ARCHAEOLOGIA JAPONICA

Overview
TANAKA Yoshiyuki1
We cannot talk about 2011 Japan and onward without mentioning the Great East JapanEarthquake. The triple disasters of a massive earthquake, consequent tsunami, followedby hydrogen explosions at Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, releasing radioactive materials,
hugely impacted Japanese society. Japanese Archaeological Association installed a“Preparation Group for a Special Committee for urgent measures for the Great Earthquakeof Tohoku and Kanto (name changed to ‘Great East Japan Earthquake’ on April 1)” inMarch, and started working on confirming the safety of association members, collecting
information on damage to cultural properties, and consulting with the Cultural Agency aswell as related institutions. The preparation group was officially approved at the 77th
general meeting and inaugurated as “Special Committee for the Great East Japan
Earthquake” and is continuing its work. However, there still no clear prospect of solving
issues related to preservation and restoration of cultural properties and their storage indamaged areas. Problems are mounting up, such as securing research systems for culturalproperties preceding reconstruction. Also, there is not even a clue for the future
measures for contaminated cultural properties due to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
disasters.
As for the problem of stored books at the association, “Special Committee for the Books
at the Association” was installed at the 77th general meeting, and its members, as well as
two non-member experts, are deep in discussion and are expected to come up with a
discussion result within the next fiscal year.
This fiscal year saw the first announcement and awarding of three JapaneseArchaeological Association Awards: “Grand Prize,” “Encouragement Prize,” and “SpecialPrize” at the general meeting. First, TSUBOI Kiyotari was awarded Special Prize of theJapanese Archaeological Association Award for his long years of accomplishment inarchaeology and receiving the Person of Cultural Merit (bunka korosha) award in fiscal
1999. The first Grand Prize of the Japanese Archaeological Association was awarded to
IKEYA Nobuyuki (Kokuyoseki Kokogaku: Gensanchi Suitei ga Akiraka ni Suru Shakai
1

Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, 744 Motooka, Nishi Ward, Fukuoka
819-3095, Japan(tanak@scs.kyushu-u.ac.jp)
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TRENDS IN ARCHAEOLOGY IN JAPANKozo to Sono Henka [Obsidian Archaeology: Social Structure and Change Learned from
Assumptions of Quarries], Tokyo: Shinsensha), and the Encouragement Prize was awarded
to MIZUSAWA Koichi (Nihonkai Ryutsu no Kokogaku: Chusei Bushidan no Shohi
Seikatsu [Archaeology on Distribution around the Sea of Japan: Consumption Life ofMedieval Samurai Warriors], Toyama: Koshi Shoin).
Activities of each committee of the association are going smoothly, and both the general
meeting and convention were carried out successfully. Publication of our magazine,
Nihon Kokogaku is also going smoothly, and in this sense, the activity of our academic
society is satisfactory. Japanese archaeology is quite prominent in the world for its
quantity and variety, backed up by enormous excavation examples. And there issignificant research that qualifies as international, interdisciplinary, and integrated science,
keywords idealized by today’s Japanese academics. In this sense, Japanese archaeology
is showing certain changes. In the future it is necessary to send out the results to theworld and receive appropriate evaluations, rather than ending up just within the country.
When this becomes normal, “Japanese Archaeology” will be established as a genre inworld archaeology.

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