WHOSE BUSINESS IS

CULTURAL PRESERVATION?
By IKUO HIRAYAMA
2001 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for
Peace and International Understanding
Presented at the 43rd Ramon Magsaysay Awards Lecture Series
28 August 2001, Manila, Philippines

I was exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

It was when I was in my third year of junior high school. In the explosion, 13
teachers and 188 students died instantly. I fortunately survived. However, at
one point, I suffered a dramatic drop in the number of the white blood
corpuscles caused by the after effects of radiation, and I was on the verge of
death.
44 students of same age lost their lives. That is the motive that makes me paint
in pursuit of praying for peace.
The main theme of my paintings has been stories on religions. I have painted
pictures in the manner of giving literal and fantastic expressions to them. Most
of the themes are stories born from Buddhism.
The Propagation of Buddhism was my first painting based on a religious
story. I depicted it through the story of an ancient Chinese monk in the 7th
century, Xuan Zhuang, who left his country at the risk of his life in search for
Buddhas spiritual path in India and brought back a large volume of the
Buddhist scriptures taking him 17 years all in all. That was in 1959 and this
artwork made me famous as a painter.

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In 1962, I was given a UNESCO fellowship and went to Europe. There I visited
Italy, France, British, the Netherlands, and West Germany to study European
artworks under the theme The Comparison of Religious Drawings between
East and West and learned many things.
Then, in 1966, I participated in the first Medieval Oriental Monument Survey
Mission organized by the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music
and visited Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon to research on the culture of the
Byzantine and ancient West Asia.
Afterwards, I visited the Silk Road almost every year, where East and West
cultures met, to learn more about it. I kept on walking to trace the marks which
indicate the cross cultural scenes. I traced the old ancient sites starting from
western countries towards eastern countries in order: Italy, Greece, Turkey,
Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia.
In 1975, at last, I visited China where I had been longing to go for a long time.
The cultural relationship between China and Japan can be traced back to the
era of the Han Dynasty. Ancient Japanese learned a lot of things from the
Chinese in the 6th century when the Tang Dynasty governed. Thus Japanese
culture at the Age of Nara was founded.
I kept on going to visit a great number of ancient sites scattered along the Silk
Road more than a hundred and ten times. Most of them have been demolished
or lost by natural disasters, civil wars and theft. I strongly felt the importance
of the preservation of cultural properties since they are the treasures for
mankind.
I was appointed as Goodwill Ambassador of UNESCO in 1985. Then I have
been advocating the Red Cross Spirit for Cultural Heritage. Under this spirit,
I have been working for the preservation of cultural properties and I believe
that should bring the world peace.
In 1989, I visited Cambodia when the civil war in the country was about to
end. The twenty-year long war devastated the land. However, people in

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Cambodia were wishing to protect and restore the Angkor monuments, putting
Angkor Wat in the top priority. That I could understand very sincerely when I
visited there. The Red Cross Spirit for Cultural Heritage is the spirit by which
you can protect cultural properties, similar to the Red Cross Spirit whereby
you can rescue not only allied soldiers but also enemy soldiers based on
humanitarian concerns. The protection of cultural properties does not mean
only protecting material things but also protecting the minds of people in the
country. Protecting both properties and peoples minds are essential to the
Red Cross Spirit for Cultural Heritage.
Poverty causes civil war. The important thing is to let people in their country
recognize how their properties are splendid and historically valuable. Thus
people can recover their pride. To do so, economic aid as well as technical help
from rich countries is required to support both their lives and minds. After a
while, people in the war would get themselves to recover their humanism, thus
they could stand on their own feet being supported economically and
technically.
As a Japanese, I feel sorry for the people of Asia who suffered from the
atrocities caused by the Second World War when Japanese troops battled in
the fields of Asian countries. To think that a great number of Asian people as
well as Japanese were the victims of the war deeply hurts me. I hope that we
Japanese take the war as a historical precept and show our peaceful stance
clearly by the promotion of the cultural movements along with the
contributions of our economy and technology to the world.
Under such spirits, I supported the Dunghuang Cave Preservation Project. At
present, among my activities are the intermediation for peaceful settlement of
civil war in Afghanistan along with the protection of the cultural properties and
the cooperation for the registration of the Koguryo Frescos in the ancient tombs
in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea to the UNESCO World
Heritage.
Thank you very much.

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Copyright!!2016!Ramon!Magsaysay!Award!Foundation!
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