Confronting discrimination with museology: Liberty Osaka and the emergence of human rights museums in Japan

[First paragraph]: " The writing of this chapter pre-dated the closure of the Liberty Osaka Museum at its inaugural location on city-owned land following a lengthy court battle with the City of Osaka. At the time of finalizing the book manuscript, Liberty Osaka was forced to find a new home and announced its hopes to reopen in 2022, coinciding with the 100th anniversaries of both Zenkoku Suiheisha and Osaka Prefecture Suiheisha.

The Osaka Human Rights Museum, popularly known as Liberty Osaka, was the first of several human rights museums to be established in Japan when it was inaugurated in the south Osakan ward of Naniwa-ku on 2 December 1985. We believe it was also the first of what is now a growing museological phenomenon and genre worldwide. That this innovative museum type should have appeared where and when it did is both unexpected, and exciting, for two reasons. First, the concept of ‘rights’ and more specifically, ‘human rights’ – or jinken, as these came to be known in Japan – is of Western origin, having only evolved in Japan during the Meiji era in the late nineteenth century (1868–1912) in the context of a deeply hierarchical and historically stratified, class-conscious society; as such, their implementation in Japan has charted a unique history which this chapter explores, with specific reference to how human rights have been promoted in the public sphere. Second, the very idea of the museum (mouseion), born in Alexandria in the third century BCE as a meeting point for intellectuals and erudition, and reborn as of the late seventeenth century in the form of the private (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), and as of the mid- to late eighteenth century, national (British Museum, London, UK, and Louvre, Paris, France) treasure troves that would soon proliferate across Europe – notably in England, France and Germany – is also of distinctly Western sensibility."