Kyoto, Japan – Nanzan University is causing some ripples in the museum world here in Japan. In 2013, it reopened its Museum of Anthropology at a new location within campus. But it’s not the exhibits inside that is getting unusual attention from the public. It is the way the museum treats its visitors.
Museums all over the world always ask visitors not to touch any of their exhibitis. At Nanzan, the opposite is now happening. Everyone visiting the museum is encouraged to touch every artifact and object on exhibit. Ubiquitous are the signs that say, in Japanese, “Please touch.” Artifacts on display are not encased in glass.
This much I gleaned from the presentation made by the museum’s curator, Hiroshi Kurosawa, here at the two-day SPIRITS Symposium on Asian University Museums at Kyoto University Museum (KUM).
(SPIRITS stands for Supporting Program for Interaction-based Initiative Team Studies, a program funded by Kyoto University. I am here on invitation from Dr. Terufumi Ohno, director of KUM, who asked me to report on the cultural mapping program carried out in Cebu.)
Consider this: the museum collection of Nanazan University is almost akin to that of USC Museum; for they share, in a sense, a common history. Both are private Catholic institutions run by the Divine Word Missionaries (or SVD, Societas Verbi Divini).The museums in both universities were begun by German, Dutch and American missionaries.
Deeply concerned with the people in which they were carrying out their missions in Asia and Africa, these pioneer missionaries collected as many of the cultural materials of the people they encountered. Thus, both Nanzan and USC, for example, have a collection of 1960s-era cultural material from Papua New Guinea.
But the difference ends there. At USC, I cannot imagine opening the entire collection, including those on storage, for visitors to touch and even grasp.
Expectedly, during the open forum, a curator from the National University of Singapore raised concerns regarding conservation and the fact that human sweat can have an adverse impact on any object especially those made of plant material like baskets. Another issue raised was the fragility of earthenware and ceramic objects.
I myself raised the question of the danger posed when visitors are asked to touch metallic objects like a Samurai katana or sword, for example. USC has a collection of Moro bladed weapons and I cannot simply imagine the many wounds inflicted on people who will be asked to touch them.
Kurosawa had a ready answer for these issues. The museum spends double time cleaning objects that have been touched. There have been objects that were broken by visitors but these were on originally broken sections that had been badly glued together, according to him.
The most telling revelation from Nanzan is that the museum is premised on the principle that even blind or visually impaired people have a right to be part of the museum public. Apparently too, the museum follows the philosophy of the blind anthropologist Koji Hirose, who argued that we who can see are the ones blinded by the power of sight because we use only one of our five senses and lose out on the rest and that therefore we should be allowed to also touch objects to experience the sensation that blind people go through.
Hirose, who now works at the National Museum of Ethnology, argues that getting cut when touching a bladed metal artifact, like the earlier-mentioned “katana”, is in fact part of such a sensational experience that museum visitors can very well go through. This much I learned from Dr. Ohno, in answer to my question.
It is a bit of a disappointment that, despite its closeness to Kyoto, I cannot find time to see for myself the revolution in museum exhibition management now happening in Nanzan. Perhaps at some other time. For the moment, the symposium, which has brought together curators and museum scholars from China, Japan, Malaysia. Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, is an overwhelming success in my view and is intended to be a start to a series of meetings and networking between Japanese museums and the rest of Asia.
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