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Accepted Paper:
Ashes: finding the Holocaust and Nanking at a Kyoto Museum
Ran Zwigenberg
(Pennsylvania State University)
This paper examine the exhibition of Holocaust survivor remains in Japanese museums and the way war memory in Poland, Israel, and beyond intersected with local war memories. The Auschwitz urns' journey reveals the complex politics and cultural landscape of the transnational commemoration of WW II
Paper long abstract:
At the Ritsumeikan Peace Museum in Kyoto exhibit there stands a little, black urn that contains ashes of Auschwitz victims. The urn is one of several urns in Japan, the first of which arrived in Hiroshima in 1963– a history I explored elsewhere, yet its story is separate and unique. It was brought to Kyoto by peace activists, who were wishing to make amends for the crimes of their own countryman in China, as part of their efforts to promote peace education in Kyoto. Their journey was both transnational, converging with the Polish Communist Party memory diplomacy and its use of the camps to forward its agenda and the use of the remains of the dead in global commemoration, as well as a very local one. The Auschwitz and other camp museums have sent dozens of similar urns all around Poland and globally, building a secular network of pilgrimage sites with its own relics and altars in schools, museums, and memorials. Importantly, the likely Jewish identity of the remains was usually not mentioned. In Japan, the Poles connected with a group of veterans and activists who wished to uncover the activities of Kyoto’s own 16th Division, which was heavily involved in the Nanking massacre. The (literal) objectification of the Jewish dead in a place so far removed from Europe meant different things for different actors in this story. Tracing the urn’s journey and its various uses, reveal the complex politics and cultural landscape of the transnational commemoration of World War II in its very local meanings in Japan, Poland, and beyond.