Muse No. 44
Japanese Citizens Network of Museums for Peace
Newsletter: July 2021
Translators: Miki Otsuka & Emi Karimata
Editors: Ikuro Anzai & Kazuyo Yamane
Ilustrators：Erico Tosaki & Pegge Patten
musejapankyoto@gmail.com

Report on the National Exchange Meeting andGeneral Meeting of the 2021 Japanese Citizens’ Network of Museums for Peace
Ikuro Anzai （Secretary, Citizens’Network）
On November 20, 2021, the National Exchange
Meeting of the Japanese Citizens' Network of Museums for
Peace was held online, where the following 10 activities
were reported and discussed in addition to the special
report by Tokuko Koga of the Himeyuri Peace Memorial
Museum, Okinawa.
1) Kazuyo Yamane (Specialist Committee Member, Kyoto
Museum for World Peace)2) Ikuro Anzai (Fukushima Museum for No Nukes)
3) Keizo Izuhara (Grassroots House)4)Ariyuki Fukushima (Peace Museum Research Association)5) Tamotsu Asakawa (Yamanashi Peace Museum)6)Hidefumi Terasawa (Manchurian Peace Memorial
Museum)7) Yusuke Hasunuma & Kazuya Yasuda (Daigo Fukuryu Maru
Exhibition Hall)
8) Fumiko Yamashita (wam)9) Fumiko Ishioka (NPO Holocaust Educational Resource
Center “Kokoro”)(10) Seishi Ishibashi (Sumida Museum of Local Culture /Tokyo Air Raid and War Damage Resource Center)

Eriko

Dengonkan (Fukushima Museum for No Nukes)
held a special exhibition about Okinawa,
Japan, the island of U.S. military bases
Ikuro Anzai(Deputy Director, Fukushima Museum for No Nukes)

Following the exchange meeting, the general
meeting for FY2021 was held, under the chairmanship of
Ikuro Anzai, and the following items were discussed andapproved as proposed by the Steering Committee: (1) draft
statute of the network, (2) steering committee member incharge of the 2022 National Exchange Meeting, (3) electionof steering committee members for 2022, (4) establishmentof the advisor system, and (5) interim report on accounting.
Mr. Masahiko Yamabe was appointed as an advisor of the
network.

Dengonkan, Fukushima Museum for No Nukes,
was opened on the very day of March 11, 2021, the 10th
anniversary of Tohoku Great Earthquake which triggered
the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. The museum
is located in the precincts of Hokyoji Temple, an ancient
temple in Naraha-machi, 15 km from the nuclear power
plant, and displays information on the damage caused by
the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thehydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, and the Fukushima1

nuclear power plant accident. Even in the midst of a serious
epidemic of a new coronavirus infection, the museum has
been visited by hundreds of people from different parts ofJapan.
The museum is a two-story wooden facility
launched by Tokuo Hayakawa, a Buddhist monk, incooperation with the "Fukushima Project Team" presided
over by Dr. Ikuro Anzai (Professor Emeritus of Ritsumeikan
University). Hayakawa monk is the 30th abbot of Hokyoji
Temple, which has been in existence since 1395, and has
played a leading role in the movement against nuclear
power in Fukushima since the early 1970s. On the other
hand, since its formation in May 2013, the Fukushima
Project Team has conducted more than 80 environmental
radiation surveys in Fukushima to address the concerns of
the affected residents and has also been actively involvedin consultation and learning activities.
In the exhibition related to nuclear power plants,
the museum displays photographs of the opposition
movements of the residents of Fukushima Prefecture,
where 10 nuclear power plants were built, and the damage
caused by the accident.

Buddhist monk Tokuo Hayakawa, Director, passionately
explaining the museum to students and newspaper reporter.

More than 25,000 U.S. military personnel arestationed in Okinawa, and there have been many cases ofsexual assault against women ranging from 9-month-old
baby to adults, but in many cases the perpetrators are nothanded over to the Japanese side due to the Japan-U.S.
Status of Forces Agreement. The residents of the area arealso troubled by the noise problem caused by the military
aircraft flights, and the Japanese courts have awarded
billions of yen to tens of billions of yen in damages in noise
lawsuits filed by the residents, but the U.S. side has not paida penny based on the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces
Agreement, and the Japanese government has been
bearing the burden. The special exhibition at Dengonkan on
the problem of Okinawa, the island of U.S. military bases,
seeks to promote the idea that the difficulties facing
Okinawa are not the problems of the Okinawans but of theJapanese people as a whole. It is also trying to show thatthe root cause of the problem is the fact that the Japan-U.S.
Security Treaty was signed at the same time as the San
Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952, and that the Japanese
government chose to follow the path of subordination to
the United States.
Since its establishment, Dengonkan has beenissuing statements from time to time in an effort to raise
public awareness of nuclear arms and nuclear power issues.
The following statement is in response to an incident thatshows the ethical corruption of a Japanese nuclear industry.

Dengonkan in the precincts of Hokyoji Temple where crape
myrtle flowers bloom beautifully

Recently, Dengonkan held a special exhibition
about Okinawa, where 1,300 nuclear weapons were once
brought in in the 1960s. Okinawa used to be an
independent kingdom called "Ryukyu Kingdom", but it wasmerged with Japan in 1879, and in 1945 it became thebattlefield of the land battle of Okinawa, killing one in four
citizens of the prefecture. After the WW2, the island cameto be used as the U.S. military base where 74% of US
military bases in Japan were concentrated. In the 1960s,
1,300 nuclear warheads including the nuclear-armed cruise
missile "Mace B" were introduced. It is also known that in
the early morning of October 28, 1962, in the midst of the
Cuban Missile Crisis, the Missile Operation Center in Kadena
sent an order to the Mace B launch base in Yomitan Village
to launch a nuclear cruise missile to USSR.

Dengonkan Statement on Japan Atomic Power
Company's Rewriting of Investigation Documents on
Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant No.2 ─ A Criminal Act that
Destroys the Very Foundation of Nuclear Regulatory
Administration

August 31, 2021
Director: Tokuo Hayakawa/Deputy Directors:Ikuro Anzai,
Hidetsugu Katsuragawa
2

The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has
decided to suspend its review of the restart of the Tsuruga
No. 2 nuclear power plant. The reason for this decision isthat it has come to light that Japan Atomic Power Company
has been engaged in an astonishing criminal act that has
destroyed the very foundations of nuclear regulatory
administration by rewriting the investigation documents.
In 2012, an expert panel of the Nuclear Regulation
Authority pointed out the possibility that the fault that runs
directly underneath the Unit 2 reactor at the Tsuruga
Nuclear Power Plant is an "active fault," but the documents
submitted by the Japan Atomic Power Company to deny thiswere found to contain more than 1,000 erroneous entries.
In the 2020 review process, the surprising fact thatgeological data had been rewritten by the company was
discovered.
Japan Atomic Power Company explained that"rewriting data was the judgment of the person in charge at
the site, and the officer in charge did not know thecircumstances", but it is a conventional fraud to try to
impose responsibility on the person in charge at the siteand escape the responsibility of the company. It is virtually
impossible for the Nuclear Regulation Authority to
independently corroborate the huge amount of documents
submitted for review, and we must assume that nuclear
power companies prepared and submitted the applicationmaterials in good faith. The fabrication of data by the Japan
Atomic Power Company this time is a criminal act that
undermines such a premise and cannot be excused, and wecannot help but conclude that the Japan Atomic Power
Company has abandoned its very qualification to handle
nuclear power plants.
We are outraged by this ugly act by a nuclear
power company that deals with high-risk technology which
involves the lives of local residents and are deeply
concerned about the constitutional and ethical corruptionof Japan's power companies.

February 2022. This year marks the 90th anniversary of theoutbreak of the Manchurian Incident, which took overJapan's policy of continental expansion (“Greater
Japanism”) since the Sino-Japanese War and the RussoJapanese War, and became the starting point of the 15-Year
War (1931-1945). How was the Manchurian Incident
positioned in the historical and international context?
In addition, the role of mass media, especiallynewspapers, was decisive in shaping public opinion andmobilizing the people for war after the Manchurian Incident.
How did the newspapers report on the Manchurian
Incident? By referring the Asahi Shimbun, which was rather
liberal before the event as in the support of realizing
constitutionalism and disarmament, we have examined
what was behind the shift in its tones of editorial opinion
and whether there was any other way for media to fulfill
their role.
The exhibition also examines the historicalconnection between Yamanashi Prefecture and Manchuria
through the experiences by the Agricultural Emigrants to
Manchuria and their repatriation from Manchuria.
Furthermore, some people have pointed out that thenational security legislation enacted by the Abeadministration in 2015 seems to be based on the similarideas of causing Manchurian Incident by the then Japanese
government.

Dengonkan will continue to hold various eventsand issue statements to seek the realization of a society freefrom the threats of nuclear weapons and nuclear power
generation.

Nobuo Serizawa: Secretariat
We held a "15th Anniversary Meeting" on Sunday,
November 21 at "Westa Kawagoe" in Kawagoe City, Saitama
Prefecture, where our museum is located. More than 130
people participated in the event, including members fromas far away as Kurashiki and Nagano.
After President Matsumura’s opening remarks,
we shared the progress of our activities during the past 15
years. Director Hosokawa also reported on international
exchanges, including the participation in International
Conference for Museums for Peace.

＜Content of the Exhibition>
1 The historical and international position of Manchurian
Incident
2 The Manchurian Incident and the transformation of theMass Media: Focusing on the Asahi Shimbun
3 Manchuria and Yamanashi Prefecture
4 Forced Implementation of the security legislation and theManchurian Incident

Chukiren Peace Museum

Special Exhibition: "Thinking about the 90th
Anniversary of the Manchurian Incident”
Tamotsu Asakawa: Yamanashi Peace Museum
I would like to introduce a special exhibition that has
been held from September 2021 and will continue until
3

Then, Dr. Tokushi Kasahara (Professor Emeritus,
Tsuru University) gave a commemorative lecture titled"China Today and the Challenges of Our Movement".
During the break, participants looked at theexhibition of paintings by Chukiren (Association of
returnees from China) members depicting their own
wartime experiences, and some newspaper articles about
Chukiren.
After the break, Mr. Hoshino moderated thepanel discussion which consisted of Dr. Kasahara, historian,member of Chukiren, bereaved family of a member, andresearcher from young generation, followed by active Q &A session with the audience.
There were twice as many non-membershipparticipants as formal members, and we feel that thevisitors of our museum as well as those who know about
the museum play the critical role to disseminate
information about our activities. We will keep working hardfor the 20th anniversary!

historical revisionism, and hung wartime slogans such as"Rather die than live in disgrace" or "Don’t run away, you
unpatriotic” that prevailed in the society at that time. In thesame space, a banner saying "I won’t forget" was also
displayed, as if to show the will to resist the falsification andsuppression of wartime memory that still continues to thisday. In parallel with this, we also held a photo exhibition"Blowing the scorch marks on my hands” by Mana Kikuta,
who covered the atomic bombed trees in Tokyo.
From May 1 to June 13 2021, prior to these events,
we organized a special exhibition "Record of the Bombing"by Hikaru Fujii. The exhibition focused on the issue that theTokyo Peace Memorial Museum to pass on the wartime
records including the Great Tokyo Air Raids (March 10,1945) has not yet been established to this day due todisagreements over historical recognition. These
exhibitions were specially paid a lot of attention in terms ofapproaching wartime memories of 76 years ago by using
modern art method. Currently, we hold a special exhibitionof a joint work by Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki in their later
years, which depicted “Taigyaku Jiken (High Treason
Incident)" in 1911 that 24 individuals were sentenced todeath for allegedly conspiring to assassinate the Meiji
Emperor with the execution of 12 people.

