Museums seek to include women's presence in staging exhibits

Asahi Shimbun

03-05-2025

Part of these portraits of successive internal medicine professors, which formerly hung in the Internal Medicine Auditorium at the University of Tokyo Hospital, were shown at 'The Face of Medicine,' a special exhibition held at the Intermediatheque museum, in 2016. (Provided by the University Museum, the University of Tokyo)
Museum collections professor Ayumi Terada admitted being overwhelmed by the lack of diversity in an exhibition she organized for the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Medicine.
'The Face of Medicine,' a special exhibition held from 2016 through 2021, exhibited 16 items out of a larger set of portrait paintings, photos and sculptures of successive internal medicine professors.
'Oh, this organization was so strikingly masculine,' Terada thought at the time, looking at the all-male faculty.
Since then, Terada, a project associate professor with the Intermediatheque museum outside Tokyo Station, has been working to include materials in light of gender at special exhibitions she has organized.
She has been seeking consciously to incorporate the 'presence of people and things that tend to be overlooked from the perspective of official history,' such as women, into exhibits.
Terada packed exhibitions with the presence of women when she organized a sequel show titled 'The Faces of German Medicine,' with a focus on German teachers in the cradle years of modern medicine in Japan, in 2022.
She included, for example, the episode of Go Ine, a Japanese woman who donated her body by her own volition, in an explanatory note to a portrait photo of Wilhelm Doenitz (1838-1912), an anatomy teacher.
She also exhibited a photo of female nurses walking toward the main building of the former Tokyo Medical School, the predecessor to the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Medicine.
Terada said she did so to spotlight the fact that women were present at the time when all professors and all students were male.
'Leaving out women risks making the public believe as if no women had been there,' Terada said. 'If museums were to design their exhibits without being aware of that risk, they could pass along, and strengthen, the biased gender norms saying that only men have played active roles in society. I think that is very dangerous.'
Museums across Japan are seeking to reflect the oft-underrated presence of women in their exhibits, even though the country, as a whole, has yet to become a front-runner in efforts to rethink museum exhibits from the standpoint of gender.
REASSESSING MATERIALS FROM GENDER PERSPECTIVE
The National Museum of Japanese History (Rekihaku), in Chiba Prefecture, provided much fodder for discussion when it organized 'Gender in Japanese History,' a special exhibition, in 2020.
Rekihaku officials said they also paid close attention to the design of illustrations and gender-related expressions in explanatory panels when they renovated a gallery on prehistory and ancient times in 2019.
For example, a statement was added to an explanatory note on village leaders of the Jomon Pottery Culture Period (c. 14500 B.C.-1000 B.C.) to say that women accounted for many of the village leaders in western Japan.
A museum of local history in Taki, Mie Prefecture, organized a special exhibition titled 'The history of women: our collection items as seen from a gender perspective,' from July through September last year.
On exhibit were 95 items of materials and documents that attest to the presence of women, who have seldom been featured front and center in history.
Okayama Tomokiyo (1789-1878), who developed the Isenishiki rice variety, is well-known among Taki's residents as an eminent figure produced by the local community.
Okayama, a follower of a folk religion called Fujido, is believed to have relied on a network of its followers to spread the rice variety to different areas of Japan.
One section of the special exhibition highlighted Fujido's teachings that men and women are equal beings and showed related documents and materials, including a scripture, along with detailed explanatory notes.
'We can learn new things, even from old materials exhibited in the past, when we revisit them from a gender perspective,' said Mami Murata, a curator who organized the special show. 'Museums could turn up heaps of materials that are useful for gender studies if only they made conscious efforts to do so.'
JAPAN LAGS BEHIND
The need to redesign museum exhibits from a gender viewpoint has been discussed for more than a decade outside Japan.
The International Council of Museums (ICOM), which organizes museum officials from around 130 countries and regions of the world, included the concept of 'gender mainstreaming' in a resolution adopted at a general conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2013.
Under the awareness of an inadequate engagement with gender and women's issues in museums, the resolution recommended, among other things, that similar institutions 'analyze the narratives being told from a gender perspective.'
ICOM redefined museums in 2022, when it adopted a new definition that includes the social role of museums in fostering 'diversity and sustainability' in addition to their conventional functions for collecting, studying and exhibiting heritage items.
More consideration is being given to gender and other forms of diversity at museums abroad.
Officials of museums overseas who are working to promote diversity attended a symposium on 'diversity and inclusiveness in museums' in Tokyo in January.
An official with the National Taiwan Science Education Center in Taipei presented, among other things, how she and her colleagues organized a special exhibition to highlight the presence of women in science, which has tended to be invisible, and later moved the exhibits to a permanent show gallery.
An official involved in working out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy at a museum within the University of Amsterdam pointed out that the process of selecting materials for show can, in a sense, take away the voice from specific aspects of history.
She stressed a need for museums to try to remain neutral, keeping in mind the presence of diverse people in terms, for example, of gender, race, religion and disabilities.
Yuji Kurihara, executive director with the National Museum of Nature and Science who organized the symposium, pointed out that Japan is lagging behind in similar efforts.
'One could hardly say the importance of DEI is sufficiently understood by museum officials in Japan,' he said.
There is, in fact, no mention of diversity in Japan's Museum Law, which was amended only four months before ICOM adopted its new definition of museums.
The numbers of men and women are almost the same among museum workers, but the proportion of women among museum directors is extremely low, at only 14 percent.
'Japan's museum administrators should also work on DEI, including by redefining their museums,' Kurihara said.
(This article was written by Maiko Ito and Chie Kohara.)