity in China. The ROM’s exhibit includes not only a text page in Hebrew, but also a cylindrical wooden Torah case such as is typical among Mizrahi/Sephardic communities, a stone drain mouth from the Kaifeng synagogue (est. c. 1163, destroyed c. 1850), and a rubbing from a stele which used to stand at the synagogue, along with a number of objects relating to Islam in Xi’an and elsewhere, and to Nestorian Christianity.

Joseon dynasty helmets, one from the Imjin War of the 1590s, and two from the 19th century.

The Korea section of the galleries was likewise larger than I might have expected, and included a somewhat broader range of objects than I have seen elsewhere. While both the Korea and Japan sections included only a disappointingly small number of works of painting, they did include a set of images of Joseon dynasty royal processions (something I have only previously seen at the San Francisco Art Museum, and at museums in Seoul) and a small section on the history of Korean printing, something I have not seen emphasized or highlighted elsewhere at all.

Finally, while I have certainly seen many art history museums and art history textbooks & courses make mention of the Imjin Wars (Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea in the 1590s) for their significance for the history of Japanese ceramics, I don’t believe I have ever seen any museum outside of Korea feature helmets, weapons, or armor actually used in those battles. Actually, I’m trying to remember now if I’ve ever seen Korean arms or armor on display at the Met at all. So this, too, was really something enjoyable to see.

“A Mohawk Family Group” diorama, revised from old (orientalist) museum practices to better represent First Nations people as contemporary, modern, human beings – members of society – and not objects of anthropological study or curiosity.

Of course, I was not surprised at all that the First Nations galleries at the ROM would be rather well-done. They’ve brought in Native curators and consultants to help ensure that First Nations cultures and history are portrayed in a way which First Nations people would want them to be shown, and they incorporate not only aspects of traditional culture but also contemporary arts and culture. They show clearly and boldly that First Nations people and their culture do not only belong to the past, but that they are also fully modern, just as much a part of the modern world as anyone else.

I very much enjoyed seeing this, and wish I’d had the time to view the entirety of the First Nations gallery – we saw it only at the end, before we had to end up leaving to head out. But I also enjoyed, as we saw in the China and Korea galleries as well, that the ROM focused not only on Native American / First Nations arts, craft, and “culture,” but also on these peoples as fully enmeshed as actors in history. We saw extensive displays on the role of First Nations peoples in the War of 1812 and in treaties, alliances, and other relations with European settlers across the 17th-19th centuries, in addition to displays of canoes, clothing, weapons, and other items, and displays of contemporary artworks relating to issues of suffering, settler colonialism, forced assimilation, and so forth.

And all of these exhibits, from the East Asia galleries to the First Nations ones, all look (at least at first glance) quite contemporary, quite newly done or newly redone. While I can’t necessarily speak in a more intricate way as to precisely how they were or were not following the latest newest innovative or best practices of Museum Studies, they certainly did not feel old, outdated, in need of renovation, at all. One critique my father pointed out in the vein of exhibit design, however, was that the gallery labels in the First Nations gallery in particular very often had far too much text, often in too-small font, and occasionally the labels themselves were located far back in the displays, making them especially difficult to read. My father simply flat-out could not read many of these labels, even with his reading glasses, and I had some difficulty as well.

That one critique aside, what a wonderful museum. I hope I get to come back and see it again sometime.

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Oceania

I was very glad for the coincidental good timing that I got to be in London to see the Oceania exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts. I had read online about this being the largest Oceanic Art exhibit ever held in the UK, so I was quite excited. And it was, indeed, an excellent exhibit, though not quite as large in the end as I might have expected. If this was the largest ever held, that’s not really saying much for all the previous ones.

Still, I think it was really a privilege to get to see it. The show opened with a video by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a spoken word and performance artist from the Marshall Islands, whose performance put me on the verge of tears right from the very beginning. I wonder how most other visitors received this, how it made them feel. Because I now have so much more background in this, I know a little more deeply what she’s talking about, and sympathize and resonate with it, at least a little more. In the video, she speaks of buying gifts for friends, of earrings and baskets, and telling her friends, when other people ask you about those items, tell them you got them from the Marshall Islands.

Tell them about our culture and our history.
Tell them about how the oceans are rising and our islands are flooding.
Tell them how we don’t want to leave.
Tell them we are nothing without our islands.

This set the tone for me, as if it were an exhibit of a vanishing race, so to speak. Even as I know better, that Pacific Island peoples are (for now) very much alive, that their traditions and culture and contemporary identity are very much alive and current, not belonging only to the past, even so, this set a certain tone, making me think of as if, what if the oceans do keep rising and the islands do disappear, and what if someday not so long from now, these treasures become emblematic representative examples of a much diminished greatness that once was? Some of the only things to survive from a myriad of cultures spanning a vast ocean, which have disappeared into that ocean?

While contemporary artworks were mixed in throughout, the core of the exhibit to my mind was the great many artifacts borrowed from across the UK, Europe, and beyond, representing cultures all across the Pacific and including many objects I might never otherwise see unless I visited Berlin, Vienna, and a half dozen other cities. Many were famous objects I’d seen in books or catalogs before, or objects of some great historical significance otherwise – such as the oldest extant pictorial depiction of a Christian house of worship by a Pacific artist; or sketches drawn by Tupaia, one of the very first Pacific Islanders to ever travel to (be brought to) Europe.

To see the Kūkaʻilimoku statue belonging to the British Museum, one of only three such large-scale Hawaiian kiʻi (tikis) extant in the world, was breathtaking. I had seen it before, at the Bishop Museum, elevated high up on a pedestal alongside its two brothers, in a most historic and powerful reunion of the three, returning two of them to the islands (from Salem MA and London) for the first time since the 18th or very early 19th century. But to see it more close-up, closer to ground level, now, was a real privilege. And I imagine that if I knew the backstories behind more of these objects I would feel similarly about more of them as well.