(Chukiren Peace Museum)
TEL & FAX: +81-(0)49-236-4711 （ Open on Wednesday,
Saturday and Sunday)
E-mail: npo-kinenkan@nifty.com
HP: http://npo-chuukiren.jimdo.com/(Please contact us in advance.)

Memorial Museum for Agricultural Emigrants
to Manchuria
Hidefumi Terasawa
Our museum has been also greatly affected by
the pandemic and was temporarily closed for two months
last spring. Currently, the number of visitors to the museum
remains at about 10,000 a year, almost half the number
before the pandemic. However, we are still welcoming
students from schools within the prefecture. Also, we havebeen working on delivering remote lectures alternatively,
but there are many challenges. The activities by the “PeaceLabo”, a volunteer group of the museum, have been
restricted due to the pandemic, and they have partially

Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels
Yukinori Okamura
We hold a solo exhibition of Masao Shirakawa, "Is
this hell or paradise?", from July 17 to September 5, 2021.
Shirakawa created a sculpture in 2015 to deal with the issueof the removal of a memorial to the Korean wartime laborsfrom the exhibition at the public museum in Gunma
Prefecture, which was also displayed in the Aichi Triennale's"Non-Freedom of Expression Exhibition". For this summer's
project, he presented a new painting that directly criticized4

resumed guiding visitors in combination with remote
activities. The group has been actively working ontranscribing the video testimonies of the survivors with theparticipation of local high school students and othervolunteers. One of the important activities of our museum,the regular lectures by the “storytellers” (survivors), were
almost suspended last year, but have resumed this year.
Recently, the museum co-hosted a project with Nagano
Prefecture to deliver the stories of the survivors online.
Although we continue facing the difficult situation, next
year will mark the 10th anniversary of the museum's
opening, so we will keep doing our best as the only private
museum in Japan that shows the historical facts ofManchurian agricultural emigrants.
Contact: info@manmoukinenkan.com

Representations of the Family" with Ms. Megumi Kitahara,a specialist in culture and representation, art history, andgender.
Our next special exhibition is tentatively titled"Exhibition on ‘Comfort Women’ and textbook- targeted forjunior high school students as audiences". We will
straightforwardly tackle the issue of "government
intervention in the description of historical facts," which is
not somebody else’s problem. The exhibition will start fromJanuary 15, 2022.

Nuclear Damage × Climate Change
Hasunuma Yusuke, Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall

Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace(wam)

We are currently holding a special exhibition,"Coral, People, and the Sea in the bombed Marshall Islands"
from October 2021 to March 2022. The Marshall Islands,
which bear the scars of 67 nuclear tests conducted by theUnited States, are one of the countries in danger of being
submerged due to rising sea levels caused by climatechange. The exhibition tries to connect the two major issuesof nuclear test damage and climate change by centering
around Marshall Islands, which is navigated by Masahiro
Takemoto, a professional diver and environmental activist,
and Kosei Shimada, a photojournalist.
The rise in temperature and seawatertemperature due to global warming is causing serious
problems in the lives of the residents of the Marshall Islands
as they have lost important food sources such as palm trees
and fish. Climate change has become an imminent crisis for
the Marshall Islands, with rising sea levels cutting into land
and urging people to migrate to Hawaii or the United States.
In the past, people lived in Bikini and Rongelap were forced
to leave their home due to the effect of nuclear testing. The
Lunit Dome is a nuclear waste disposal facility filled withcontaminated sediment and other materials in a crater

Fumiko Yamashita
August 14, 1991 was the day that Ms. Kim Haksun came forward publicly. Since the Asian Solidarity
Conference held in December 2012, which designated thisday as the Japanese Military Comfort Women Memorial Day,
many events have been held in various places to remember
the women who suffered. Since 2017, we have held a"memorial service" where the names of the deceased
women are read out loud and white flowers are offered tocommemorate them. This year's event was held online dueto the pandemic, and we heard with deep regret of thepassing of another 16 women from 6 countries. In theafternoon, we had an online talk event in collaboration with
the Museum of Japanese Colonial History in Korea to invite
Ms. Lee Hee-ja (representative of the Pacific War Victims
Compensation Promotion Council), who has supported Ms.
Hak-sun closely.
In addition, the fifth session of the "wam seminar:
Thinking about the Emperor System" was held on
November 3 under the title "Modern Emperors and5created by nuclear testing, and it has been eroded by therising sea level and in danger of being destroyed by cyclones.
In the Marshall Islands, the legacy of nuclear tests and thethreat of climate change are now intersecting, both ofwhich have been originally caused by powerful andindustrialized nations.
This exhibition also features paintings on nuclear
damage and climate change depicted by youth from the
Marshall Islands. These works show the views on young
people living in the region. A gallery talk by the twonavigators will be available on our YouTube channel.

of young researchers, including myself, put together theoriginal plan to develop the exhibit. After that, theexhibition was reviewed by the survivors, educators andresearchers. We also expected the young generation to visit
the museum. Since the school visits still have beensuspended, the evaluation of the exhibits will be conductedin the near future.
At the exchange meeting with other museums,
we shared the photos of our exhibits including the map of
the affected areas of Tokyo ward, the model of cluster
incendiary bomb, and the image of the night of the Tokyo
Air Raid. We hope that many people will visit the exhibition
and give us feedback.

Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource
Center (Kokoro)
Fumiko Ishioka
Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center(Kokoro) has been working on promoting human rights andpeace education by using the teaching materials of history
and memory of the Holocaust. We would like to share an
initiative by students launched during the pandemic. Nine
volunteer university students, who wanted to learn andshare the history with others, got together and held the"’Me’ and ‘History’ Exhibition: Memories of the Holocaust
and Ourselves Today" in August. The students, who had
only met online and were from various grades and majors,
had weekly meeting for eight months to realize theexhibition. The content of the exhibition did not focus on
displaying the historical facts, but rather offered visitors
questions and struggles that arose within themselves. It
was an interesting experiment to see how communication
through the exhibition happened in the exhibition space bylooking at visitor’s comments and response. I thought it
could be one form of passing the history/memory to thenext generation. These students also participated in theInternational History Festival organized by the German
Federal Agency for Civic Education in October. Next year, wehave a plan to gather youth from all over the world in Berlin
to expand the circle.

Lunit dome cracking over time (Kosei Shimada)

Sumida Heritage Museum / The Center of theTokyo Raids and War Damage
Seishi Ishibashi
I would like to share the exhibitions related to theGreat Tokyo Air Raids at Sumida Heritage Museum and The
Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage.
Sumida Heritage Museum has been holding theannual exhibition of painting of air raids on Tokyo since I
became in charge of the event four years ago. The lastspecial exhibition was organized two years ago and we had
another one this spring.
I came to realize that there are more unknown
facts in the research about air raids than we think eventhough the media cover this topic every year. Some ofunknown facts are the ways to handle the human remains
or the accurate information of the victims including who
and where they were.
For this spring's exhibition, we planned to
examine the original official records of war damage in the"Great Tokyo Air Raid― War Damage Documentation," butit did not work out, so we instead studied damage maps andplotted the damage on the map.
In the meantime, The Center of the Tokyo Raids
and War Damage has renewed its permanent exhibition,
which has been open to the public since last June. A group6

students, I also felt the limitations of the Peace Aichi
exhibition (there was no exhibition on Japan's
mistreatment of wartime prisoners, killing of civilians,
poison gas, etc., nor did it delve into the U.S. responsibility
for the atomic bombings or the Soviet Union's internmentin Siberia). After this, the students are going to have a mocktrial of the Tokyo Trial in their seminar. I hope that this seriesof activities will be a good opportunity for them to learn
more about the Tokyo Trial.
I have observed that most of the peace museums
focus on specific themes in their exhibits, and it is a bigquestion whether we should deal with the whole picture of
war and even the modern world. On the other hand,
digitization has a risk of intervening in freedom of
expression in a sense that one day the Virtual Reality (VR)headset, which eliminates state (government) control ofdata and negative history, will take the lead and become "avirtual space museum that meets all demands and can beentered at anytime from anywhere”. If that could happen,
the originality of the museum would be lost at the same
time.
From this experience as a museum guide, I havereflected the roles and expectation to be taken by the peacemuseums.

The role of the Peace Museum - my struggles
as a museum guide
Yutaka Maruyama, Peace Aichi
In recent years, the groups visiting Peace Aichi
have diversified, and the museum is now expected to playa role as a place for learning about modern andcontemporary history. For this reason, museum guides are
required not only to explain the exhibits but also to havedeep knowledge and understanding of modern andcontemporary history.
In November, I was asked by a university
professor of international law to guide 16 students roundthe museum exhibits related to the Tokyo Trial(International Military Tribunal for the Far East). Even
though I was teaching history at junior high and highschools, I was worried because I had not straightforwardly
dealt with the Tokyo Trial itself in my class. Today, the"denial of the Tokyo Trial" is linked to the "Greater East Asia
War," "postwar regime, " "government intervention inhistory textbooks", "constitution" and "US military baserelated issues", and young generation tends to accept such
"historical revisionism" as it is mostly through social media.
In other words, the way we deal with the Tokyo Trial has
possibility or risk to encourage students to justify theGreater East Asia War.
Therefore, in consultation with the university, I
gave a 20-minute presentation in the museum entitled"Why are we discussing the Tokyo Trial Now?" in which I
touched upon three elements of the Tokyo Trial: problems(the trials were not based on the international law),
challenges (the emperor system was retained, and the trial
was rooted in the structure of Cold War, which favored the
U.S.-led occupation), and significance (Japan's aggression
and atrocities were known to the public for the first time,and it also led to develop international laws on peace andhuman rights, as well as to establish the International Courtof Justice). Despite the shortage of time, I felt that thestudents' awareness of this issue was growing, as they
showed interest in the history textbook edited by one
publisher who never recognize Japan’s war of aggression.
After the lecture, we explained mainly about theJapan’s wartime aggression that killed over 20 million
people, and what was judged, what was traded, and who
was exonerated at the Tokyo Trial. Specifically, I wondered
if the museum exhibits were sufficient enough to deal with
the Nanjing Massacre, the bombing of Chongqing, Japanesemilitary "comfort women", conscription, forced labor, andUnit 731 (Manshu Detachment 731). While guiding the

Kyoto Museum for World Peace,
Ritsumeikan University
Ikuko Shimizu, Manager
The museum has been closed from April 2021
until the reopening in September 2023. We have almost
completed the design of the new exhibits for the reopening
and will spend the next year and a half preparing thematerials to display. The building will also undergo a majorrenovation, so please come and visit the newly renovatedmuseum in the fall of 2023.
After December 2021, the library will no longer
accept any donated documents, and reading space andrental service will not be available.
In spite of this, we are trying to disseminate ouractivities as much as possible through our website andvarious publications. This year, in addition to holding online
lectures and lending materials and panels, we have created
new “digital peace lectures and talks” and started lending
them out on DVD（There are six 30-minutes lectures byDirector and Honorary Director of the museum, and eleven30-minutes talks by the members of the museum’s "Friends
for Peace" that are useful for learning about wartime
experiences and peace). We have also developed a7

of the wartime aggression and damage.
As for the Pingdingshan Massacre, we displayed
panels based on the detailed research and studies
conducted by the Fushun Pingdingshan Massacre Memorial
Hall in China. Many people said that they never learned
about the fact that Japanese troops had massacred nearly
3,000 innocent villagers and that they seriously had to face
the aggression caused by Japanese military.
About the Agricultural Emigrants to Manchuria,
we exhibited a collection of 27 illustrations entitled "Warcreated insanity," which depicts the horrific repatriation
journey of the agricultural emigrants from Towa-son, Kochi
Prefecture. In 1943, 547 people settled in the village in
Manchuria, and 361 people died during their repatriation.
Many visitors stared at the pictures drawn by former
agricultural emigrants, which showed the unbelievable
events of 76 years ago, such as people being given cyanide
for suicide, bodies being thrown off trains, wild dogs eating
the legs and arms of bodies fallen by the roadside, andwomen being stripped naked by Soviet soldiers. Thesepainting accused the misguided national policy and how
much sacrifice it entailed. We also introduced the situationof the Korean Peninsula, which was turned into a "giant
prison" during the wartime, using panels borrowed from
the Museum of Japanese Colonial History in Korea. Thistime, we were able to hold the exhibition without any
interference from the right-wing groups. Even though theevent was held under the pandemic, 520 people visited theexhibition.

