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Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to build partnerships with museums in Hungary and France

by Gosuke Nagahisa, Staff Writer

To increase the number of opportunities to convey the consequences of the atomic bombing overseas, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum will seek to build relationships with museums abroad in the next fiscal year. Museum staff will begin discussing the idea of holding exhibitions in conjunction with museums overseas that display items involving war. In the future, the Peace Memorial Museum and other museums are expected to lend and borrow artifacts from their collections and pursue exchange activities among staff members. Initially, two museums, one in Hungary and the other in France, have been chosen as partners.

The museum in Hungary, located in the capital of Budapest, is called the Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum. The museum was originally an underground shelter, and was used as a military hospital during World War II. Today, the museum shows visitors what conditions were like during the war. With the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki holding a joint A-bomb exhibition there from June to October, the Peace Memorial Museum will take that opportunity to strengthen ties with the museum.

The other museum is the Caen Memorial Museum, located in Caen, France, where a fierce battle took place during the Normandy Landings in World War II. An A-bombed roof tile was donated by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to the Caen Memorial Museum in 1986.

Kenji Shiga, the director of the Peace Memorial Museum, will visit the two museums and discuss the details of the partnerships with the heads of those museums, including the ideas of lending and borrowing from the museum collections and engaging in exchanges of staff for training. The partner museums will also benefit from being able to show the war damage suffered by the A-bombed city in their nations. To support this vision, the City of Hiroshima has proposed an initial budget of 7.51 million yen, including travel expenses, for the new fiscal year.

The Peace Memorial Museum has previously lent exhibition materials to museums in Germany and Switzerland, in line with such requests, but this is the first time since the museum opened that it has pursued a plan to actively seek partnerships with museums abroad. This effort is intended to help lend a boost to negotiations at the United Nations to establish a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons, which will begin in March. A staff member in the museum’s Outreach Division said, “Hiroshima has drawn a lot more attention from people in Japan and overseas, compared to before, since the visit made last year by former U.S. President Barack Obama. We would like to build partnerships with more museums.”

(Originally published on February 7, 2017)

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