The exhibit was organized in part by Nicholas Thomas, unquestionably one of the leading Pacific scholars in the world, and had the involvement of Noelle Kahanu and Ty Kawika Tengan (two of the most prominent Native Hawaiian scholars active today), as well as Maia Nuku (Pacific Art curator of the Metropolitan Museum), and some other Māori scholars as well. And it was obvious from the labels and from the audio guide that the emphasis was being placed on Native cultures and Native perspectives, not on the history of “discoverers” or “discoveries.” I am sorry to say that no matter how you dress it up, I could only muster so much interest for fishhooks and spears and the like. But, even so, the fact that they were there, representing so many different Pacific cultures – not just the Sepik Valley over and over again as in the Met’s permanent collection galleries – were being described as to their treasured value within their cultures, and included some of the greatest such treasures of European collections, made them appeal nevertheless.

One highlight of the exhibit was the installation of Lisa Reihana’s “In Pursuit of Venus [infected],” a video art piece installed all along one very long wall of an entire room. Emulating a particular famous painting of European explorers viewing the planet Venus from Tahiti, the video is brilliantly designed to resemble a painting, but animated, with the figures within acting out numerous individualized scenes of European and Islander activities and interactions. Some more friendly and peaceful than others. These scenes are isolated, but interconnected. Here, a small group of islanders perform a hula or other sort of dance. Nearby, some sailors sing a sea shanty. Explorers take off layers of clothing and fan themselves as they look around at the scenery. Islanders pray, or gather for food. An explorer suddenly gets scared, and grabs his gun, pointing it in this direction and that. A native prepares and fires a sling. The gun goes off. A Native is killed. The sailor is all the more wary now, scared of what he’s done, and scared there might be more Natives around, coming for him. The video continues to slowly scroll, continually, such that each of these scenes, as they repeat or develop, gradually moves to the left and eventually off-screen, replaced by others. The music and sounds change depending on what is visible on-screen, from happy and sunny Native songs, bird tweets, and the sounds of the ocean to ominous, deep dramatic music, as skirmishes break out and people are killed. I had read about or seen stills or segments of this in the past, but had never seen the whole thing before. A wonderful precious opportunity.

A section of “Kehe Tau Hauaga Foou (To all new arrivals)” by John Pule, an artist from Niue. Look closer and you can see specific episodes from past and present.

The show closes with a last room featuring a few more traditional and contemporary pieces. One in blue and black and white, resembling at first glance the sketches of Tupaia, caught my eye. On closer examination, one sees the events of 9/11, and the ensuing mobilization of warplanes and tanks, dropping bombs on cities. One sees missiles, nuclear or otherwise, being preppred for launch. One sees people carrying away moai and other Pacific treasures. A beautiful and powerful piece.

In total, I suppose the exhibit covered X rooms (galleries), and felt to me like maybe about the same size as a Metropolitan special exhibit. Sizable, but not so incredible. I wonder, if we were to actually compare the number of objects or the number of galleries to, for example, the Silla exhibit at the Met, the Hawaiian Featherwork exhibit I saw at LACMA, or the much larger(-feeling) Pre-Columbian exhibit I saw at the Getty, how this would compare.
I did buy the catalog, though. While entrance to the exhibit itself was definitely overpriced at £15, especially compared to the British Museum being free, the catalog was very reasonably priced at £13. So I took advantage of that opportunity to buy a nice, big, full-color book.

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Back in London

Having finally finished with my posts on last summer’s stay in Turkey, I can move on to some of the other travels I was privileged to engage in this past year. In late November, I traveled to London to present at a conference, and jotted down the following notes/thoughts.

11/29/18

These last few days in London have been just wonderful. I guess maybe I don’t quite remember my last few trips to London too clearly (though I could just look them up in the blog), but somehow I think that maybe this time I’ve really felt that feeling of being able to come back, and wanting to come back.

Scones and tea at Gail’s Bakery in Exmouth Market. Sometimes the simplest things are the greatest highlights of a trip.

I think getting my SOAS Alumni card made a big difference. I don’t know why I never tried to look into that possibility earlier. Having a card and being able to go in and out of the campus as I wished, and to use the library, as well as meeting up with one of my SOAS professors from many years ago not in an intimidating student-teacher sort of way but in a laidback, friendly, collegial sort of way, really helped I think. It made me feel welcome and to feel like I have a place here (that is, on previous trips perhaps I felt like SOAS was no longer a place for me, no longer a place where I belonged). Meeting up with (just a very few) friends and professors, even though I didn’t really get out into the city all that much, and certainly didn’t really do any super extensive touristy exploring or anything, I dunno, somehow I just really felt like I was on top of things, knew what I was doing for a change. By which I mean to say, yes, I did have a ton of false starts, wasted a lot of time going to the British Library only to find I couldn’t get anything done there, walking around looking for a cafe or restaurant that suited what I was in the mood for at that time, only to end up at a Cafe Nero, but, still, overall, I feel like I settled in, however briefly, to a routine, to a life, as if I were to be staying here longer. I visited a few museums, went out to a few restaurants, but also spent some considerable time just walking around or sitting in UofL student spaces, having a drink or a sandwich and getting a little work done, not feeling too out of place.

The Junior Common Room (JCR) at SOAS.

SOAS is an interesting place. Many of the students – or, at least the ones who most make themselves heard – are super activist liberal, to an extent that often rubs me the wrong way. Crazy ideological, without the nuance and complexity that comes with further age and experience.

But at the same time, it is so inspiring and interesting to be in a place where everyone around you is a non-Western specialist. Where people are actively and passionately engaged in studying everything from Kurdish language to Senegalese music to Burmese politics to Tongan economics. Where the entire library and not just some corner of it, is organized into Africa, Asia, Pacific, etc. And where most of the signs and flyers on the walls, and the books in the bookstore, are non-western, decolonial, culturally oriented, with true serious diversity unlike you ever see in a US institution’s library. Incidentally, SOAS Library is currently being threatened by terrible budget cuts. See here for information on the latest developments, and on what you can do to help.

Opening slide for a wonderful presentation by Gaylen Vankan, on a 1526 series of depictions of Turkish (Ottoman) warriors on horseback.