"sugoroku (traditional Japanese board game played withdice traditional Japanese board game played with dice)"game that enables groups of people to learn about peace ina fun way, and have started to publish it on our website.
The Center for Peace Education and Research also
holds online public seminars as well as publishes bulletins
and research reports.

Newsletter of Kyoto Museum for World Peace

The 43rd Annual Exhibition of Materials
for War and Peace
Keizo Dehara, Deputy Director,
Grassroots House: Peace Museum
We had 43rd Annual Exhibition that started toremember US air raid in Kochi. This year's exhibition washeld at the Kochi Liberty and People’s Rights Museum from
July 2 to 11 under the theme of "90 Years after the
Manchurian Incident: Thinking about the War of Aggression
in the Year on which the Nuclear Weapons Convention
became effective”. The exhibition featured themes such as
the Manchurian Incident, the Pingdingshan Massacre, theAgricultural Emigrants to Manchuria, the Nuclear Weapons
Convention, and the Kochi Air Raids, from the perspective
8

temporary action in order to recover from the managing
problems but it is a continuing action as an opportunity toconvey missions Himeyuri Peace Museum has.
(Translated by Emi Karimata)The 43rd Annual Exhibition of Materials for War
and PeaceNoboru Sakiyama, Board Chairman
As the young people who visited our museum lastyear offered to support the museum, we started the“ZOOM meeting" for young people once a month this year.
On July 17, we held the "6th meeting to talk about Oka
Masaharu", and two artists from Fukuoka gave a talk titled"Oka Masaharu as seen by young artists in Fukuoka". They
stayed in Nagasaki for about a week in March and June, andvisited the museum to look through the "Oka Masaharu
Collection" to create an archive. In addition, with the help
of ZOOM meeting members and the students fromInternational Christian University, we were able tocomplete the rest of the English captions for the exhibitionin August. Then, on October 16, we started the "Let's Learn
Again! Japan's Contemporary History Course Phase 2", andthe first session was held under the title of "May 1949: The
Formation of Nagasaki's 'Postwar' Era”. We enabled
participants to join the seminar online, which was madepossible by the technical support of ZOOM meetingmembers and supporters in Fukuoka. The theme of thesecond meeting was "The World under the Cold War:
Europe in the Aftermath of World War II”, which was
successfully held on November 13.

Turning War-Related Sites into 'Fortress of
Peace’
Keizo Dehara, Deputy Director,
Grassroots House: Peace Museum
The 24th National Symposium on the
Preservation of War Related-Sites was held in
Higashiyamato, Tokyo on October 2 and 3 online, and I gavea keynote speech. Seventy-six years have passed since theend of the World War II, and we have entered an era inwhich the wartime memories must be handed down to thepostwar generation. The role of war-related sites as "living
witnesses" of the war is becoming more and moresignificant.
The preservation of war-related sites began in
Okinawa in the 1970s, soon after its reversion to Japan, andeventually spread nationwide as a citizens' peace
movement. As of October 2021, the number of war-relatedsites designated as cultural properties such as historic sites
has reached 319 in Japan.
However, the growing and spreading interest inthese sites does not necessarily agree with our desire to
make them "defenses of peace". There are also conflicting
aspects. New challenges have emerged to consider whatkind of memories of war and what elements of war-relatedsites should be passed on to the next generation.
As is well known, modern Japan has repeatedly
fought wars over 50 years, starting with the Sino-Japanese
War under its national slogan of “enrich the country,
strengthen the armed forces”. The mainland became thebattlefield for less than one year of the last phase of the
Asia-Pacific War, and before that, all the battlefields werein East Asia, including the Korean Peninsula and China.

Himeyuri Peace Museum
Noriko Koga, curator
On April, 2021, Himeyuri Peace Museum
renewed its exhibits for the first time since 2004 to
approach “generations who are far removed from the war.”
After the renewal, we received comments such as “itbecame brighter,” “understandable,” and “well done.”
I would also like to mention that support for the museum
was spread. Our SNS posts received many reactions in thisJune. With messages like “it must be reserved since thepreciousness” and “I will support the museum because I
want to visit there someday,” approximately 74 million yen
donated in a half year.
Moreover, local government purchased themuseum tickets as presents for parents and children in theregions and Okinawan musicians gave a live performance toraise contributions. These actions were taken in a hope that
more people would visit the museum on this occasion.
Through such experiences, the museum staff
members met many people and strengthen connections
with them. I believe asking support was not just a9Countless war-related sites have been found in these areas.
It is said that there are about 50,000 war-related sites inJapan, and most of them are from the Asia-Pacific War
period, which were concentrated in the last year of the war.
The transition and distribution of war-related sites in Japan
clearly shows that the series of wars were wars of
aggression. However, I strongly feel that there is a tendency
to overemphasize the damage observed by these sites andto keep their eyes off the fact of aggression by Japanesemilitary. With the rise of historical revisionism, which has
become particularly prominent since the Abeadministration, it seems that more and more Japanesepeople are unaware of the history of aggression by
Japanese military.
No single war-related site, no matter how small itis, can’t be concluded within Japan. These sites will lose
their historical value if they cannot be connected to themodern history of East Asia. Why are they located there,
and what was the era when they were made and used?
These sites should remind us of the war that took the livesof more than 200 million people in East Asia and caused
them to suffer and fear. I would like to position the warrelated sites as the closest "defenses of peace", where we
can think about the connection between our community
and the war, from where we are now.

Masaru Tanaka (Hiroshima City Council member andcontemporary artist), and Junko Kanekiyo (Kyoto Museum
for World Peace, Ritsumeikan University), comments by
Masaya Nemoto (Matsuyama University), and discussion. In
this project, we focused on how museum objects are
displayed in peace museums and how they are understoodand perceived by visitors, and asked the three participants
to describe their own experiences of visiting the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Museum. Although the social backgroundsof the three participants differed from each other, they
indicated that they were viewing the exhibition in relation
to their own personal and family histories. In addition,
asking them to focus on the exhibited objects might cause
them to pay more attention to the original objects thanother kinds of exhibits. We will improve the worksheets
based on this analysis. Please refer tohttps://www.psaj.org/bunkakai202111/
for the report of the theme session of the Conference (Onlyin Japanese).

Participating Webinars Abroad
Kazuyo Yamane,
Adviser to Kyoto Museum for World Peace
In the midst of the Corona disaster, I have been
participating in zoom conferences and webinars related topeace museums. On October 11, I attended a conference ofPeace and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin in
the U.S., where I participated as a panelist with otherauthors in a webinar titled "Museums for Peace: In Searchof History, Memory, and Change" (the title of a book to be
published by the International Network of Museums for
Peace (INMP)). On October 22, I participated in "Museums
for Peace: Themes, Claims, and Controversies" at the Peace
History Conference at Kennesaw State University in Georgia,
where I presented on the Kyoto Museum for World Peace.
On October 27, I participated online in International
Scientific and Practical Conference (World political process:information wars and "color revolutions") in Moscow, andreported on peace education in peace museums. Also, on
November 7, I reported on "History and Issues of theInternational Conferences of the INMP" at the sectional
meeting on peace education at the conference of the Peace
Studies Association of Japan.
The Corona disaster has changed my life
completely, but I think it is a good aspect that I can talk withpeople abroad more easily than before, especially in Africa,
South America, and Iran, with whom I had few
opportunities to come into contact before.

Historic site in Nankoku City, Kochi Prefecture：Cover offighters No. 5

Report on “Peace and Art” Session at Autumn
Conference of Peace Studies Association ofJapan
Ariyuki Fukushima, Study Group on Museums for PeaceOn November 7, 2021, a project titled "An
Attempt to Put into Words the Way We See and Feel the
Peace Museum (Part 1) - Case Study of the Hiroshima Peace
Memorial Museum" was held online at the “Peace and Art”
session at the Conference with 34 participants. The session
consisted of an introductory report by myself, reports on
visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum by Suzu
Nishimura (junior student from Hiroshima City University),10

