IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

This paper serves as a critical review and museological discussion on the representation of the Narita Airport (NA) Conflict since the 1960s. The Conflict, as known as the Sanrizuka Struggle, took place in Narita, Japan, upon the construction of the second international airport of Tokyo. Disputes between local residents, mostly farmers, unwilling to relocate, and the government, was upscaled to life-taking violent clashes, when leftist radical activists joined the locals. Even expropriation succeeded, and Narita Airport began operation in 1978, confrontations lasted until today, though many oppositions declined after a roundtable conference among stakeholders held in 1993, moderated by scholars and officials. In 1997 the History Inheritance Committee was set up by the NA Corporation with the aim to “accurately” convey the history of the issue through research and study and in 2011 the NA & Community Historical Museum was founded. Through critically reviewing curatorial strategies, this paper inquires the roles of museums in intervening difficult heritage as such. I argue from NA’s case that museum as a site of memory, rendering processes of remembering and forgetting, embodies the dialectical nature of a pharmakon – both a remedy and poison. By historicising and narrativizing the development in a macroscopic and linear periodisation, the exhibition as curated by NA necessitates the airport’s past and present. The narrative may remedy and stabilises the conflicts by rationalising and contextualising each stakeholders’ act “accurately”, drawing a conclusion of “coexistence” through the 1993 conference, incorporating the entire landscape of conflict into community history; on the other hand, the re-membering of past and present and among conflicting parties failed without acknowledging unsettled voices and traumas as evidenced by ongoing oppositions, entailing the flattening, if not forgetting, of memories, which might still haunt NA and the community in the future.