The Perceiving Processions symposium I was in London to attend was wonderful. I suppose that in the end I am afraid I must admit that, as almost always is the case, I sadly did not actually come away with any new insights, new methodologies, that might truly inform my research/writing going forward. I had hoped for some new insights into how we talk about processions as performative acts, as acts that actually function in some fashion to make meaning through the unique qualities of processions as a particular form of display and action. But, nevertheless, it was a lot of fun, met a lot of great people, and got some surprisingly interested excited reactions. I half expected that as the only East Asianist on the docket, people would largely just ignore me, taking my work as a curiosity but as something outside of the much deeper, more involved and engaged conversations they would want to have with one another, with their fellow Europeanists. But during the first coffee break after my talk, and to a certain extent throughout the entire rest of the day, multiple people kept wanting to talk to me, which was really something. Many of the other presentations were also really interesting, working on really interesting topics, with beautiful or otherwise really engaging sources.

One on a series of tapestries depicting Congolese royalty as Brazilian kings, in a sort of pastiche of Dutch Brazilian tropical Empire – I had no idea that there was a Dutch Brazil, or that Congolese courts or polities sent any kind of formal embassies. Not to mention the fact that the only place where this set of tapestries is still displayed in full, in order, is at the Knights of Malta Council Chamber, on Malta. The incredible degree of internationality of these topics is stunning.

Matthew Gin presented on rituals in which a Spanish princess was sent over to France to marry a French prince – a tiny island in a river between Spain and France still remains today shared between the two countries. And at that time, temporary ceremonial buildings were erected, to receive the Spanish princess and to convey her into her new life in France in a manner which ceremonially treated both countries as equals. Neither the Spanish nor the French side of the building was larger than the other, or raised up higher, or anything like that – in order to help ensure ritual equality between the two sides. As an architectural historian, he found records of these temporary buildings and reconstructed some notion of the effects or implications of that design, as well as considering the ceremony itself, though he has no pictorial representations at all of those ceremonies or their associated processions. Interesting too, that he noted that even as these Spanish princesses went and took on roles/positions within the French court, they were always considered foreigners, “of Spain,” and thus took on an identity much like the island itself – ambiguous and in-between, not fully belonging to either country.

Visit of Albrecht Dürer in Antwerp in 1520, Jan August Hendrik Leys, 1855, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, 2198. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Another presenter, Gaylen Vankan of the University of Liege, spoke of Dutch depictions of Ottoman riders, specifically Suleiman the Magnificent and several other figures on horseback accompanying him. Though often grouped together as a procession, these can also be taken to be five separate images of separate classes of Ottoman riders. The key point he made, which I thought was interesting, is that even as one would expect in the late 15th and 16th centuries that Europeans would see the Ottomans as a horrible, barbaric, non-Christian horde, a serious threat to Christendom (and that’s putting it mildly, even, considering the fall of Constantinople and the fall of so much of the Balkans to the Ottomans, all the way to the gates of Vienna) – and they are indeed depicted in that fashion in a great many works. And yet, in these works as well as in many others, the Ottomans are depicted with some considerable nobility – the artist obviously admires or respects them or at the very least finds something appealing about the aesthetics and style of their clothing and accoutrements.

Nicholas Crummey (Central European University) talked about a wonderful diary he had found in the British Library, by a member of a late 17th century British embassy to Ottoman lands. Though re-published several times and oft-cited, it would seem the original copy of this diary – complete with wonderful illustrations – is very rarely consulted. He showed us some great maps and illustrations that this figure, John Covel, drew, relating various aspects of his journey.

Inside at Gail’s in Exmouth Market.

But what I think I’ve really enjoyed the most these last few days has just been the nice little shops I’ve visited, and just the free sort of lifestyle. Even if it was super chain sort of shops like Cafe Nero, or eating out of a supermarket, it has that extra cultural cachet for me because it’s “foreign,” because it’s British or European. For the first two nights, the symposium put me up at a nice hotel just a very short walk from Russell Square station, pretty close to SOAS and to the areas I was familiar with but just different enough that I could feel I was exploring/experiencing something new. I missed breakfast in the hotel both mornings, which was a shame, because I was so jetlagged and basically just overslept both times. Well, on the day of the conference I didn’t oversleep, I just took too long to prepare and didn’t have time for a proper breakfast. So I just grabbed something at the Simit Sarayi across the street. This is (one piece of) what I’m talking about. Here’s a Turkish chain store, selling Turkish pastries and stuff – I’m not sure we have any Simit Sarayi in New York or LA, and if we have anywhere at all selling this stuff you really have to sort of search it out, whereas here in London, because Britain and Turkey are both in or on the peripheries of Europe, you can see this sort of intermingling of the stores. Anyway, sadly the food was not nearly as good as at even the Simit Sarayi in Istanbul, let alone the proper local places. But even so, it existed. The second morning, after the conference was over and I was free to be on my own time, I did sleep in, until like 10:30 or so – never got over jet lag the entire trip, so I’ve been sleeping from like 11pm or 12am until 2 or 3, and then being up until 5 or 5:30, and then sleeping until 10:30 or so…. But, on my way to SOAS or the British Museum or wherever it was, I found a wonderful little bakery called Gail’s. Which I’ve now learned also has multiple locations, but it doesn’t feel like a chain at all, feels like a nice cozy cafe like I might also expect to find in the Yanaka neighborhood of Tokyo, or in all sorts of other places (except, this one is more authentically British). I had a wonderful little breakfast, a real highlight of trip, haha, as I could imagine going back there or places quite like it regularly, if I were to be living here. I got a scone with jam and clotted cream, and a pot of English Breakfast, and honestly I could have just relaxed and stayed there all day, enjoying tea and pastries, the bright, airy, and relaxed background-conversations sort of atmosphere, putting me in a good relaxed mood to be productive on my computer.