International Newson Museums for Peace

Visiting Himeyuri Peace Museum
Mari Kumura in Hawaii (INMP Board Member)
When I was in school, I would always tell people I
was half Okinawa and half Japanese. The response I often
got was “so full Japanese.” I would then go on to explain tothem how Japanese and Okinawan were different. My
grandpa on my mother ’s side was born in Hawaii and his
family had intended to work in Hawaii and move back to
Okinawa. When my grandpa was a toddler, the kids all did
move back to Okinawa for a few years but by the time he
was a teenager they had all decided to move back to Hawaii.
All of this happened before World War II began.
In Hawaii, grandpa worked as a bookkeeper at a
non-profit organization downtown and my grandma, who
had never lived in Okinawa, was a housewife. They would
often speak Uchinaguchi whenever they didn’t want mymom or uncle to understand what they were talking about.
My mom never picked up the language but always
maintained that I should keep a connection to my Okinawan
heritage. The Hawaii United Okinawa Association would
hold gatherings yearly to introduce the younger generation
to Okinawan culture which I would attend every summer.
Looking back, I still hold my Okinawan identity
close to my heart. The strong presence Okinawans still holdin Hawaii made the Himeyuri and Hawaii exhibit much more
impactful. Reading about Chioko Oyadomari, who was bornin Hawaii, drew parallels between my grandpa’s life.
Thinking of the hope that my grandpa must have felt
coming back to Hawaii to pursue his life and how happy
Chioko must have felt to teach children made me feel astronger connection to her. She was just a young woman,no older than me, trying to keep morale for her students.
It was difficult to fathom the depth of the conflictin Okinawa from our small island but
after visiting the Himeyuri Peace Museum in 2019,
I was able to gain a deeper understanding of the atrocities
that occurred in Southern Okinawa.
Driving down the winding highway, the road wasvery clear. The sun was shining and there were few clouds
in the sky. We pulled up to the Himeyuri Peace Museum inthe mid morning and walked over to the front. With very
few people around, my parents and I joked about how thewind and salt air felt just like being in Hawaii even if all thesigns were in Japanese. The museum grounds weregorgeous, tucked away behind tall trees and a beautiful, oldstone gate. As we entered the first rooms of the museum,
the air still felt light and happy, reflecting the rows ofVisiting Himeyuri Peace Museum
Lily Kumura in Hawaii
I am a third generation Uchinanchu living in theUSA. Both my paternal and maternal grandparents
immigrated from Okinawa pre-WWII.
I knew nothing of the experiences of the Himeyuri
students until my visit to the Himeyuri Peace Museum in
2019. As an American, the history we learned in school
didn’t include the ground war fought in Okinawa, hence nomention of the young female students who were tasked
with caring for the Japanese soldiers concealed in caves.
I recalled one video of a now older woman who was a“nurse” in the cave, and she shared her experience caring
for the injured soldiers. The video was in Japanese and mydaughter interpreted for me. What was painful was her
recounting of the lack of water, food and the severity of thewounded soldiers. These men crying out for help and thepowerlessness of these young girls broke my heart. She also
shared the death of many young girls from suicide using a
grenade, throwing themselves off cliffs, and the bombing
from US warships. There was no more powerful ormeaningful way to convey the atrocities of war than
through the words of the survivors and the artifacts. The
exhibits were laid out well with artifacts and pictures tofurther enmesh me into the history and experiences as thewar was coming to an end.
So why is it important to have museums such as
the Himeyuri Peace Museum for all people to see?
I have visited the Holocaust Museum in
Washington DC, the Hiroshima Museum and more
recently the Himeyuri Peace Museum. While the stories
from each museum are dissimilar, all share in the horrors ofwar. Wars create needless suffering and pain for people—
both innocents and combatants. As an American what I
came away with is that there is a great need to raise theawareness of people that there are no winners in war andto greatly hope that peace prevails. The museum also
provides the younger generation, who are now far removed
from WWII, a factual glimpse into this tragedy that should
never be forgotten.
Thank you for the outstanding Himeyuri Museum.

11

flowers in the central garden.
I had been to several Peace Museums before
Himeyuri, including the Ritsumeikan museum and theHolocaust museum in Washington DC. Coming from Hawaii,
we had heard stories of the terrors of December 7th andthe effort to push back against the Japanese forces. In
history class, we celebrated the success of the Pacifictheater and the strategic brilliance of military commandersof the era. Looking back, I failed to consider the actual
consequences of war.
Reading about the kids of the area still going toschool despite the looming threat of conflict astounded me.
Seeing the clothing worn by the girls of the school, girls wholooked like people I could have known in high school, scared
me. The waves of emotions staring into the frozen faces ofschool children who could never imagine the coming
horrors made my heart race. We scooted into the theaterarea just as the video began again. Listening to the survivors
discuss the hardships they faced running through thetunnels, being nurses and cleaners while living on rations,and running through gunfire, grenades, and shrapnel todrag wounded and dying soldiers into the safety of thecoastal caves was jarring. I couldn’t stop thinking how they
were just children, no older than my cousins. They musthave had dreams, aspirations, crushes, everything that
normal kids have and then it was all over when theJapanese army retreated.
Hearing how the military officials had suddenly
informed the remaining girls that they were no longer
needed in the effort and they would be abandoned where
they stood made me feel their hopelessness. After all they
had done, they were cast out of the caves. One of thestories that stuck with me was hearing about how a survivor
had witnessed their friend hold a grenade to their chest
instead of allowing themselves to face the American forces.
I started to tear up as I heard the testimonies of seeing the
now elderly survivors recall their friends dying around themand how much they themselves could only think of theirown survival.
By the end of the video, I felt like the air in theroom was gone. Why had we been so naive to think that a
war won had no consequences? Regardless of military
brilliance, I could only think of the true victims of World War
II. Innocent men, women, and children were tortured andkilled. Hearing about both sides - American and Japanese treating these children as mere cannon fodder made me
rethink the meaning of winning and losing a war.
My final thoughts as we left the museum was thatthe girls of Himeyuri had not done anything wrong, had

never expected to be dragged into a conflict, and could
never expect that the government that had worked so hardto insist Okinawa was part of Japan could abandon them tohold the line as the rest of the island was evacuated. Truly,
the victims of war were those innocent women and girls,
caught up in an unnecessary conflict.
Stepping out into the warm sunlight, I couldn’t
help but feel sad thinking of the children who would neverfeel this kind of simple pleasure. Going through themuseum made me rethink conflicts throughout the world.
Wars are painted as the good guys defeating the bad guys
but in the end, there is no good or bad in war. There are
only victims, innocent people whose lives are changed anddestroyed. This thought still lingers with me as I live my life.
On one hand, I am glad that I was born never seeing a
conflict of that magnitude and on the other, I want toembrace the girls in those cramped caves and tell them that
their lives are remembered, that they would live on to
inspire peace that they never got to see. We as citizens of
the world must always remember that no conflict comes
without sacrifice and examining the past should lead us tothe conclusion that conflict is never an appropriate answer.

Exhibition of Testimonies of Victims ofForced Mobilization
Yeong-Hwan Kim, Colonial History Museum
The Colonial History Museum will hold an
exhibition of testimonies of victims of forced mobilizationfrom July, "Remember the Victims' Voices! Display thehistory of forced mobilization!” is being held. This exhibitionshows the history of forced mobilization and forced laborthat was erased from the "Industrial Revolution Heritage of
Meiji Japan through the vivid testimonies of 19 victims.
In 2015, when the Meiji Industrial Revolution Heritage Site
was inscribed on the UNESCO World
Heritage List, the Japanese government promised
to hold an exhibition to remember the victims as a "strategy
to help people understand the history of each site" withregard to forced and compulsory labor carried out during
the war. However, the Industrial Heritage Information
Center in Tokyo, which opened to the public in June 2020,
does not have any exhibits against forced mobilization.
The exhibition at the Colonial Museum shows the forcedlabor of Koreans, Chinese, and Allied prisoners of war who
were forced to work at the sites of the Industrial Revolution
Heritage of Meiji Japan, including the Takashima andHashima Island (Gunkanjima) coal mines, the Mitsubishi
12

Nagasaki Shipyard, and the Yawata Steel Works. This
exhibition was made possible with the cooperation of the
POW Research Association, the Oka Masaharu Memorial
Nagasaki Peace Museum, and theNagasaki Association for the Investigation of theTruth about Forced Conscription of Chinese. It is also ameaningful exhibition made possible by the solidarity ofJapanese and Korean citizens of the Museum for Peace.

During the Japanese invasion of China and thePacific War, the Japanese military established a bacterial
warfare system with Unit 731 as the core, secretly carriedout the human experiment and bacterial warfare,committed heinous crime. In order to warn and educate thepeople to rethink war and peace, on the occasion of the40th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist
War in 1985, The Exhibition Hall of Evidences of Crime
Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army was
officially established.
On the 70th anniversary of the victory of theWorld Anti-Fascist War in 2015, the government built the
new exhibition hall. The architecture of the new exhibition
hall was named “The Black Box”, it was designed as atwisted black box. The black box of an airplane is a container
for recording the truth, the design of the architecturemeans that “The Black Box” records the truth of Unit 731,
once “The Black Box” is opened, the truth of Unit 731 will
be revealed. “The Black Box” is a semi-undergroundbuilding with no natural light inside, black and gray are used
to represent the darkness. The architecture does not
express anger, but hopes that the audience will view thehistorical truth from the perspective of human civilizationand peaceful development. “The Black Box” has won the
ArchDaily 2018 China Architecture Award.

“Remember the history of forced labor”

The Black Box

The inside of the “The Black Box” is the exhibition
themed “Inhuman Atrocities--The Exhibition of Evidencesof Crime Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial
Army”, display the criminal evidence of Unit 731 indeveloping bacterial weapon and carrying out bacterial
warfare.The exhibition take the crime and criminal evidence
as the core content, using a large number of criminal relics,
historical archives and oral materials, forming a chain of

The Black Box for Recording the InhumanAtrocities
The Exhibition Hall of Evidences of Crime
Committed by Unit 731 of the JapaneseImperial Army
Liu Ru：Researcher
13evidence, including 10050 criminal relics,8000 pages ofhuman experiment report, 1567 files of“Special Transfer”,
423 hours video data from former members of Unit 731,
testimony of 136 Chinese workers, trial records of 19
Japanese war criminals. Through the criminal relics andarchives, comprehensive and objective display the inhumanatrocities committed by Unit 731. The audience walkthrough the exhibition hall with a mountain of criminal
evidence is like reading a thick file of the Unit 731, thepurpose is to let the audience remember the pain of history,
rethink the war and peace.
Surrounding “The Black Box” is the site of Unit
731, the site of Unit 731 is the largest bacterial warfare site
in the world. Before the end of the war, there were morethan 80 buildings in the Unit 731, in order to destroy theevidence of crime, Unit 731 blew up the buildings andfacilities before retreated. At present, 23 sites have beenpreserved, cover the area of 250000 square meters, themain sites include: site of Unit 731 headquarters, site ofbacterial laboratory and special prison, site of boiler room,site of frostbite laboratory, site of gas laboratory, site of rat
breeding room, site of incinerator. These sites truly record
the crime of Unit 731.

and victims to participate in the activities. For example, Jing
Fuhe, was a victim of the plague spread by Unit 731 in
Harbin, Zhang Shenghong was a witness of the Unit 731
carried out the bacterial warfare in Hunan, they have
served as volunteers in the 731 Exhibition Hall for many
years, by telling their personal experience, let the audienceknow the cruelty of war and the value of peace.
The 731 Exhibition Hall actively cooperates withschool to organize educational activities, and has
established the cooperative relations with more than 70
schools. For example, The 731 Exhibition Hall has
cooperated with Heilongjiang International University toestablish the Peace Archives and Peace Lecture, set up theexhibition with the theme of “War·Memory·Peace” andhold the lectures on the theme of peace in the University.
Through the various forms of educational activities to guidestudents to rethink war and peace.
The 731 Exhibition Hall actively cooperates withcivil peace groups. In 2015, the “Bafang Peace Art
Troupe” ,which formed by retired employees, formallybecame the volunteer performance group of the 731
Exhibition Hall，they composed the song “History of Unit
731 can’t be forgotten”, and performed in the community
for many times. In September 2015, the 731 Exhibition Hall
invited Japan's “Chorus of Devils’ Gluttony” to Harbin, andorganized a joint performance with “Bafang Peace Art
Troupe” in the Harbin Concert Hall, the two sides jointly
convey the voice of “never forget history and cherish
peace”in the form of chorus.
As a member of the war memorial hall, The
731Exhibition Hall implements the spirit of “keep history inmind and never forget the past, cherish peace and create
future”, undertakes the responsibility of protecting the war
sites, recording the history of war, spreading the memory of
war and organizing peace education. It has been more than
30 years since the 731 Exhibition Hall established, morethan 10 millions people come to visit. Recently, due to the
Covid 19, the 731 Exhibition Hall has actively organized
online activities, visitors can visit exhibitions and participate
in educational activities on the website. Under the guidanceof the government, the 731 Exhibition Hall will continue tostrengthen the work on site protection, exhibition andacademic research, actively play its role in peace education.

