Eco-museums - The Age of Communities Beginning to Speak for Themselves - Japan - September 1996

Eco-museums - The Age of Communities Beginning to Speak for Themselves - Japan - September 1996

What makes the eco-museum concept so interesting in Japan around 1996 is that it was presented not as a mere tourism policy or industrial promotion measure, but as a philosophy that went into the very way of life of the region. At the time, several years had passed since the bursting of Japan's bubble economy, and the country's regions were reeling from a population exodus and industrial decline, with a lack of confidence in what was left for their own communities. Under these circumstances, the idea of an eco-museum, where value is not brought in from the outside but is already inside the community, prompted a profound ideological shift in the local community.

As stated in the file, the core philosophy of an eco-museum is "to explore historically the life of local residents and the developmental process of the natural and social environment, and to preserve and exhibit these legacies on site to contribute to the development of the region. This is in contrast to conventional cultural administration that collects exhibits in a building called a museum. The entire community is regarded as a living museum, and the residents themselves are the researchers and inheritors, a major rewriting of cultural subjectivity. The emphasis was on going beyond the top-down framework of government and experts making plans and the residents following them, to an attitude in which the residents themselves understood the characteristics of the region and sought out lifestyles and industries adapted to them. This was a movement that could be called the democratization of culture, and could serve as the ideological foundation for restoring autonomy to the
countryside.

Furthermore, an important characteristic of the eco-museum philosophy is that it does not separate nature and culture, but sees them as one and the same. At a time when the government was treating nature conservation, cultural asset protection, and industrial promotion in a stove-piped manner, the idea of treating a region as if it were a living organism was extremely progressive. By viewing the transition of the natural environment, traditional lifestyles, and industrial history as a single process that cannot be separated from each other, a more fundamental understanding of the value of the region and an attitude toward preservation were born.

Globally, after the Earth Summit in 1992, sustainable development became a new keyword, and efforts to balance the environment and local culture were expanding. The introduction of this concept proposed by Rivière in France to Japan echoed this very trend. In the 1990s, when the industry- and economy-centered growth model was beginning to falter, eco-museums, with their emphasis on local life and culture, posed a fundamental question to local communities: How should we live?

Eco-museums are neither tourism nor public works, but a philosophy of preserving and rediscovering the local way of life. Residents rethink their community not as a mere resource, but as a living place to be nurtured together, and try to envision the future there. What made this philosophy most appealing in 1996 was that it shed a deeply affirming light on local culture, telling a region in the midst of decline that its values are here to stay.