I’m sure these kinds of places must exist somewhere in LA, but I would have to really seek them out, and drive to them. Unless you live in Santa Monica or certain other neighborhoods, in my very limited experience, I feel like there’s really nothing properly walkable in LA. No sense of a local neighborhood. If I were to live in Islington/Bloomsbury area, I could definitely imagine myself having breakfast at Gail’s and just settling in to work there on many days. Or even at Café Nero. Or at one of the UofL cafes. Any/all of these feel different than just going to a local Starbucks or whatever here in LA…

The Rocket. A pub near the British Library. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside, but certainly a familiar sight.

I once again made a trip to London during which I barely got out of the Islington/Bloomsbury sort of area, but, this time I’m not feeling down about it at all. When I first relocated from the hotel to the AirBnB, I was feeling a little bummed out, kicking myself for booking a place here in this same neighborhood rather than getting out to explore the rest of the city at all. And, sure, who knows what kind of experience I might have had if I did stay in an entirely different, new, neighborhood. But, it really worked out just fine. I did not allow myself to get stuck going up and down the same streets or areas that I already know have been a bust in the past, and actually by walking just a little bit off my own personal well-beaten track, walking south to Exmouth Market and then west towards the British Museum rather than going straight back to King’s Cross and Euston and Gray’s Inn Road and whatever else I’m already too familiar with, I made it a new experience.

I just love these little market streets, lined with cute little shops. I loved Gail’s, and I can easily imagine if I were living here to either go back there regularly or to explore other shops up and down and in neighboring streets and so forth. I also happened upon Judd Books again, a small but really good little used book store right near SOAS and UCL; the SOAS on-campus bookstore also, though extremely small, has a good selection of things, obviously, since it’s all the books that SOAS professors are assigning for their classes. And some “random” stuff that I wouldn’t expect to be able to find anywhere else, like CDs of the London Uyghur Ensemble for one quid.

And though I pretty much only got out of this neighborhood to meet up with a friend for pizza near All Soul’s Church (near Oxford Circus), to go to the Royal Academy of Arts (near Picadilly Circus), and to have dinner and drinks with a professor out near Borough Station (near London Bridge), and didn’t really see or explore the city at all, somehow that just really felt like enough. I think having a SOAS alumni card and being able to get into the campus, not feeling like I had nowhere to be allowed to belong, made all the difference. I didn’t need the card at all to get into the Institute of Education pub, or for that matter the Brunei Building, or half the times I tried the Senate House, but, still, I dunno, for whatever reason, sitting around on or near campus and pretending like I was actually based at SOAS for the week, it just really worked. Go to the campus bar, sit and pull out your computer and get some work done. Go to the library. Use the old shortcuts you remember to go through Senate House to the side entrance of the British Museum rather than going all the way around. Visit Judd Books.

SOAS Main Building, with its statue of Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar.

I think meeting up with one of my SOAS profs, and with another scholar who he had put in touch with me, really helped too. Maybe my experiences in Japan these last few years, and at UCLA too, have helped me too, to develop a much greater familiarity with the identity of being an outsider who’s come to use the library, or to have a meeting, or whatever. Even though most Japanese universities do have security gates for their libraries – turnstiles or gates that won’t even let you into the building at all without a library card or whatever – number one, if you just ask and explain that you’re a visitor and fill out a tiny bit of paperwork, they’ll typically let you in, and two, I think every other campus I’ve ever been to has let me walk in and walk around campus without anyone checking or asking. Okinawa University of the Arts in particular comes to mind – I’ve been there quite a few times now, either to use the library or to visit with a professor there. And no one asks me questions, no one looks at me funny. The first time I went, I asked at the desk before trying to get through the gate, explained that I’m a visitor, and they just said sure, go right ahead, without any need for any paperwork or guest visitor badge or anything. And so I used the library database on my own computer, found the books I wanted on the shelves, asked when I needed help, did my own photocopying… and left, and came back another day. Anyway, the point being that I’ve grown used to feeling like that person. I’m no longer the awkward alumnus or total outsider who is worried what am I even doing here, what am I trying to get out of this, what kind of nostalgia am I trying to claim; I no longer feel like an invader in other students’ space. Maybe that just comes with age as well. Because instead of feeling like some kind of intruder or impostor compared to these real (current) SOAS students, who have some kind of more real claim to the space than me, I feel like an alumnus, who has already been affiliated and associated with the place, however loosely, to be honest since most of the current students were still in primary or middle school, and I feel like a scholar – I wouldn’t call myself “experienced” or “established,” but still, a stage or two beyond these undergrads and study abroad and Master’s students. I don’t feel threatened by them.

At the SOAS Student Union Bar.