Site of Unit 731 headquarters

Over the years, the government has made efforts
to protect the site of Unit 731 and apply for the World
Heritage. In 2006, the site of Unit 731 was listed as thenational protection unit, and it was listed in China's
application for World Heritage list in 2011. Through theprotection and display the site, let the audience get close
contact with the war site, directly face the real evidence ofcrime, in order to arouse the audience’s deeply reflection
on war and medicine, war and human nature, war andpeace.
As the national education base, the 731
Exhibition Hall insists on organizing the educational
activities with the theme of “remember history, cherish
peace, create future”, and invites the historical witnesses
14peace from the perspectives of those who are affected by
the conflict rather than academic or civil society
organizations.
The term “museum” is not new to the people in
the area, but their lives had taken them away frommuseums, and many of them had never visited one.
Simultaneously, the term “peace” was perceived as abstract,and it was a term that people did not use in their everyday
lives. People preferred to talk about justice, equality, andself-determination rather than “peace.” Following theworkshop and explanation of what the museum for peaceis, the villagers do not see the museum as a building,exhibition, or collection; rather, they see the museum as atool that they can use to directly communicate their voices
to the target audiences they want to hear the most, such as
the government, military, and people outside of deep south
Thailand.
They did not want a museum in the deep south,
and they saw no reason for people in the area tocommunicate with one another. They preferred that their
voices be heard beyond their territory. Their responses
demonstrated that the villagers understand that themuseum can be used to confront authoritarianism and thatthey expect to gain support from a larger public.
While the conflict is ongoing, communication orpresentation of the violence in various forms, victims'
voices, or different versions of histories and experiences do
not always result in mutual understanding but may instead
lead to another conflict. As a result, the villagers pointed
out that having a peace museum outside of the conflictzone helps to reduce conflict among villagers as well as
between villagers and authorities.
Another concern is that the museum’s locationinfluences public perception and emotion, and that bypresenting or communicating sensitive issues such as themassacre or ideas about great autonomy, the museum may
become a target of military, authorities, or resistancegroups. However, if the museum were to be located outsideof the deep south, it would raise questions and criticism
about the system and structure.
The peace museum is also expected to achieve
academic freedom, as the villagers pointed out that whilepeople in the area are not allowed to publicly discuss selfdetermination, there should be at least a space to discuss
this sensitive topic in order to learn and gain a better
understanding of what led people to believe this way.
For the villagers who live in conflict area, themuseum for peace is not a place where their stories andexperiences are displayed; rather, it is a place where theyIs the concept of a museum for peace
applicable in a conflict zone?
Exploring the answers from the Deep South ofThailand
Patporn Phoothong,Researcher of Peace Museums in Thailand
To what extent does the concept of a peacemuseum contribute to the peace process, and can it beused as a tool for peace education? While museums forpeace play an important role in communicating thehistories of wars, conflicts, and colonization by encouraging
the public to remember, learn, criticize, and prevent
atrocities from occurring again, is the concept of a museum
for peace applicable to ongoing conflict resolution? I asked
these questions while in Japan in 2011 for my field researchon museums for peace, and again in 2017 at theInternational Conference on Museums for Peace in Belfast,
Northern Ireland. It took me a few more years to get someanswers, as in 2019, I began a research project called“Education for Peace in Violence Conflict: Exploring
Possibility of Peace Museum in Southern Frontier Provincesof Thailand,” which was funded by Thailand Science
Research and Innovation. This research has taught me that
if people understand what a museum for peace is, they can
imagine how to use it as a socio-political tool tocommunicate their struggles, needs, and hopes, as well as
to invite the public to join their call for peace.
The conflict in Thailand's deep south consists ofthree provinces, Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat, as well asfour districts in Songkhla province. The majority of theresidents in this region are Muslim, speak Malayu-Pattani,and have their own cultural identity. The study began withan attempt to gain a better understanding of how people in
the area have been faced, how they feel and interact withthe situation during the 17 years since the area's recent
return to violence. According to the Deep South Watch,
there were 21,235 cases of violence, 7,111 deaths, and13,266 injuries between January 2004 and November 2021.
Territories, autonomy, inequality, natural resources, woundhistories, religious and cultural identity are major concerns
among locals, while the government considers these to berelated to national security, with military intervention being
the primary approach.
The study focused on the voices of local people
who had limited access to resources and were excluded
from decision making, such as villagers in rural and conflictareas, and youth who dropped out of the educational
system, in order to gain perceptions on the museum for15

see themselves as people who make decisions and design
what and how to communicate, and who are the primarytarget. They also expected the museum to be independentand to maintain a balance between different communities,
such as between Muslim and Buddhist communities.
Finally, they hoped for “humanity dignity” in themuseum for peace, which would include military personnel,
authorities, and resistance groups, leading to a better
understanding of where others come from.

attacked my peaceful village and kidnapped me at gunpoint.
I still hear my mother’s cries pleading with them: Leave myson. He is but a child. Take me instead. They took me to abush camp deep in the jungle and trained me to kill. Then
one day, seven years later, in 1993, I escaped from a violent
battle between the government of Sudan’s army and theguerrilla rebels of the Sudanese People Liberation Army
(SPLA) that had kept me as their prisoner-soldier. I fled into
the wild with my gun. It was an AK 47, heavier than mychild’s body. For 14 days, I roamed about the bush avoiding
wild animals, snakes, scorpions and the rebels. Two otherchild soldiers who escaped as I did, joined me. We suffered;
we were hungry and thirsty, and exhausted. Then one day,when one of us was considering suicide as an option, we
spotted a UN truck. They took us to their station and later,
I looked for where my mother was. She too had to run awayfrom our village called Magwi. The UN took us to a refugee
camp in Uganda at Achoi-pii. I was free! I vowed that day
that no one’s childhood should ever be stolen. I came to
Canada as a refugee intent on keeping my vow.
In 2014 I met Dr. Sultan Somjee, the Founder of
the Community Peace Museums in Kenya, and we talked
and talked about the concept, the purpose and the strategy
of making a peace museum in a village. Three years went by.
I didn’t realize Dr Somjee was training me to start a peacemuseum. In turn, I talked, using the Internet, with theChild Soldiers in my village about building a peace museum.
The very idea of a peace museum that belonged to the Child
Soldiers gave us a hope. Many of us, if not all of us live day
by day, with a hangover of a deep trauma.
In 2018 we started working. Dr. Somjee made an
initial donation, and we bought bricks. Two former Child
Soldiers volunteered to offload, carry and store the bricks.
A plan was sketched on the ground and a waist high circularwall constructed while we waited for more money to come.
In 2018 we brought together nine talented people in thecommunity, including two former Child Soldiers, and madea Board. I worked two jobs as a care worker in Vancouver tosave money and we bought poles. They were curated forthe frame of the roof. The wall stood like raised circular well
for about a year while we waited for the rains to come, andthe right size and strength of grass called abii that’s special
for thatching the roof, to grow. Then Dr. Kimberly Baker
donated some money for thatching in 2020. Finally, theformer Child Soldiers constructed a frame on top of thecircular wall and the thatching began. My dream of making
a peace museum for and by the Child Soldiers was now
becoming a reality. It put esteem in the Child Soldiers. They
found space to tell their stories, make peace and advocate
for peace in my 40-year-old conflicted country.

A small farmer village in Pattani Province, where youth
migration is relatively high due to economic and conflictfactors.

Rice, rubber, sugar palm, and coconut are among the deep
south's economic crops, but due to a lack of labour,a large number of paddy fields have been abandoned.

The Story of the Community Museum of theAfrican Child Soldier
Lomudak Okech: Founder, The Community Peace Museumof the African Child Soldier andAdviory Committee Member of INMP
The story of the Community Museum of theAfrican Child Soldier is as much of my story as of building of
its mud walls and putting sheaves of grass to make thethatched roof. Thus, I interweave the story of my life as achild soldier with the story of the peace museum.
I was a child of eleven years when the rebels
16

The community donated material culture and wehave started to collect photographs of the Child Soldierskilled during fights or kidnaped, and had not returned home.
We are talking with a local artist to work on five wall
paintings on the mud walls as and when funds become
available for paint and labour. The paintings will show the
kidnapping of the Child Soldiers, their life in the bush, theirescape and reunion with the family. Other paintings will beof Mato Oput, the traditional Acholi reconciliation ritualand the concept of Peace called An-Locoli in the Acholi
culture. We say An-Locoli has five faces of peace. These are
Jojok-Amalo (the Supreme Being), Kitgi (Nature) Ludito
pacu (the Elders) Kwarewa, (the Ancestors) and Dul-maogure (the Community). We shall be using the material
culture, the wall art and oral stories to speak to the visitors
and for peace education for local school visits.
An important feature of the Community Museumof the African Child Soldier is wang-oo. This is a traditional
gathering place for the Child Soldiers and the community to
sit in a circle, often in the evening around a fire, to discussmatters of concern such as conflicts, peace-building andreconciliation. In my discussions with ethnographer Dr.
Somjee, he insisted that wang-oo was an essential space tohave in an African peace museum to retain local customs of
dialogue and oral traditions. True, at the wang-oo, speakers
compete to speak in proverbs, parables and riddles encasedin songs and stories of peace. An-Locoli is a pan-African
concept also called Utu in eastern Africa and Ubuntu in
South Africa. Nelson Mandela used this African philosophy
to initiate Truth and Reconciliation project to come to termswith the horror of the apartheid government. Dr. Somjee
pledged to pay for the wang-oo at our peace museum, thus,
by example, setting the donation drive to complete thedisplays.
The Community Museum of the African Child
Soldier is made piece by piece as funds become available.
Every mud brick and sheaf of the abii grass sings for peace
when tropical winds, rain and sun bath it in the healing
hands of mother nature telling stories of the Child Soldiersof Africa on the path to seeking peace and recovery.

