[MSN] Janus-faced Japan

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Janus-faced Japan
[Commentary] Is the country a cultural 'guardian' or 'looter'?

Japan enacted recently a new landmark law obliging the nation to 
actively promote its crusade for the preservation of valuable foreign 
cultural assets. This is a welcome move.

Despite efforts made for many years by the United Nations Educational, 
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and other organizations, 
there are still many sites, historic monuments and other vestiges of the 
cultural heritage common to humankind that are threatened with serious 
degradation, and even disappearance, due to war, natural disasters and 
environmental destruction.

The new law, the brainchild of renowned painter Ikuo Hirayama, was 
introduced to the parliament by a non-partisan group of lawmakers. 
Hirayama proposed the legislation because he felt distress at the 
destruction of two giant statutes of the Buddha at Bamiyan in 
Afghanistan -- dating back to the 6th century -- by the Taliban in March 
2001 and the looting of the National Museum of Iraq during the confusion 
caused by the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Under the new law, Japan is expected to step up official development 
assistance (ODA) to help countries preserve and restore their cultural 
heritages, especially through the fostering of human resources in 
developing countries. Japan is the world's second-largest ODA donor 
after the U.S.

The new law is the latest in a series of Japanese initiatives aimed at 
elevating its international status. Japan put assistance for the 
preservation and restoration of valuable cultural assets abroad high on 
its diplomatic agenda clearly for the first time in the late 1980s.

During a visit to London in 1988, then-prime minister Noboru Takeshita 
unveiled his "international cooperation initiative," which made 
strengthened international cultural exchanges, along with increased ODA 
for developing countries and stepped-up contributions to peace, a major 
pillar of the nation's foreign policy. The Japanese initiative was aimed 
at deflecting a barrage of international criticism that it was not 
making sufficient contributions to global peace and prosperity despite 
its snowballing trade surplus.

Under this new policy of strengthening cultural exchanges, Japan began 
to provide financial and technical assistance to preserve cultural 
heritage abroad. In 1989, a trust fund with Japanese financial 
contributions was established within the Paris-based UNESCO. Japan has 
chipped in a few million U.S. dollars annually for the Japanese trust 
fund for the preservation of world cultural heritage.

While successfully scoring diplomatic points on the cultural front, 
culminating in the election of Koichiro Matsuura, former Japanese 
ambassador to France, as the UNESCO director general in 1999, Japan had 
long been far from serious about cracking down on illicit trade in 
foreign cultural assets at home. It was not until 2002 that Japan 
ratified a key international treaty banning illicit traffic in statues, 
paintings, manuscripts, books and other objects of historical or 
archeological value.

The UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the 
Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, 
as the treaty is formally called, was adopted in 1970 to protect 
cultural assets against theft, illicit export, and wrongful alienation. 
It took effect in 1972. Japan dragged its feet on joining the treaty for 
30 years. It was only shortly before Matsuura's election as UNESCO chief 
that the Japanese government began full-scale consideration of domestic 
legislative and regulatory amendments necessary to join the 1970 treaty.

Japan's ratification of the UNESCO treaty was aimed at shedding its 
notoriety as a global center of illicit trade in cultural assets, along 
with Britain. There was a growing criticism at the time that Japan was 
actually a looter of cultural assets because it was widely believed that 
many precious cultural assets stolen from troubled countries, including 
Afghanistan and Iraq, were being traded illegally in Japan. Japan's 
years of inertia on the treaty clearly contradicted its professed 
commitment to the preservation of valuable cultural assets abroad.

With no official data being released by law enforcement authorities, it 
remains unclear how much -- if anything -- the treaty membership has 
done so far to eradicate illicit trade in the world's second-largest 
economy. Critics say the country still has to do more to cleanse its 
image completely as a safe haven for cultural traders. There are two 
other international treaties concerning the protection of cultural 
assets that Japan has not yet joined -- the 1954 Convention for the 
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, or the 
Hague Convention as it is more commonly known, and the 1995 UNIDROIT 
Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.

Meanwhile, Japan also remains dogged by negative legacies of its 
militaristic history. The question of who are the rightful owners of 
cultural properties is not a thing of the past in uneasy relations 
between Japan and its Asian neighbors, which suffered Japanese 
aggression or colonial rule during and before World War II.

Earlier this year, a 2-meter-high stone monument, built in 1707 to 
commemorate Korean militia leader Jeong Munbu's victory over Japanese 
warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi's invasion force in the late 16th century and 
seized in 1905 by Japanese Imperial Army troops during the 
Russo-Japanese War from what is now North Korea, was returned to North 
Korea via South Korea. The statue had been kept at Yasukuni Shrine in 
Tokyo, where some 2.5 million war dead, including former prime minister 
General Hideki Tojo and 13 other Class-A war criminals, are enshrined.

The monument's return came at a time when South Korea and China began to 
step up efforts to recover cultural relics abroad, whether they have 
ended up in the hands of people or organizations abroad, legally or 
illegally.

Some South Korean experts claim that the number of known Korean cultural 
assets scattered around Japan totals about 34,000, most of which were 
unjustly pillaged during two periods -- first during the invasion by 
Hideyoshi Toyotomi's force and then during the 1910-1945 Japanese 
colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. Such figures cannot be verified 
independently, however.

There is strong dissatisfaction among many Koreans that when South Korea 
concluded the basic treaty with Japan normalizing diplomatic ties in 
1965, it settled for the return of only 1,300 Korean cultural assets 
after Tokyo pledged US$500 million in desperately needed aid for 
economic development. Some experts say only about 3,500 cultural assets, 
including the 1,300 assets covered by the 1965 treaty, have so far been 
returned to South Korea.

In late 2004, two Koreans were arrested in South Korea for stealing 
precious goods from Kakurinji Temple in the western Japanese city of 
Kakogawa in 2002. Among the booty was one particularly important 
painting of the Amida Buddha from Korea's Koryo period (918-1392), which 
the temple had treasured for hundreds of years. The two Koreans insisted 
they were on a mission to reclaim pieces of Korean history, which had 
been appropriated by the Japanese.

Of the 130 odd paintings of the Amida Buddha from the Koryo period 
exhibited so far, only 13 are reportedly kept in South Korea, with 106 
being held at Japanese temples.

In a handover ceremony for the monument of Jeong held in North Korea's 
Kaesong on March 1 -- the anniversary of the March 1, 1919 uprising by 
Koreans against Japanese colonial rule -- representatives from the two 
Koreas pledged to work together to seek the return of all of what they 
claimed were cultural assets looted by Japan during that period.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Fund for Recovery of Overseas Relics, a 
non-government organization devoted to the recovery of lost Chinese 
treasures abroad, also reportedly began to send a mission abroad this 
past spring, with Japan as the group's first destination. According to 
the organization, over 10 million Chinese cultural relics are estimated 
to be lost, mostly among private citizens throughout the world.

http://english.ohmynews.com/