Much of campus is much how it always has been, I suppose. To be honest, I don’t remember it all that clearly, to know whether or not the hallways or the library has changed at all. Though I can imagine that at the very least the technology of the library probably has changed. And I know the pub was redone since I’ve left. Though, SOAS has also expanded into Senate House, so they have this whole new “Paul Webley Wing,” which I imagine has a lot of classrooms, offices, etc. Super high-tech-looking meeting rooms or study rooms which I suppose you can reserve, and the touch-screens outside each room show a clock in green or red which I guess means it’s either available or not, or that your time has come up or not? From what little I was able to access, I mostly just saw a big very new-looking, very clean and bright and nice-looking atrium. Beautiful gathering / studying spaces. And, of course, having a SOAS Alumni card now was a crazy breath of fresh air, as I said, since I was able to get into these spaces, and to not feel like I was unwelcome or denied or un-belonging. Though, frankly, I’m really not sure what I think about limiting these spaces to SOAS students. I mean, I suppose I understand that with so many other colleges in the area, if it were left totally free and open it would be too easy for the place to become overrun with students from UCL and elsewhere, and it would be much harder for any of the spaces to develop or maintain a distinctly SOAS character – and thus, for the School as a whole to build or maintain quite as much of a strong sense of community. So, that’s all important and valid; I can very much see the strengths of that. But, at the same time, I really appreciated when I was at SOAS getting to go to the Institute of Education cafeteria next door, the Senate House cafe, and the pub down the street (is that part of Birkbeck? I was never sure). Even if not to actually mix with students from other Schools, to have more additional different spaces to choose from, and perhaps most importantly just to not feel shut-out. I’m not saying that any of these schools have such great, amazing, fancy cafeterias or pubs or whatever, that we are (or would be) being denied access to the “nice” pub or whatever. But, just for the sake of variety. Of course I don’t want to see the SOAS pub overrun with anyone and everyone, but I also hate the idea that I wouldn’t be able to go and experience that, intermingle even a little bit, if I were a student at one of the neighboring colleges. I wonder, I don’t actually remember if it came up while I was there, if SOAS students wanted to bring their UCL or LSE friends in to have a drink together, if the guards would block them. Because that would really suck. Anyway, maybe it’s me personally, I don’t know, but I really do have a thing about access and about belonging. I hate being treated like I’m not allowed in somewhere. Even in visiting the SOAS library’s Special Collections earlier today, I tried to ask about how the process worked, whether I could just request items or whether there was a long and complicated approval process, and the librarian said “can you identify yourself? I mean, who are you, where are you coming from?” I sense that maybe English isn’t her first language, and more to the point maybe she just wasn’t choosing her words very carefully in that moment – I certainly don’t always say exactly what I mean, in exactly the best way, and so I give her the benefit of the doubt. But, still, I’m a SOAS alumnus, and even if I wasn’t, I’m a University of California graduate student, and even if I wasn’t, I’m someone coming in to try to use your Special Collections. I suppose I can understand that if I truly were just some person from off the street, some random person, then, *maybe* there’s some call to say who is this person. But I should like to think that many (if not most) librarians at many (if not most) other institutions would simply assume that the person asking is probably some kind of legit academic. I just really hate gatekeeping. Don’t ask me to “identify myself” as if I’m already an intruder until I prove otherwise. Don’t treat me like I’m not welcome, like I don’t belong. Give me the benefit of the doubt, assume that I am a legitimate researcher, assume that your own job is to help provide access for researchers rather than to block it. Rather than the first step being to challenge a person coming in, under the assumption that they can’t be granted access, assume they can, and make your very first step starting to help them with the right paperwork or whatever. “May I see your SOAS ID, or your ID from your institution?” “Oh, I see you’re a SOAS alum. Okay, you have X and Y privileges but I’m afraid if you want to do Z, that’s restricted (or, then you’ll have to fill out this additional form).” or “Oh, I see you’re from the States. Okay, well for visiting researchers from outside of the U of L, we have these forms that you have to fill out.” Something like that. And then you welcome them. Just like being granted a Reader Card at the British Library. Just like when UCLA granted me a library card so I could borrow books (but not have certain other privileges) even though I’m a UCSB student. Just like when prefectural and national and local archives and libraries as well as university libraries all across Japan let me in as a guest, and allowed me X but not Y level of access, or whatever it may be.

Anyway, sorry for that rant.

Hoa Hakananai’a (‘lost or stolen friend’), one of the many iconic objects in the British Museum. A moai ancestor figure from Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

The British Museum

I’m not sure I have too much to say about the British Museum that I haven’t said before. I love how they use objects to tell a fuller story about culture and history, and not just artistic style or aesthetic form, and that they do include things that are historically significant (and often quite beautiful), and not only things that fall into a more mainstream “art” sort of category. I don’t even mean historical artifacts without much artistic value (whatever that even means); I mean genuinely beautiful, skillfully-made, art objects that happen to also allow one to speak of their content, of what they depict or how they were used… And, I love that the museum is so extensive!! I mean, I was a little surprised to learn that they don’t actually have a gallery for Musical Instruments, or for Arms & Armor, as the Met does. There are certainly categories for which they don’t have much on display, I suppose. (And, actually, Chinese painting in particular, is oddly sparse, given that they have a huge permanent exhibit of Chinese history from ancient through modern, featuring mostly ceramics, sculptures, I’m not sure exactly what else off the top of my head, but then only a very few paintings?) But, they do have a whole gallery of clocks, and a whole gallery of the history of coinage from around the world, not to mention the Enlightenment Gallery which is just really wonderful.

I was a little bit hoping I might happen upon a protest by Rapa Nui people demanding their ancestor moai back. One of the most iconic, famous objects in the Museum’s collection – its fame aided by the fact that it’s right there in front of you when you walk into the Wellcome Gallery right off the main atrium – the statue is a sacred object for the people of Rapa Nui, an embodiment of a specific individual ancestor, and as some articles I read put it, how would you like it if people busted into your home and took your grandfather and put him on display in a museum?

Well, in any case, I had heard that there were supposed to be some kind of in-person protests. Whether that would (or could) take place right there in the gallery, or when they would take place, the articles I read didn’t say. But if it did happen, it would have been good timing, a nice opportunity to catch the experience – and photos – of something I would otherwise only read about.
That didn’t happen. But, whatever.

I think one highlight of the BM during this visit was the new Islamic galleries. I really appreciated and enjoyed the way they incorporated all different parts of the Islamic world, with individual displays on the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Persia, Islamic North Africa, etc., covering the history of each different period and region. One thing I was a bit disappointed about, though, was the absence of discussion or representation of other peoples – yes, these are the “Islamic” galleries, but if you’re not going to include Sephardic, Mizrahi, Kurdish, Armenian, Coptic, etc cultures in these “Middle East” galleries, then where will you? Nowhere, it would seem. Maybe mixed in with Europe or Africa, but certainly not where you’d expect to find them, i.e. right here in the Middle East (“Islamic World”) galleries.

What’s really kind of funny also is that I even had moments this weekend when I thought I was kind of over London, or that London feels a bit too familiar already, now that I’ve lived in Istanbul. I certainly won’t say that I remember or ever really properly learned or adopted British ways of doing things. I’m still probably pretty blatantly visibly American in terms of the way I walk, the way I order at cafes and restaurants, all kinds of things. I’m still awkward at asking for “some tea” or “a tea,” not knowing whether I should be asking for “a pot of tea” or how people ask for it. Still fumbling with coins. Still sometimes not looking the correct direction or not knowing properly when I can and can’t cross. Nearly got hit by a car the other day, as he turned onto the small side street that I was crossing just not thinking not realizing that anyone might be turning into it. While it’s pretty cool that they have those yellow-lighted crosswalks where cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians even without any change of red/green, when it comes to crossing anywhere else, they really don’t stop for you. American drivers will get annoyed at you, often, or they just won’t even expect you or won’t see you, but generally speaking they know that once a pedestrian is in the road, whether they’re jaywalking or whatever, you have to stop for them. They have the right of way, actually, especially if they’re in a crosswalk. Doesn’t seem to be the same here.