How a mobile app is helping students accesslearning content and mitigate climate change
Timothy Gachanga, Nairobi Kenya
When COVID-19 was first reported in Kenya on
March 13, 2019, education at every level – from elementary
school to professional training – was disrupted and had toshift online. Many learning institutions including
universities were unprepared for online or distance learningmodes of learning. Those that were unable to shift online
were forced to close down indefinitely. Some took over a
year to figure out how to resume learning.
Internet connectivity presented anotherchallenge. The staff and students had to be trained on how
to use education portals, Moodle, Zoom or Google Meet.
Going online required teachers and students to haveinternet bundles which according to UK firm Cable.co.uk,
costs Sh240 (USD2.25) for one GB of the Internet. This was
too expensive for many to afford.
I was teaching two courses at the university
during this time. When schools were closed I had to figureout how I was to continue teaching and how my students
would access learning content despite the connectivity
challenges.
To solve these challenges, I developed two mobile
apps, the Conflict Resolution and Transformation
Toolkit and the Peace and Conflict Reporting Toolkit to help
my learners access learning content. Students downloaded
the apps for self-study and I connected via WhatsApp or
SMS for those who did not have access to the internet.
The Conflict Resolution and Transformation
Toolkit app aims to provide learners with a basic
understanding of the field of conflict resolution andtransformation and how these concepts can be applied inpractice to peacebuilding. It covers 11 topics and aims tocover both theoretical and practical issues, from the natureof conflict, its analysis, mediation, dialogue, restorative
justice and post-conflict reconstruction.
17

The Peace and Conflict Reporting Toolkit isdesigned to support those who wish to learn about
reporting in situations of conflict. The app also covers 11
topics. This includes functions of media in society, peace
journalism, basic rules of peace journalism, reporting on
the peace process among others.
Through the toolkits, students can listen torecorded lectures, watch videos, the lecturer can giveassignments via Google Forms, students can access casestudies or journal articles and can havecollaborative activities such as Collaborative Wiki, journal
writing etc.
By creating an app, rather than hosting thematerials on an existing university website, I put into
consideration the increasing mobile penetration in Kenya
and addiction to social networks among young people.
According to Deloitte Kenya,[1] the rise of the smartphone
continues to accelerate, and Kenya now ranks among theleading global adopters. This is putting pressure on
businesses to transform their service delivery to a mobilefirst experience.
By developing the mobile app, students candownload and access much of the content offline, wherever
they are, only requiring a connection to stream content
hosted by other platforms. It also makes it easier for me to
update the content.
Though the apps were primarily intended for use
by the students I was teaching during the session, theircoverage has been much wider. Statistics from Google PlayStore show that over 900 students from different countries
across the globe have downloaded and are actively using
the Conflict Resolution and Transformation Toolkit.
Though COVID-19 was a catalyst to thisinnovation, Climate change also motivated me to develop
the app. As lecturers struggled to manage their situations,the majority resorted to the traditional way of teachingwhere they would send notes to students to read. Since
reading online was expensive many students printed thenotes instead. This led to an increase in the use of paper
which leads to deforestation. Deforestation is a major causeof climate change. My innovation seeks to slow down
climate change by reducing over-reliance on papers inteaching at the university.
Universities in Kenya use enormous amounts ofpapers on a daily basis. According to the Commission of
University Education (CUE, 2019), there are454,826 students enrolled in universities in Kenya, 15,186
lecturers and 5,113 courses being offered at the universities.
If we are to quantify the tones of papers used to produce

learning modules, notes and exam booklets, it is enormous.
This is contributing to a reduction in forest cover in the
country.
When Kenya gained independence in 1963, 10%of the country was covered with forest. By 2009, thisnumber had dropped to 6% as a result of charcoal burning,
paper production, timber production, agricultural
expansion, unregulated logging and urbanization. This has
not only contributed to climate change but has contributed
to soil erosion, increased flooding, and dramaticallyreduced availability of freshwater during droughts. The
apps do away with the paperwork. Instead of printing
modules, students are only supposed to download thecourse on their mobile phones.
In November 2021, my innovation, together with
25 others, was recognized as one of the innovative
teachings happening unreported in Africa. You candownload the report here: Creating digital content anddelivering digital learning in African universities.
You can also read this short piece in University
World News: Innovative teaching is happening – often
unsupported
Thank you[1] Global Mobile Consumer Survey: The Kenyan Cut
https://www2.deloitte.com/za/en/kenya/pages/aboutdeloitte/press-releases/deloitte-releases-2019-report-onkenya-s-mobile-consumer-behavio.html

18

the brutal war that had been raging in Bosnia since 1992. It
was in Dayton that the three warring nations sent leaders
to participate in weeks of conflict resolution, after which an
agreement was finally negotiated and the fighting ended.
The museum’s Peace Accords exhibit wasawarded the AASLH (American Association for State andLocal History) Award for exhibit excellence. The museum
also published an interactive online exhibit so that it can beviewed by anyone from home, as a response to Covid-19.
The exhibit includes interactive kiosks with stories, videos,
photographs, music, and educational maps that reflect andteach on the realities of war and the difficult path towards
peace. As a permanent exhibit in the museum, it is acontinual reminder of the museum’s roots and conception
as well as the enduring legacy of peace in our communityand our responsibility to uphold it.
The leading curator of the museum’s Peace
Accords exhibit, Dr. Mary Ramey, met with two dozen
Bosnian high school students visiting Dayton on an
exchange program in September. The museum also recently
signed an agreement with the Srebrenica Genocide
Memorial to be partners as well as the newly-formed, Kyiv
Peace Museum.
Additionally, the museum has collaborated with
the Austrian Service Abroad program to bring two Austrian
students to intern at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial
and the Dayton International Peace Museum each year.
There has been global interest due to the fact that one
young man is Austria-Serbian while the other is AustriaBosnian. The first student is scheduled to arrive in January.
Our summer intern, from Northwestern University, createda four-minute video reflecting on the history of student
protests in the United States.
When the museum is finally ready to open its
doors, the community will be welcomed to view and reflect
on the following exhibits:

The Dayton International Peace Museum
Salma Albezreh
The Dayton International Peace Museum has
been riding the wave of change for over a year now, with along-awaited move to a new building. The original building,
known as the Isaac Pollack House, was sold at the end of
September. Although the museum was founded in 2004,
the Isaac Pollack House dates back to 1877 and is listed on
the National Registry of Historic Places. The house served
the museum well for 17 years, but we simply outgrew our
first home.
The new location in downtown Dayton’s
Courthouse Square has its own unique history. It wascompleted in 1850 and is acknowledged as one of thegreatest examples of Greek-revival architecture in the
country. No less than nine United States presidents,
including Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William J.
Clinton campaigned on her steps. It was historically a place
for gathering and community-wide announcements.
The new space is located in the heart of Dayton
with three times as much exhibit space as the old museum,as well as a studio, cafe, a stage, a kid’s room, and a
dedicated classroom. Much of the past year has been spenttransitioning to 10 North Ludlow Street, with many
community members volunteering their support in person
and online. Construction is nearing completion.
For the International Day of Peace, the museum
organized a gathering inside the new, but unfinishedmuseum and celebrated with live music from a choir groupcalled the World House Choir. The name makes reference toMartin Luther King Jr ’s description of the greater humancommunity as residents of one big interconnected home.
Guest speakers included Dion Greene, whose father diedduring a mass shooting in 2019, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley,
Judge Jack Meagher and museum director Kevin Kelly, all ofwhom gave remarks to the large audience.
The museum has been working with the designsof artists Ray Zupp and Tristan Cupp to ensure the newChildren’s room gives kids the opportunity to explore
kindness and empathy through their natural curiosity andlove for animals. This will include books, interactive games,
toys, and many stories featuring animals. Meetings havealso ensued to begin planning the annual kid’s summer
peace camp. A peace poem by noted writer, Wendell Berry,
will also be used throughout the children’s space.
November 2021 marked the 26th anniversary of
the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, an agreement that ended

The Story of the Dayton Peace Accords,
Gandhi Original Photo Collection
The Peace Labyrinth
Peace Builder ’s Digital Exhibit
The History of Student Activism
Building Peace Through ArtsThe Peace Pole: A 12’ artwork created by local artists
The MLK color photo collection will be the first
temporary exhibit in the new building, running fromFebruary through April. It will feature 45 color images ofDr.King’s life and his journey across America. The
19

photographer, who is now nearly 80, has been invited to
speak about his reflections and experiences capturing thehistoric story.
We are also excitedly anticipating a Hiroshima
survivor tree sapling that will be arriving at the museum
where it will grow and have its own exhibit. Relatedly, we
had our second Atomic Bomb memorial ceremony inAugust on Facebook live, somberly remembering why thework of peacebuilding must endure.
The museum has been engaging with fellow
institutions for peace and education both in-person andonline over the past few weeks. The museum’s Executive
Director, Kevin Kelly, presented at the INMP and the
University of Milan’s peace museum conference on
December 10th and at the Kent State University’s peaceeducation conference in September. He also served recently
as a moderator at the University of Dayton Human Rights
Conference.
The Dayton International Peace Museum has
been defined by change over the past year, as has much of
the world’s communities. As each community shows
resilience and grace, the Dayton International Peace
Museum hopes to provide hope, inspiration, andemblematic change to all those who walk on the path ofpeace.

From little things big things grow: anintroduction to ANMP
Eva Rodriguez Riestra,
Australian Network of Museums for Peace
This article is a brief introduction to the people,
ideas and projects behind the newly-formed Australian
Network of Museums for Peace.
What started as a modest idea to rescue animportant collection of peace posters has become awonderful project: a lively and rigorous examination of therole of museums in the work of peace, an expansion of theidea of a peace museum, and the establishment of a
network which has started to connect collections, museums,
trails and places relating to peace and social justice.
We believe that the creation of a new Peace
Museum for Australia is a sign of optimism and resilience,
and a form of peaceful activism which we hope will havelong-lasting positive impacts on our communities andsociety.
According to Joyce Apsel in Introducing Peace
Museums 1 , peace museums are a distinct group of
museums whose content and activities focus on culturesand histories of peace, and include antiwar and antiviolence
messages. They come in different shapes and sizes, but all
share the purpose of promoting and understanding peace
as an ongoing and significant part of human history.
Peace museums are repositories of the material
culture of peace, including posters, art, banners andpetitions, as well as of antiwar and social justice
movements fostering nonviolence, disarmament, andconflict resolution.
Peace Museums bring to light complicated andlargely unknown or ignored peace histories.
Our project was conceived following thedismantling of the Posters for Peace Gallery in the Mackie
Building at the University of Sydney Centre for Peace andConflict Studies. The gallery provided a physical space for
imagining a culture of peace with justice in the world, andsupported a community of scholars and activists byproviding a site of resistance to cultures of violence and aplace for dialogue and education about the potential for
creating cultures of peace through human rights,
nonviolence and reconciliation.

The Peace Accords exhibit

A view of the new building we are moving into.

