Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States

Extract

This essay compares museum representations of WWII from Japan and the USA and discusses how museum curators responded to the changing international and domestic environment in their exhibits. The authors also identify challenges that museum curators in these countries have often faced. In Japan, for example, when the newly opened peace museums in Osaka, Kawasaki, Saitama, and Kanagawa began to depict Japan's role in the Asia-Pacific War from a critical angle by including photographs of the Nanking Massacre, they drew heated criticism from conservative nationalist groups. This in turn eventually led some of the museum curators to revise their exhibitions, while other museums like the Peace Osaka remained firm about keeping their original exhibitions. This kind of tension was also evident at the National Air and Space Museum in the USA, where the curators’ initial plans to display war artifacts such as the Enola Gay (the airplane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) had to be restructured to be more “American” due to pressure from veterans’ groups. What to display in exhibitions and how to display it are sensitive issues for museum curators, who are expected to serve racially and culturally diverse audiences, and this is one reason why the pedagogic role of the public museum has become increasingly challenging since the 1990s. The authors of this essay introduce the ways in which museum curators in these regions have developed their strategies to accommodate public demands in ways that contribute to a more inclusive environment.