But, all of that said, even so, even despite all the little cultural quirks that so frustrated and depressed me my first time in London, and even despite difficulties with language, the fact that my accent is noticeably decidedly different, and terminology is often different, and I don’t always actually know what others are saying (or they, me), even so, the fact that people speak English here as the truly primary language, as compared to negotiating with my minimal Turkish and other people’s varying range of English, or just regardless of other people, navigating myself with signs and posters in a foreign language, … I dunno, I just really enjoyed Istanbul. I don’t know how well I would have managed on my own; having Simone was extremely helpful. And I’m not saying I’m looking to just run off to anywhere, but, having now gained a certain degree of familiarity with Istanbul, having learned some very minimal level of Turkish, I dunno, London doesn’t feel adventurous enough anymore. Which is a terrible shame. Because I don’t want it to lose its appeal, or its magic. I don’t want to grow bored or uninspired by London. Even worse, I wouldn’t want to grow to dislike it, to have all the utterly mundane practical things start to ruin my feeling of the city.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, at the Royal Academy of the Arts.

For now, London still feels like an adventure. And I want it to still feel like that. Even the most basic things like Tesco sandwiches are for me cultural capital, they’re a feeling of knowing something, experiencing something, becoming familiar with something that I never had before. It’s being able to go back home and talk to people about … whatever it may be about London that reveals some (shared) familiarity, … Or, I don’t know, just to feel like I’m being or becoming my best self, like I’m living my best life. I’m not saying I necessarily want to live in the UK or Japan or anywhere else permanently, that’s too big a decision to make, just far too much too deep a matter in terms of both practical and other sort of considerations. But at the same time, there’s a part of me that just can’t help but feel like traveling less is somehow a failure, a failure to launch, as it were. When I did study abroad in Japan for the first time and felt like it might prove to be my one and only big trip in my life, and at that time I couldn’t have imagined that I’d end up living in Hawaii or California, or that I’d ever do half (or, any) of the traveling that I have since, … that feeling of coming back from Japan and not knowing if I ever would go back, and indeed I didn’t go back for a good four years, which felt like a pretty long time at the time … there’s a part of me that just really feels that even if I did settle in an exciting big world city like New York, that’s still going home, that’s still seeing an end – a failure – to all the traveling that I had done.

Anyway, London has its faults, to be sure, and I am sure that if I ever were to get a job in the UK and really spend a real amount of time here, I would come to feel all those flaws, and perhaps all the more so in a smaller city like Durham or Leeds or wherever. But, at least for now, it’s still an adventure. It’s market streets and Gail’s Bakery. It’s the Flat Iron Square / Food Arch area, with all these great little food stalls, some of them serving things like Turkish mantı which I’ve just never seen (or never known to look out for) in the States.

(4 May 2019)
I did, in fact, apply to quite a few jobs / fellowships in England this year. Didn’t get selected for any of them in the end, unfortunately. Strangely didn’t see a single job posting/advertisement for anywhere in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, though I would have jumped at that chance just as much. I don’t know why, maybe it had something to do with this London trip, but even all these weeks later I’m still really feeling that I would have so loved to live in Britain for a time. Who knows what’s going to happen with Brexit, of course, but that aside, as much as I **love** Japan, and much as I would have been up for whatever adventure the job market may have brought me – staying in LA, moving back to the East Coast, getting a teaching job at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest – I would have been up for that. But somehow, for whatever reason, I just find myself in a place right now where I just so wished I might have gotten a chance to move to England. Maybe sometime in the future…

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Topkapı Palace

One of the major gates within the Topkapı complex.

(Returning to my long-overdue posts on last summer’s travels…)

Topkapı Palace is an interesting place. Having missed it on my earlier trip to Istanbul, I was going to make sure to see it this time. I was especially interested because one piece of my research had been considering the physical layout and arrangement of the Shogun’s Grand Audience Hall (Ôhiroma) at Edo castle, in Japan, and I thought that Topkapı, as the palace of another great non-Western empire, could make for an interesting comparison. Or could provide insights that I just couldn’t get from the scholarship on Japan. Topkapı is also of interest for its extensive collection of Ottoman artifacts.

As it turned out, I am sorry to say I found the palace a bit of a disappointment. I think that if/when I go back, I’ll try to get a tour guide, hopefully someone who can give a fuller explanation of how the rooms were used, why they were arranged the way they were. It’s an incredible, very impressive set of spaces, no doubt, and many of the rooms are lavishly, very impressively decorated with tile and so forth. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Very palatial, and in a distinctly Ottoman way; this was an earlier palace, quite unlike what I imagine Dolmabahçe Palace – inspired by Versailles, and by the modern/Western trends and pressures of the 19th century – looks like.

But, sadly, I really didn’t get a sense from the map pamphlets, or from the plaques on the walls, how this palace was used in an administrative, governmental, or ritual way, so much as just a focus on its artistic beauty, craftsmanship, and the lavish lifestyle of the sultan.

The Inner Palace Library of Ahmed III.

The collection was interesting, though frustratingly they didn’t allow photos in most of the exhibition rooms. It was neat to see weapons and other historical artifacts directly associated with some of the most historically famous or significant sultans – objects not only beautiful in their craftsmanship and artistry, but of historical note as well, such as the sword of Mehmet II, or the sword and bow of Bayezid II. The palace collection also included a number of items from other cultures, many of which I imagine were formal gifts from foreign rulers or governments. This included a sword belonging to Stephan the Great of Moldavia, several *huge* Hungarian greatswords, and several Japanese swords. While one of the Japanese swords bears the imperial chrysanthemum on its lavishly decorated gilded scabbard with purple velvet ropes, the rest had ivory scabbards which looked to me, if anything, like export art, not imperial gifts. But, then, I could be wrong.

