Global Guide to Disarmament and

Non-Proliferation Education

Museums

JAPAN

Japanese Network for Peace Museums, Kochi City

Submitted by Kazuyo Yamane.  Submission details existing programs and describes the role played by peace museums on an international scale, and as a tool for disarmament education.  “The most famous peace museums that have been playing a great role in disarmament education are the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and [the] Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.”  According to the guidebook Peace Museum Worldwide, published by the United Nations in 1998, the role of the peace museum is “to recognize the reality and significance of the disaster, to inspire fresh desire for the abolish of nuclear weapons and the creation of a world without them.”  The Japanese Network for Peace Museums was part of an international conference in 1992, organized by the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University (see submission under Educational Institutes), which established the International Network of Peace Museums (INPM). 

Since this time, a newsletter of INPM has been published which makes possible collaborative exchange of information and exhibition materials among peace museums throughout the world.  Such collaborations have resulted in exhibition materials being sent from Japan to the United States, for example Grassroots House, a small peace museum in Kochi City, sharing an exhibit with Swords into Ploughshares Peace Center and Gallery in Detroit, Michigan.  This collaboration was part of commemorative activities in 1995, in remembrance of the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the Smithsonian Institute’s failed exhibit, due to congressional pressure, is mentioned here).  Other international collaborations, assisted by peace museums in Japan, are mentioned, including Dr. Kate Dewes’ speaking tour regarding the denuclearization of the Pacific.  The resulting book from this tour, Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation, is being used in a class entitled “Peace and Disarmament” taught as part of the Peace Studies program of Kochi University.  The Japanese Network for Peace Museums was established in 1998 and publishes a newsletter in both Japanese and English.  It is recommended that “more peace museums be created [in] various parts of the world even if they are small.  A small peace museum can be a center for disarmament education under the motto of think globally and act locally.”

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