1

Apsel, Joyce Introducing Peace Museums Oxon and

New York: Routledge, 201620

Following closure of the Gallery and removal of the posters
from the walls of the Mackie Building, a significant locus ofcommunity and student inspiration and activism was lost.
Efforts to find a new location resulted in most of the posters
being rehung at Soka Gakkai International (SGI) Australia
community centre in Homebush. The posters were safe, butthere was an ongoing desire to further expand theeducational, social and inspirational aspects of the former
gallery and share with a wider audience.
Our first project envisaged the digitisation of theposters in order to make them available to a wider audience,
whilst also preserving the images for future generations. At
the same time, former members of the Centre for Peace
and Conflict Studies were pursuing the proposal for a peacemuseum in Australia, but were struggling to find a physicalvenue - so the idea of creating a virtual peace museum
emerged.
In February 2020 the University of New England
hosted a conference in Sydney titled Rethinking Peace,
Conflict and Governance. At the conference, Kazuyo
Yamane presented a paper on Education for Peace andHuman Rights at Museums for Peace which further inspired
discussions about establishing a peace museum in Australia,
and the creation of the working group.
The lockdowns due to Covid19 started in March
2020, and the working group has only met online, taking
advantage of zoom technology to convene regularly formutually supportive and engaging discussions which have
kept the project alive and resulted in several inspiringconference presentations.
The limitations andopportunities presented by the pandemic have impacted
on the development of the idea for a museum. We haveobserved how many museums have been struggling toremain viable after months of restrictions to visitors inperson, and heard about how some have moved totravelling exhibitions while others have focused on a virtual
digital presence, but always with the hope of returning to amore interactive physical museum experience in the future.
We have been inspired to embrace theselimitations and connect them to a vision to establish themuseum as a network and a virtual space which also
extends to existing spaces for peace. Perhaps one day
ANMP will be partly housed in a conventional building, but
we feel that this start as a virtual space enables us toliterally think outside the box, and greatly emphasises anagenda of education, resistance, equality and access.
While we work through the logistics of our virtual“home”, we have been participating and engaging with anumber of initiatives dedicated to promoting dialogue

about peace as an active process that includes dynamic
spaces through a living peace museum and the concept ofpeace trails.
In 2020 our group participated in the INMP
conference with two collaborative papers: Visualising Peacewith Justice: Narratives of Resistance, Education and
Dialogue and Building Cultures of Peace through Spaces for
Peace: The Creation of a Peace Museum for Australia, andtwo individual papers Universal Ethos by Lindsay Mell andLest We Forget Tomorrow: Peace Trails for Australia byPeter Herborn.
After the conference, two members of
the ANMP working group, Frank Hutchinson and Eva
Rodriguez Riestra, joined the INMP as advisors, and havebeen contributing to INMP initiatives such as the newsletter.
Another member of the ANMP working group, Peter
Herborn, was elected to the Board of the online Australian
Living Peace Museum (ALPM). The ALPM is currently
working on new online exhibits and is upgrading its website.
In September 2021 we were involved insupportingtheRaising
Peace
Festival
https://raisingpeace.org.au.
Initiated by International
Volunteers for Peace (IVP), the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and theIndependent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN), theeleven day online festival celebrated peace and the people
and organisations that work for peace. ANMP members
were part of the group organising events as part of thefestival, including the closing panel in which ANMP
members Anne Noonan and Eva Rodriguez Riestra joined anumber of other key speakers in reflecting on the future of
the peace movement in Australia.
In November 2021 ANMP working group member
Eva Rodriguez Riestra participated in the INMP webinar
Artivism: Art and Peace with a paper examining some of theways by which art in public spaces can contribute to peaceand social justice.
Most recently, ANMP members Nina Burridgeand Anne Noonan, supported by Liz Bowen and Wendy
Lambourne, prepared an innovative presentation for the
conference Trails of Peace: between history, memory andcommunication held in Milan, Italy and online. The
presentation comprised video footage and images taken at
the old Quarantine Station in North Head, at the entrance
to Sydney Harbour, telling the story of this historic site
intertwining themes of disease and health, detention anddiscrimination, and war and peace. Presented as an
example of a peace trail, the video we submitted for the
conference highlighted the significance of Aboriginal
heritage and lessons for how we move forward as21

custodians as Country in peaceful relationships with eachother and our natural and built environment.
A special acknowledgement to fellow ANMP
member, Frank Hutchinson, who was instrumental andinspirational in supporting these various presentations andevents, even though not always so visible in front of thecamera publicly he was always present with the rest of us
contributing to our meetings and pushing us forward.
The camaraderie and commitment of our small
team has kept us going and we are looking forward to
realising our vision of a peace museum in Australia in the
not-too-distant future.

Raising Peace Festival Closing Panel
The Future of the peace Movement in Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYgQJ2BOUNE&t=1s
INMP Webinar 2021 Artivism: Art and Peace
https://inmp-gallery.museumsforpeace.org/art-peacewebinar
ANMP presentation Art + Peace and Social Justice in the
public domain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9VRrEyb6YY
Conference 2021 Trails of Peace: between history, memoryand communication
ANMP presentation Pandemic to Peace building - creating
cultures of peace as the new normal starts at 8 hours 56
minutes Posters for Peace GAllery meeting with Sekai
Holland 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR8OK9bIXbQ

References and links:
Apsel, Joyce Introducing Peace Museums Oxon and New
York: Routledge, 2016
Australian Network of Museums for Peace (ANMP)
website (holding page)https://australiannetworkofmuseumsforpeace.com/
INMP 2020 Conference collaborative paper
Visualising Peace with Justice: Narratives of Resistance,
Education and Dialogue
https://sites.google.com/view/inmp-2020/p72-visualisingpeace-with-justice-narratives-of-resistance-educationand?authuser=0
INMP 2020 Conference collaborative paper
Building Cultures of Peace through Spaces for Peace: The
Creation of a Peace Museum for Australia
https://sites.google.com/view/inmp-2020/pn79-buildingcultures-of-peace-through-spaces-for-peace-the-creationof-a

Posters for Peace Gallery meeting with Sekai Holland 2014

INMP 2020 Conference individual paper by Lindsay Mell
Towards a Universal Ethos
https://sites.google.com/view/inmp-2020/p61-towards-auniversal-ethos?authuser=0
INMP 2020 Conference individual paper by Peter Herborn
Lest We Forget Tomorrow: Peace Trails for Australia
https://sites.google.com/view/inmp-2020/p12-cities-forpeace/p14-lest-we-forget-tomorrow-peace-trails-foraustralia?authuser=0

All of Berlin as an Anti-War Museum
By Philipp Sonntag in Berlin
Shortly after the Second World War, Robert Jungk
looked in vain for a remnant of the Anti-War Museum in thewide rubble field of Berlin. At that moment all of Berlin

Raising Peace Festival 2021
https://raisingpeace.org.au/

22

appeared to him as a kind of involuntary museum about theconsequences of the war. He saw exactly what had been
warned about in the small Anti-War Museum in Berlin from
1925: It had been founded in 1925 by the Berlin pacifist
Ernst Friedrich. With his photo documentation "War against
War" he had shown the horrors of the First World War. Hiscollection was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.

The concentration on cyber war increases the susceptibility
to disruptions enormously. After the start of any war, thegreatest danger arises from the chaotic use of nuclear
weapons during war.
The declaration of the “18 atomic physicists in
Göttingen” was effectively “anti-war”, after theirconclusion: “We refuse to build nuclear weapons”. A second
step was helpful for this, the “War Impact Study” in 1971. I
was responsible for the damage assessment computer
programs, we examined both, the damage and the
dynamics of the escalation. What we had to use ourimagination for at that time were possible theaters of war.
They are better known by now. For instance Andreas
Conrad describes an example on October 26th, 2021 in the
Berliner Tagesspiegel, p. 26: "The Americans' secret bombplans": From the perspective of the Strategic Air Command(SAC) of the USA in the 1950s, there was a "worthwhilegoal" among many, the headquarters of the Soviet militaryadministration in Germany, a building on Karlshorster
Waldowallee.
Such plans for nuclear war are generally subject
to the highest level of secrecy. A few years ago, however,the "Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 ...
SM129-56" of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), created in
1956, was de-classified and thus was made publicly
available. Another SAC study cites 68 points on East Berlin
such as “machine tools”, “rubber tires”, “railway repair
companies” or even “population” as targets that should be
erased with three atomic blows. There were also goals in
Brandenburg. Hardly anything of West Berlin would haveremained habitable, mainly because of fallout.
What is currently new is the politically “tolerated hightreason”, in which former staff members and others in high
THE NATO bodies write their “military thrillers”. Their
descriptions are much more realistic than scientificcontributions to “security conferences”. It's suggestive ofarmament and violence. That is dangerous, it dramatizes
escalation!
An example: Richard Shirreff: “War with Russia an urgent warning from senior military command “, Coronat(2016), a novel and bestseller that presents itself morally: If
you do not counter the expansively agile Putin in time withresolute conventional armament, then everything will
escalate "alike in a novel".
Richard Shirreff held a high position in the NATOas a British general. He describes the discussions imaginable
in the decision-making bodies of the NATO and Russia
during the expanding conflicts in Europe authentically andrealistically in a way that no one else could. It is directly

The current museum
In 1982, 15 years after Friedrich’s death, the AntiWar Museum was reopened again. In 2021 it is headed byFriedrich's grandson Tommy Spree, see
https://www.anti-kriegs-museum.de/
The museum shows photos, documents andobjects from both world wars, including medals, postcards
glorifying war, diaries and letters from soldiers and photosof the seriously injured. You can also see war toys from past
centuries. A large world map provides information on
current trouble spots. The museum also covers modern war
weapons such as chemical and biological warfare agents.
And it presents the effects of nuclear weapons in many
ways. One can only hope, that this will not again be a kindof forecast of a coming destruction of Berlin - and globally.
Despite all the anxiety, one can at least hope a little better
now, after the number of THE NATO nuclear weapons
stationed in West Germany was reduced at the end of theCold War. Before that, there was an unbelievably large
number of nuclear weapons in Germany. Although we
know: Any attempt to defend West Germany with THE
NATO atomic bombs would destroy our country much thesame as an attack of an aggressor against us with atomic
bombs. 1964-1971 I examined this in all details, within theframework of the Vereinigung Deutscher Wissenschaftler(VDW, Association of German Scientists), in the German“War Impact Study” about war consequences and war
prevention (Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker (Hrsg.):„Kriegsfolgen und Kriegsverhütung”, Hanser München,1971).
The dynamics of escalation
Humanity has very often stumbled into wars.
Current electronics exacerbate the problem. Modern
armaments development leads to unwanted escalation
risks. Thus a war gradually gets worse and worse.
Huge sums of money are spent on “command and control”.
With rising complexity, also controllability and disturbancewill increase (Peter Otto and Philipp Sonntag: Wege in die
Informationsgesellschaft - Steuerungsprobleme in
Wirtschaft und Politik. München dtv, 1985).
23

about decisions about war and peace - about the threshold
to III. World War to escalate into nuclear war. It's like a novel,
and for instance describes (on pages 389 ff) for how many
hours an extensive the NATO attack could incapacitate thecommand centers of Russia with details such as: Could it bethat Russian counter-attacks would be shot down by"confused" Russian anti-missile missiles - at least in theinterim?
More armament per se creates more complexity.
Thus inevitably it will be more difficult to control escalation
avoidance. Politically, it is about an emotional control of the"flexible response", which requires an enormous rise ofarms and troops, for any scale of war. Inevitably such aneffort will prepare and practice a pronounced readiness forwar.
In the novel, Russia decides as a sovereign power
and appears to be uncompromisingly ready to use violence.
The situation is completely different with the NATO and its
28 states – where for instance Hungary and Greece “asfriends of Russia” can veto in the bodies of the EU and theNATO at any time and thus at least delay actions.
It has been openly discussed for decades that theconventional armed forces of many nations are poorly
coordinated and thus unnecessarily expensive. It is clearthat if the West were to invest its economic power in theNATO as radically - and locally ready to escalate - as Russia
did, then the West's superiority would be strong at every
level of escalation.
What is new in the “novel” is the portrayal of a“logic” of high readiness for war, despite the possibility of
extreme destruction on both sides.

