No.020 - Interview Series “New Minpaku Director-General Kenji Yoshida”

Interview Series

Kenji Yoshida

Director-General, Minpaku

 

At the National Museum of Ethnology (“Minpaku”), Professor Kenji Yoshida began his term from April 2017 as the new Director-General, following the retirement of Ken’ichi Sudo who served in that position from the 2009 through the 2016 academic years.

Along with celebrating the 40th anniversary of its opening in 2017, Minpaku has also completed a comprehensive 10-year program of renovations of the permanent exhibitions in its main building. The President of the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU) asked the new Director-General about his vision regarding how to utilize the ethnographic resources which Minpaku has continuously accumulated (artifacts, audio-visual materials such as photographs and movies, research papers, etc.) to realize a so-called “intellectual forum” that will serve a great variety of people as an arena for intellectual exchange, discovery, and collaborative work.

Interviewer: Narifumi Tachimoto

President, National Institutes for the Humanities

 

1. Ambitions as the New Director-General

(Tachimoto) Professor Yoshida, since taking up your post as the new Director-General, you have conducted a completely new reorganization of the make-up of the research divisions, haven’t you?

 

(Yoshida) Yes, we have made it into an organization with four research divisions. The Department of Advanced Human Sciences provides leadership in theoretical research on the basic fields of human science, and the Department of Cross-Field Research takes as its base the fieldwork conducted in various regions worldwide while striving to establish anthropological regional research from a new perspective that transcends regions. These two are what we could call the basic divisions. Then as applied divisions, there are the Department of Modern Society and Civilization, which takes up the challenges humankind is facing from a diachronic viewpoint spanning man’s past and future, and the Department of Globalization and Humanity, which approaches these same challenges from a global perspective. Further, there is the Center for Cultural Resource Studies, which disseminates internationally information on the cultural materials that Minpaku has accumulated through these research activities, and promotes the sharing of that information as a common resource of humankind. All of these are developing their research activities through an international network, in collaboration with universities and research institutes both in Japan and abroad, and further with the people of the societies where research and collection of materials have been carried out, namely the source community itself.

Making this reorganization substantive and not merely in name is the primary task that I believe is for me to carry out.

 

(Tachimoto) Would you say that what we see in this reorganization is Minpaku’s posture as it grapples with cultural anthropology?

 

(Yoshida) As in the old days, fieldwork or intercultural exchange are no longer monopolies of cultural anthropology. While making cultural anthropology unmistakably our pivot foot, on top of that we must unite with related fields, and promote studies in a manner that attracts other researchers.

(Tachimoto) While I can imagine you have confidence in yielding results as a consequence of this reorganization, I would also like to ask about your ambitions as Director-General regarding how to achieve Minpaku’s mission.

 

(Yoshida) Forty years have passed since its opening, and Minpaku has accumulated 345,000 artifacts, making it the largest collection in the world for a museum specializing in cultural anthropology built from the latter half of the 20th century on. From the time of its founding, when Professor Tadao Umesao took office as Minpaku’s first Director-General, we have been striving to become “one of the top-class museums in the world,” and I believe that has come about.

However, in terms of disseminating information, there is still much to be done. In order to become top class in making information available to all parts of the world, first of all there is the problem of language. Our database is the largest item we have in terms of resources, but until now many of the database of Minpaku’s artifacts and so forth are accessible only in Japanese. Work has already begun on making this database bilingual in Japanese and English. As a task to take up in the future, I would very much like our resources made available worldwide by providing a multilingual database.

 

2. New Developments in the Utilization of Cultural Resources

 

(Tachimoto) As a means to disseminate Minpaku’s resources internationally, you have begun to build an Info-Forum Museum. What kind of information will Minpaku be sharing through this project as it greets its 40th anniversary? Could you explain to us in simple terms?

