NEWS
2025.07.31
【Report】 The 81st AJI Frontier Seminar was held! Dr. Marika Tsukahara presented “The Media History of ‘The Yamato Museum’: Focusing on the Role of Local Communities in the Construction and Inheritance of War Memories.”
The 81st AJI Frontier Seminar was held online on Tuesday, July 8, 2025. Dr. Marika Tsukahara, a Senior Researcher at Ritsumeikan Asia-Japan Institute, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, gave a presentation entitled “The Media History of ‘The Yamato Museum’: Focusing on the Role of Local Communities in the Construction and Inheritance of War Memories.”
Dr. Tsukahara explained that the purpose of her presentation was to clarify how local cultural practices contribute to the construction of nationalism and examine how local communities are positioned and function in the process of constructing cultural nationalism. She asserted that in previous studies, the agency and active role of local communities have not been sufficiently recognized in the process of constructing national identity. The construction of the Yamato Museum as a site for the discovery and representation of war memory by the local community of Kure in Hiroshima has been criticized for glorifying the former Imperial Japanese Navy and promoting nationalism. However, there is a lack of empirical research on how local narratives of Yamato in Kure shaped national discourse and identity.
Dr. Tsukahara explained that Kure was a naval base and naval arsenal during World War II. After the war, it became the “peace-oriented industrial capital of the ‘Shipbuilding Kingdom’ of Japan.” However, the end of rapid economic growth and the collapse of the bubble economy in 1973 led to stagnation and decline in the shipbuilding industry, prompting Kure to search for a new local identity. For this purpose, a nature-oriented museum was conceived; however, as the concept shifted to industrial technology and the military themes of the “Battleship Yamato, " the Peace Memorial City of Hiroshima refused to support the project, and Kure had to look elsewhere for funding. By extending the scope of the narrative from the technological inheritance of the local community of Kure to Japan as a whole, it was linked to Japan’s national identity, founded on scientific and technological achievements. Thus, the museum, centered on the Battleship Yamato, was finally established as a Symbol of Kure’s history and Japan’s technological heritage.
During the Q&A session, Dr. Tsukahara addressed questions about the sentiments of Kure's inhabitants and those of Hiroshima, as well as the potential negative perceptions of tourists from countries with a history of conflict with Japan. She informed the listeners that the museum was extremely popular and that at least one-third of the visitors were from overseas. There were also questions about relations with the local maritime JSDF and for clarification on how the narratives on the pursuit of Kure’s historical identity became intrinsically linked to the reaffirmation of Japan’s national identity.
Dr. Marika Tsukahara making her presentation
Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/