Confronting discrimination with museology

Chapter 2 presents the case study of the Osaka Human Rights Museum, known as Liberty Osaka, in Japan. The chapter discusses the rise of human rights discourses and practices in the Japanese civil sphere, and evolving strategies regarding their invocation within a museological setting. Based on documentary evidence as well as field visits and ethnographic research conducted in multiple museums throughout Japan in 2013 (including semi-directed interviews with museum staff in four rights-based museums), the chapter specifically examines how the subject of human rights has been musealized at Liberty Osaka in a multidimensional way. Documenting the features of this new museological genre, the chapter argues that while Japan’s human rights museums largely borrow from existing paradigms in their approach to traditional museological functions (research, collections and exhibitions) and forms (following the strategies of history and ethnographic museums), they have also been shaped in important ways by factors distinct to Japan, and in some cases, their own immediate civic contexts, as well as newer forays in museology, such as human rights education.