 

(Yoshida) While Minpaku was able to finish comprehensive renovations of the exhibitions in its main building in March 2017, these exhibitions are already progressing to the next new level. We will continue to update the contents of our exhibitions on a regular basis. At the same time we will be developing and building a system over the next several years that will enable all users and researchers to extract freely the cultural resource data that Minpaku is still continuing to accumulate, based on their interests and using the exhibitions as a point of entry, to link up with further research. Also, in parallel with this, the project we will be advancing is the Info-Forum Museum.

The Info-Forum Museum aims to share information consisting of Minpaku’s store of artifacts, and audio-visual materials such as photos and movies, not only with researchers and users both domestically and abroad, but also with the people of the societies that originally produced these materials, or if they are photographs, the people of the regions where those photos were taken, in other words with members of the source communities. Then the knowledge gained thereby will be added collectively to enrich the database in the hope that it will lead to new collaborative research and exhibition, and community activities.

 

(Tachimoto): So you are making a digital data bank. In concrete terms, how will you be advancing the project?

 

(Yoshida): Minpaku has already implemented, in Taiwan and South Korea, the practice of taking exhibited artifacts back to their places of origin, the exhibitions of returned materials. In addition to instances of people from the source communities providing new information when returning these artifacts, or photos and movies taken there in the past, there are also cases of people from the source communities coming to Minpaku and enriching the data of our resources. This type of collaborative activity leads to new discoveries in contexts where people encounter things or other people, and new discussions or challenges emerge thereby, and we aim to implement thoroughly this ideal format of “the museum as forum” not just in the museum’s exhibitions, but also in the museum’s accumulated cultural materials, and further in anthropological research.

 

(Tachimoto) What is the new way of thinking in this project?

 

(Yoshida) Whether for collaborative research, or research with a special focus, I think the attempt to disseminate information together with members of the source communities has been absent previously. I believe that with researchers receiving various perspectives they themselves lack, through feedback from the people of the source communities, new kinds of things not previously seen will emerge.

 

(Tachimoto) As small units such as single villages were previously the main objects of cultural anthropology, the Info-Forum Museum may have considerable impact for such villages. However, Minpaku’s exhibitions are organized on the basis of much wider regions. How do you link the two together?

 

(Yoshida) Cultural anthropology today does not study only small-scale societies. While the objects on display were collected in particular ethnic villages or towns, the fruits of our research activities advance our understanding about the entire globe. We regard the permanent exhibitions we have newly made as platforms for global inquiry. Accordingly, I would like for all of Minpaku’s users to take the exhibited objects as their point of entry, and through projects such as the Info-Forum Museum, extract information as much as they like from our accumulated ethnographic resources. Then by reconfiguring that information in their own particular ways, for researchers I believe this should enable them to develop new lines of research, and lay users should be able to build up their understanding of the world in accordance with their own interests.

I myself have been conducting fieldwork in a small village in southern Africa for these past thirty-five years, and through that village I have witnessed developments in the culture and religion of the entire African continent. For example, taking the questions I felt in that village as starting point, then going around to all of the countries in southern Africa, I have found myself in the bind of chasing down developments in Christianity for modern-day southern Africa as a whole.

 

(Tachimoto) So, Minpaku is currently planning new developments for its exhibitions. What would be the difference in terms of ideals with the other NIHU museum, the National Museum of Japanese History (“Rekihaku”) that displays Japanese history in systematic fashion?

 

(Yoshida) Like Rekihaku, Minpaku also has exhibitions on Japanese culture, and speaking just in terms of the size of the exhibition gallery, the Japanese exhibition is the largest among the exhibition areas at Minpaku. So when Rekihaku opened, there actually was some debate about whether Minpaku’s Japanese exhibition had become unnecessary. However, Minpaku’s exhibition on Japan is after all made with the intention of looking closely at Japanese culture in a global context. So from the start, the intent and direction are different from the manner of Rekihaku, which is to know one’s own history by digging further and further down into it.

Taking Japan as the point of origin, I think that only by having both the perspective of Rekihaku which digs further back along the diachronic axis, and that of Minpaku which looks across the globe in synchronic fashion, do we get to see the world in its entirety. It is a great strong point that two organizations with such differing directions are in Japan, and that distinguishes them as well from the ideal of the national museum group of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, which the Tokyo National Museum and Kyoto National Museum are part of.