The “Inner Treasury” exhibit was… well, it was something. If I hadn’t been told about this ahead of time, I would not have expected Topkapı to house such a room of such absurdities. They claim to have the sword of King David himself, the turban of the biblical Joseph (Yusuf), the staff of Moses, and of course numerous relics of the Prophet Mohammed. King David, of course, having ruled sometime around the 10th century BCE, not only is it fully unbelievable that his sword – even assuming it survived at all – should be in such good condition, but further, whatever a 10th century BCE sword should look like, this one seemed far too similar to a medieval sword in style; clearly an absolute anachronism. The turban and the staff, similarly; I can’t judge style, but both lived many many many many generations before even King David. Wikipedia suggests that Joseph, if he did live, lived sometime around the 1500s-1440s BCE. Did people wear turbans back then? Of what style?

What’s the story behind these treasures, I wonder. When we’re they made, or obtained, and for what purpose? They’re so obviously fakes, what’s the point? Or, is it so obvious? I really wondered what so many of the tourists around me, Christians and Muslims most of them, what they thought about all of this. How many see them as real religious relics, as something they’ve been so honored to get to see?

Since I don’t have any photos of the Inner Treasury, something completely different. A gate known as the Sublime Porte, a metonym for the Ottoman government as a whole.

Another set of very interesting and much more plausible artifacts pertained to the Kaaba, the most sacred site in all of Islam. Located at the center of the most sacred mosque in Mecca, it is strikingly iconic for its relatively unadorned black square form, and for the masses of pilgrims regularly (constantly?) forming circles around it. It’s easy to think of Turkey as an outlier on the margins of the Muslim world – Turks aren’t Arabs, after all. And, to be sure, Turkish history and Turkish culture are distinct from that of the Arab Middle East in all sorts of ways. But, what I hadn’t known is that for centuries the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was regarded as the chief (or sole?) Caliph of Sunni Islam.

After the Ottoman conquests of much of the Middle East, the keys to the Kaaba (to open and close it at certain ceremonial hours of the day) were sent to Istanbul as symbols of the sultan’s authority over the administration of Mecca. When the Kaaba was in need of repair at one point in the 17th c., doors of the Kaaba were apparently sent to Istanbul. And a number of other treasures associated with the Kaaba are still held at Topkapı today. (Or at least, that’s what is claimed. After that last set of rooms, who knows what to believe.)

We learn that a stone supposedly placed by the prophet Abraham (Ibrahim) marks the location of the circumambulations, even if the Kaaba itself is damaged or under repair. This stone was damaged by catapult stones during the Umayyad siege of Mecca in 756, but was repaired with silver. It broke again in the 17th c, but the Ottoman sultan had it gilded and repaired with lead and silver.

We are also shown items claimed to be the swords and bows of the Prophet Mohammed himself. Hard to know what to think, but I suppose I could actually believe this, since they’re hidden underneath later scabbards and cases and so forth, and since Mohammed lived far more recently than, for example, King David or Moses. So, it could be. Of course, even so, it seems just a bit too unlikely for these things – and his beard hairs, teeth, etc – to have actually been passed down and passed down and never lost. Then again, it was the 7th c CE, not super ancient times. If Japan can retain things from such a time, then I suppose Islamic civilization could too… Even despite all the wars and conflicts, from one sultanate or caliphate to another. maybe? I wonder if any of my readers might happen to have insights on this?

In the very last room, we finally get to 16th c. objects – letters and documents from Sultan Selim, and a large royal banner. Much more believable.

The sultan’s breakfast pavilion.

I’m honestly not sure what I expected from visiting the palace. I guess I was hoping for something which might more explicitly compare to, for example, Edo castle or Shuri castle, so that I might find something interesting in similarities or differences in how foreign delegations were received, how court ceremonies were conducted, etc. But you get very little of that at most historical sites, actually, right? Shuri has models in the gift shop of New Year’s celebrations and investiture ceremonies, both of which (alongside live reenactment events and scholarship) have been very informative and inspirational for me, but the castle itself, in its explanatory plaques and such, doesn’t really give visitors all that much of a sense of it. And Edo castle, of course, has nothing at all, since the entire Honmaru – the main section of the castle, where the shogun’s audience halls, meeting rooms, administrative offices, etc. were located – burned down in 1863 and was never rebuilt. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, it is now just an open public park area, just grass, while most of the rest of the castle grounds is now the Imperial Palace and is off-limits to tourists. Thankfully, though, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, among other places, has models and other sorts of recreations of what had been. Nijô castle in Kyoto has been perhaps the best of the places I have visited, really talking about who would be received in which rooms etc., and even going so far as to display mannequins arranged in the main audience hall to show how lords would have been seated, and what the room really looked like when it was in use. But here at Topkapı most of the palace rooms have been converted into museum galleries, displaying paintings or arms & armor or religious relics of questionable veracity, so we don’t get as much discussion as we might of how ceremonies or court business was conducted.

Then again, it might be simply a matter of reading about it ahead of time. Had I read Gülru Necipoğlu’s book about Topkapı more extensively before going there, maybe I would have known what to look for better. Certainly it was because of my knowledge of Edo, Beijing , and Shuri, from a combination of experience and study, that I understood the Korean palaces (which I visited in June 2017 and realize now I still have never blogged about) better.

The exterior of the Imperial Council Hall. A plaque explains how the space would have been used, but that’s about it.

A few final notes, small things I found interesting.

One label in the Palace Kitchens section mentions a Polish page, Ali Ufki Bey (Albertus Bobovius). Apparently, according to Wikipedia, he wasn’t merely a page, but actually became one of the most prominent or influential musicians and dragomans (interpreters/guides) in the 17th century court. One wonders how common this was, and how diverse the court.