Prevention of war is above all emotional. I would like to also
express it in a novel-like manner: the young Putin was inLeipzig for a long time, if he then would have a lover there,that fact could have made him now hesitate more than all
the fear of military defeat, which he does not believe inanyway.
In one of his last public appearances at the VDW,
Egon Bahr emphasized cyber war as a current major threat,
especially in connection with atomic bombs. In the context
of the VDW, the escalation risk was examined in particularfrom 1964 to 1971: Escalation has a powerful own dynamic
to expend. It cannot be limited effectively, neither on thetechnical level, nor strategically, and thus in no way
politically.
Today our only hope is the common recognitionof potential opponents, that the common interest against
destruction has to be common priority. A chaos would arise
if both opponents would try at the beginning to destroy the
management staff of the other side. Any attempts to deescalate to a ceasefire would then be made largely
impossible.
For 55 years I have heard the argument that
nuclear deterrence has prevented conventional wars.
However, precisely because the greatest powers feelreasonably safe, there are particularly many “proxy wars”
and many levels of violence - while the export of weapons
is gigantic. The extent of the violence is widely known
through the media. There were 158 violent crises in 2019,of which 27 were armed conflicts and wars, mostly in Africa.
One reason: when the United Nations was founded, themember states retained their power to politicize interests.
This systematically prevents the investigation andpunishment of war crimes.

Anti-war requires anti-escalation
War avoidance succeeds by emphasizing thecommon interest of the NATO and Russia to avoid
destruction. That is also the direct interest of many statesin the border area. Cold warriors see it, as “reported” in thenovel: Russian rocket attacks on Berlin and Warsaw are
openly discussed (on page 385).
To provoke Putin into a new arms race isdangerous for him and for us. Far more effective than arms
could be if we intertwine Russia with us economically, as
China is trying to do globally. By buying a lot of gas from
Russia, we are a valuable customer for Putin - it is not worth
it for him to destroy us. Nevertheless we have to stop a
Russian expansion, in order to set a borderline. Meantime
we shall protest against human rights violations - but
hesitant sanctions and "punishments" are probably
ineffective - also emotionally.

UP - United People
Globally, there is definitely an awareness of thenecessary structural changes. There is still a lot to be done
before we can really “Unite People”, and thus form apowerful organization of “UP”, replacing the “UN”, called
the United Nations. A forward-looking ray of hope is that it
was possible for the first time to bring criminal officials,
even heads of state, to justice to an international court. The
multi-year chief prosecutor at the "International Court ofJustice in The Hague" has written a book about obstacles
and successes from her own experience:
Carla Del Ponte: „Ich bin keine Heldin – Mein
langer Kampf für Gerechtigkeit“, Westend Verlag,
Frankfurt/Main, 2021.
She wrote on page 9/10, on Serbia and Rwanda:
24

“With Slobodan Milosevic, for the first time a former headof state had to stand trial for serious war crimes. He wascharged with genocide, crimes against humanity, massacresand deportations. And almost the entire government of
Rwanda, which was responsible for the cruel slaughter of
the Tutsi, was on trial. In just 100 days in 1994, members ofthe Hutu majority killed around 75 percent of the Tutsi
minority, and also killed moderate Hutu who refused toparticipate in the genocide. For the first time there was aconviction for genocide in front of an international court in
1998. A milestone. ... 90 defendants were found guilty in
the Yugoslavia tribunal, 62 in the Rwanda tribunal. "Carla Del Ponte emphasizes the current further
development of international criminal law as futureoriented, in particular through a "Rome Statute" passed in
1998, which 123 states have signed and ratified. The US hadsigned it but not ratified it afterwards. So American’s
responsible for war crimes is left out. Criminal dictators canusually protect themselves first. There must then be
substantial changes internally, or strong externalinterventions, before the accused can possibly be
extradited. And the United Nations does not have a “world
police” that is respected by all states.
I estimate the financial expenditure for war
preparation to be a thousand times greater than the cost of- mostly voluntary - efforts to avoid war. Essential is theassociation "War Resisters’ International" (WRI), see
https://wri-irg.org/en
In October 2021 the centenary of WRI wascelebrated in the Anti-War Museum.
Even Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, the director of thegovernment-affiliated DGAP (German Society for Foreign
Policy) warns (Berliner Tagesspiegel November 2, 2021, p.
7): “German security policy is still underfunded”, and shewants “diplomacy to function properly and improve foreign
policy ”, also to avoid “mishaps” like in Afghanistan.
Acutely it would be important to prevent theheavy export of arms. After all, Germany is no longer anoutspoken warmonger - the Foreign Minister tries to be akind of peace broker globally.

and at the beginning of the articles of the association theintention is clear:"Article 1: Name = The name of this network
should be International Network of Museums for Peace,abbreviated INMP.
Article 2: Purposes = INMP, a non-profit
organization, wants to contribute to world peace bystrengthening the work of museums, galleries and libraries
working for peace, organizing international conferences,making full use of information media and issuing
publications to promote cooperation between support
museums, libraries and galleries working for peace. These
are collectively referred to in these statutes as ‘Museums
for Peace’. This also includes research, training andeducation projects. "And that includes the Anti-War Museum in Berlin,which is an associated member.
INMP (the International Network of Peace Museums) was
founded in 1992 when the first International Conference ofPeace Museums was held at the University of Bradford in
England in 1992. Today many peace museums exist in Japan.

Every contribution is important. An example oflocal activities exists in Berlin: The NETZWERK ZUKUNFT(network future) was the organizer of 12 projects in 2020,
which were funded by various sponsors and local
institutions for the education of the youth. The projects led
by Michael Sommer are primarily about further training foryoung people in the areas of nonviolent communication.
This includes areas such as “understanding the baby”, to theintegration of young migrants, and further to sociallythemed computer games.
Our special responsibility in Berlin is: The firstnuclear weapon had been developed in order to destroy

The Network of Museums for Peace
But in order to fundamentally overcome global
killing one needs more fundamental considerations thanthose that come from institutions that are funded bygovernments. Such considerations are essential in the
global network of Museums for Peace, see
http://www.ipb.org/members/international-network-ofmuseums-for-peace/25

Berlin. So, Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered three months
after the capitulation of Germany. This happened out offear of a German atomic bomb – which did not exist, andwhich was then prevented after the war by the "Göttinger
18" atomic physicists, by Albert Schweitzer, and by othercommitments. The tradition, and difficult task, of limiting
and controlling nuclear weapons has to be carried on.

bings, those who were within 3.5 kilometers of
the hypocenter area within two weeks of the bombings,
those who were affected by radiation when they were
engaged in the rescue work at the time of and after thebombings, and those who were unborn at the time of thebombings. Currently, there are 4,404 atomic bomb victims
registered with the Korean Red Cross Society (as of June 30
this year), of which 2,043 are still alive. At this meeting, thecommittee reported the analysis of the actual conditions ofatomic bomb victims and the survey results on their healthand welfare needs. According to the report, the atomic
bomb victims were still suffering from diseases and otherproblems even after 75 years. The Korea Institute for Healthand Social Affairs conducted an analysis (July 2019-March
2020) using public data such as health insurance application
data, national cancer registration data, and data ofregistration of death, and found that not only atomic bomb
victims but also their children had health problems thatwere suspected to be related to radiation exposure. The
incidence of cancers such as stomach cancer and colorectal
cancer was higher among atomic bomb victims and theirchildren than in the general population, and the prevalenceof chronic diseases and neuropsychiatric disorders such as
rare and intractable diseases, thyroid diseases, chronicrhinitis, pharyngitis, sinusitis, skin diseases, headaches,mood disorders, and neurotic or stress-related physicaldisorders was also higher. The frequency and expenditureof using medical care was also higher among the children of
atomic bomb victims than among the general population,and the use of outpatient care was particularly high, thecommittee explained. Ministry of Health and Welfare isconducting a follow-up study to analyze the causal relations
between atomic bomb damage and disease, as well as
genetic effects.
The Committee discussed Hapcheon-gun, South
Gyeongsang Province (near the Atomic Bomb Survivors
Welfare Hall and Museum), as a priority area to construct amemorial facility. Hapcheon-gun is currently home to thelargest number of atomic bomb survivors (331, or 15
percent of the total number of survivors). Minister Kwon
Deok Cheol said, "We plan to take all possible measures topromote the memorial project so that the victims of the
tragic history will be remembered, and the wounds andsuffering of the atomic bombing will be healed even a little.
We will also make sure that the memorial facility is used asa place for history education for human rights and peace”.
Reporter Lee Jae-ho (Contact: japan@hani.co.kr )https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/d79dc2513035caee6840
9c7b54f0e74d6fb95cf2

South Korean Government Pushes for
Establishment of 'Memorial Facility for Korean
Atomic Bomb Victims' in Hapcheon... 'It Will Be
Used for History Education'
11/5 (Fri.) Hankyoreh Newspaper“Ministry of Health and Welfare's Committee to Support
Korean Atomic Bomb Victims deliberates: 4,404 A-bomb
Victims Registered, 2,043 Survivors”
The South Korean government has decided toproceed with the construction of a memorial facility in
Hapcheon-gun, South Gyeongsang Province, tocommemorate those who lost their lives as a result of the1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On November 4, the Ministry of Health andWelfare announced that it held a meeting of the Korean
Atomic Bomb Victims Support Committee (hereinafterreferred to as the "Committee") at Seoul City Tower in Jung
District, to deliberate on a plan to promote theestablishment of a memorial facility. The Committee wasestablished in 2017 to conduct a survey on the actual
situations of atomic bomb survivors (Hibakusha) and to
discuss the necessary support. The legal basis of this
discussion is the Special Law for the Support of Korean
Atomic Bomb Victims (Atomic Bomb Victims Law) enacted
in 2016.
The Atomic Bomb Victims Law defines victims as
those who were in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki areas at thetime of the atomic bom
26

(Only in Japanese)

Editors’ Note

Your Articles are Welcome!

In this issue of Muse Newsletter, we have also
introduced news posted from overseas, so there is a lot ofvariety. The Muse Newsletter is published in both Japaneseand English, so we hope you will share it with others who
may be interested.
The Muse Newsletter is published in both
Japanese and English, so we are indebted to our translators
for their help. (Translation software was used to edit it,
but we appreciate great efforts of volunteer work by Ms.
Miki
Otsukaand
Ms.
Emi
Karimata.)
The advantage of having an English version of thispublication is that it is a valuable resource for those
involved in peace museums overseas to learn about thesituation of peace museums in Japan. In the next issue andbeyond, we plan to keep the door open to information fromoverseas, so that Japanese peace museum officials canlearn about the situation of peace museums overseas.
At the general meeting of the Citizen's Network
held on November 20, 2021, it was decided that Kazuyo
Yamane would continue to serve as a member of thesteering committee in charge of editing. Anzai is also thesecretary of the steering committee and will continue tocooperate in editing the Muse. We look forward to receiving
contributions and ideas for projects from our members.
The newsletter of the International Network ofMuseums for Peace (INMP) is currently undergoing a review
and restructuring of its editorial policy under a new
editorial structure. Until the INMP Newsletter is publishedstably under the new editorial policy, the Muse in particularwill play an important role internationally as a medium for
information on peace museums around the world.
We sincerely ask for the active contribution andcooperation of all members.

◆ Number of letters: about 500
letters in Japanese, and about1000 words in English.
◆ Hopefully 1 or 2 photos◆ Due Date: We will accept it at
any time
Please send your article to thefollowing email address.
musejapankyoto@gmail.com＊Invitation to INMP＊

INMP Office
If you would like to join INMP
(International Network of Museums for Peace),
please contact
inmpoffice@gmail.com.
The annual membership fee is 2000 yen
and it allows you to participate in webinars andthe International Peace Museum Conferences.

Spirit Touching by Pegge Patten

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