 

(Tachimoto) Both Minpaku and Rekihaku take their exhibitions very seriously. Exhibitions are but a small part of our activities, yet for some reason when we are evaluated on to what extent Minpaku has made use of its cultural resources, our value as research institutes gets measured in terms of the number of visitors and so forth. What place do exhibitions hold for you at Minpaku?

 

(Yoshida) Minpaku was established as one of the inter-university research institutes. We have always stressed to others that we maintain exhibition facilities as one pathway for publicizing our research activities. By making the fruits of research public we open up a point of contact with society, and our research gets improved through the critical evaluations received thereby. In that sense, exhibitions are extremely important as an activity which supports the endeavors of research.

 

 

3. Anthropology and the Study of Human Cultures

 

(Tachimoto) Originally, academics were a means for procuring answers to the problems confronted by humans and thus improve our wellbeing. But for the problems of humankind in the 21st century, as a study of human cultures, how can cultural anthropology contribute?

 

(Yoshida) Minpaku’s Special Research Projects, under the unified theme of “Modern Civilization and the Future of Humankind: Environment/Culture/Humans,” are truly a re-inspection from an anthropological perspective of the problems which modern civilization is facing. In concrete terms we are taking up themes such as the environment, food, cultural clashes, cultural heritage, and also minorities and population issues.

I believe we are currently witnessing a turning point for civilization. It has been the practice until now for those who have been held as central to rule unilaterally over, or to study in unilateral fashion, those who have been taken as peripheral, but already this situation is no longer permissible. Everywhere on earth, between those who have been regarded as central and those who have been regarded as peripheral, mutual contacts and entanglements including things both creative and destructive have taken place. In the midst of such happenings, a kind of narrow-minded nationalism has been raising its head. In such a time as this, much more than previously the wisdom of anthropology, which has sought to gain an empathetic understanding of the Other’s culture, will become all the more vital in my view. Instead of taking the distinctive quality of such an era as problematic, rather we should utilize it to the fullest extent. The concept of the “Info-Forum Museum” and also the ideal of anthropology are to provide a platform that seeks out new directions through collaborative debate and research by making Minpaku’s cultural resources available across borders.

 

(Tachimoto) The inter-university research institutes were set up to contribute to universities and other research institutes, but not all humanities fields are part of NIHU. In the midst of debate as to whether there are not even more important humanistic fields, what is the significance of Minpaku’s existence, as a research institute for cultural anthropology, within the inter-university research institute scheme?

 

(Yoshida) NIHU has institutes focusing on Japanese culture such as Rekihaku, the National Institute of Japanese Literature, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, along with Minpaku and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature which take the entire world as their object of study. We are first able to truly see ourselves when we confront the Other, and the opposite also holds true. NIHU has a complement of institutes that research both Self and Other. That is NIHU’s greatest strength, of which I feel it can be proud. I think Minpaku exists as one of the research organizations bearing a core component of that endeavor to understand the human condition.

When universities accumulate collections that reflect their researchers’ fields they build university museums, but they are unable to have a facility like Minpaku that can look out over the entire world. Minpaku has a lineup of researchers, research areas, collections, and exhibitions based on its design of surveying the world as a whole. This kind of facility is unique in Asia, and only one of a very few worldwide. There are other ethnological museums in Asia, but they are museums and research institutes taking the peoples of their own countries as their subject of study, and no other institute exists that surveys the entire world.

Minpaku is now building a virtual museum on the Internet, which will enable free extraction from universities or from home of cultural resource data using the exhibitions as an entry point. Materials that cannot be uploaded to the Internet because of copyright or other issues will be converted into portable videotheque format to be available for loan. I believe it is Minpaku’s mission as a Japanese inter-university research institute to become a global hub for the accumulation and dissemination of cultural resources covering the entire globe.

 

(Tachimoto) As Minpaku has an extremely large collection of such cultural resources, I would very much like to see greater success and energy in sharing those materials.

Professor Yoshida, thank you very much for your time today.