Some 4,000-5,000 people lived/worked at Topkapı in the 16th century, and the number rose to 10,000 in the early 17th. The palace chose the finest fruits, vegetables, meat, grains, etc from all incoming ships or caravans, before the remainder was allowed to go to the people of the city.

Tons of Chinese porcelains, celadons, etc. were used in the Ottoman court, alongside Persian ceramics, Turkish metalware, etc. I suppose I should not be surprised at this, but nevertheless it is interesting to see, firsthand, in person, the incredible extent to which Chinese goods (not ugly “export art” goods like we see in so many Western museums, but nice, good, blue and white porcelains) were integrated into the everyday courtly material culture. The newly reorganized Islamic Art galleries at the British Museum (which I would visit in November) reflected the same.

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Light and Shadow in Japanese Museums

A folding screen in the home of art collector Alex Kerr. I’m not sure exactly how it’s lit, but notice how the gold shines; it’s easy to imagine how this might have helped brighten a room when only natural light or candles were available.

In a recent article in the Nikkei Asia Review, Michael Dunn proposes that the lighting in Japanese museums is inexplicably arranged poorly, deadening the textures and reflectiveness of works and casting aspects of their shapes into shadow.

As he writes, Japanese art and design can be fascinating and enchanting in its myriad forms, from handscrolls and hanging scrolls to the most modern and postmodern designs. But that, according to him,

visitors to the country’s many museums may be less satisfied when they see traditional paintings, badly lit and often obscured by glass panels, which appear flat and boring compared to those they have seen in temples and palaces.

At the core of his argument would seem to be simply that works are regularly lit from above and not from the side, despite the fact that traditional works were nearly always designed to be lit by incidental sunlight or fire-light from the side and not from overhead, and despite the fact that they would look better that way (in terms of the way the gold-foil would catch the light, etc.). I’ll be honest, I never paid attention really to how works were lit; definitely something to start thinking about. But I did notice when visiting the Getty Museum recently here in LA how much the gold accents in their illuminated manuscripts shone, so much more brightly and more noticeably than in most other exhibits I’ve seen. Lighting or other factors were used very successfully to highlight the presence of such features. I also remember photographing Japanese woodblock-printed books as an intern at the Freer|Sackler Galleries, and how we used various camera angles and other techniques to capture the reflectiveness of mica, silver, and other materials on the pages, which would not otherwise show up in photographs, making the attractiveness of these works more directly visible to (digital) viewers.

I’m kind of amazed that a publication like Nikkei Asia Review would publish such a one-argument article on such a technical, niche, sort of issue.But I’m certainly interested to read such things, as I have long been interested in these sorts of museum-world considerations. Dunn goes on to complain that whenever he has brought up this issue with Japanese curators, they have simply insisted that their lighting system was state of the art – the implication being that they either don’t understand why there should be any problem with lighting things in this way, or that they’re dodging the question.

Screen painting of Nagasaki harbor, at the National Museum of Japanese History (Rekihaku). I have no idea if this is the best example, or how exactly this was lit, but notice how the gold seems flat, not shining at all. Perhaps this is what Dunn is talking about.

I think there’s a deeper and potentially quite interesting history to be uncovered here, which is going unspoken in this article. To what extent do display practices today in Japanese museums stem from the development over the last 120+ years or so of a particular modern tradition of museum practices, which is then adhered to? Regardless of how they were made, displayed, and viewed in the past, in the modern era it has come to be its own “tradition” that museum professionals always display folding screens /this/ way, and ceramics /that/ way, because that’s the right way, the professional way, the proper way, that museums do it. Something like that? And to what extent, I wonder, does this stem from the infiltration of Western ideas (or Japanese notions of/about Western ideas) of how art is to be displayed or appreciated?

One of the tokonoma at LACMA’s Japanese Pavilion, using natural light filtered through shoji screens to light the paintings. Not the most attractive photo, but…

In any case, with the example of gold-accented or gold-foil-backed paintings, “intended to gleam in the recesses of palaces and mansions, picking up available daylight — a magical property of gold — through white paper shoji screens, or lit by candles and paper lanterns at night,” there’s a give-and-take to be had, always. On the one hand, yes, lighting them more minimally so that the gold really shines, giving an impression of how they might have looked historically, is one way to go about it. Joe Price played some major role in having the Japanese Pavilion at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) designed to do just that. At LACMA, Japanese paintings are hung in (a modern stylized version of) the traditional tokonoma, and they are lit at least in part by sunlight filtered through white paper shôji screens. And it really is incredible to see such paintings in situ, at temples and palaces, to get a sense of how the artworks actually interacted with the space and with the people in it. This is part of what I love about certain works by Tim Screech, William Coaldrake, and others, who talk not just about the paintings themselves, their style, their composition, but about how works interacted with the environment around them. How they were used. To give one example, how fusuma and byôbu arranged behind or around a shogun or other lord within his audience halls augmented the sense of his prestige. But, this is an art museum, and as aesthetically impactful and intellectually meaningful as it would be to portray such things in limited lighting or even in an architecturally loyal manner, there will also be a great many visitors – from the most casual tourists to professional art historians – who will want to see the works as well-lit as possible, in as much detail as possible, so that they can appreciate the style, composition, and aesthetics otherwise of the object itself, in as fully visible a manner as possible.

I think that in museum display in general – whether in Japan or anywhere in the world – there is a balance to be struck between aesthetic impact (displaying things with a focus on their striking beauty) and other modes of display which might highlight the historical or cultural context, or which allow visitors to see the work more fully. There will always be multiple ways in which an object can be shown – as an aesthetic object vs. a practical one; emphasizing its original historical context vs. its provenance (the history of which/whose collections it’s been in); as a practical object vs. a religious/sacred one; as an object unto itself vs. as a part of a whole or of a grouping; and so on and so forth. There will always be visitors, scholars, trustees, and other “stakeholders” as they say, who will always want it to be some other way, but decisions have to be made, and you can’t please everyone. But, you can certainly give it consideration; and while most museum visitors might not think about it, lighting is most certainly one of those considerations.

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