How to create a special exhibition
Morioka History and Culture Museum
An interesting way to convey the charm of Morioka and its people during the Edo period!

As a comprehensive space production company, NOMURA GROUP not only designs and constructs spaces, but also provides comprehensive and inclusive operation and management of the entire facility, including research and curatorial departments, with a focus on cultural facilities such as museums, science museums, and art galleries. We will be running a series of interview articles titled "How to Create a Special Exhibition," focusing on special exhibitions held at each facility and capturing the unique perspectives of the planners.

The third installment is the Morioka Museum of History and Culture in Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture. This museum offers special exhibitions with a different approach than other cultural facilities, and in particular, the special exhibition "Crime and Punishment: Morioka in the Edo Period as Seen in Crime Records" held in 2023 attracted a lot of attention and attracted many visitors from all over the country.

Where does the uniqueness of this museum come from? A member of the Operations Department interviewed the curator in charge of planning the exhibition about the background of the exhibition that has been a hot topic so far, what he keeps in mind on a daily basis when planning, and even the contents of the exhibition "Reading the Horaizu - A Depicted Utopia" to be held from Sunday, December 1st, and nomlog editorial team covered the situation.

[Exhibition staff]
Morioka History and Culture Museum Curator
Akane Fukushima (Center right of photo)

He majored in cultural property preservation and restoration at university. After working for the Morioka City Board of Education and other organizations, he has worked as a curator in charge of preservation at the Morioka Museum of History and Culture since 2015. He is mainly responsible for managing the museum's environment and exhibition operations. Past exhibitions he has been in charge of include: Designated Cultural Properties of Morioka (2015), Family Heirlooms (2017), A Hundred Types of Utensils (2018), Suspicious Objects (2019), To Edo (2021), Shirokuro Toshiatsu (2023), Crime and Punishment (2023), and more.

【interviewer】
NOMURA Co., Ltd. Co., Ltd.
Business Production Headquarters, First General Affairs Department, Public-Private Partnership Project Development Division 1, Operation Business Section
Miki Mori (Photo on the left) Planning Director
Hino Natsuka (Photo on the right)
Lisa Aoki (Second from the left in the photo)

* Text: Satoko Yokota (nomlog Editorial Department)
*Photography: Hiroko Okazaki, Nagomi Yagi (nomlog Editorial Department)

 First, come up with a plan that you think is interesting.

forest
I always look forward to the special exhibitions at Morioka History and Culture Museum. Every time a new poster arrives, I look at it and think, "This one is going all out, too." I can sense something new in the titles, designs, and themes. Morioka History and Culture Museum's special exhibitions are composed almost entirely of materials from its own collection, but I was really curious as to how they come up with such plans using materials from what could be considered a typical history museum. What perspectives do you usually take when structuring and thinking up exhibitions, including the special exhibitions that have been the talk of the town so far?

Fukushima
Although I work at a museum with the word "history" in its name, I specialize in the preservation and restoration of cultural properties (modern sculpture) and the preservation and management of materials, and am not an expert in history or exhibitions. Due to the nature of the museum, we often deal with historical materials, but I try to create exhibits that can be enjoyed even by those without specialist knowledge of history, by drawing on my original expertise or combining it with other fields.

There are various ways to choose a topic, but most of all I start with a document that I find interesting, and then I expand from there. On top of that, if there is a connection to a social movement, such as the Olympics or a new era, I choose a topic with that in mind. Even if the topic is minor, at least the person in charge thinks the topic is interesting, so I approach it with the feeling that "there is at least one person in the world who thinks this is interesting!"

Few of the materials in our collection are well known nationwide, but the perspective of "what is the best way to present and what context is best to convey the interestingness of the materials?" is something we value in common with all our exhibits. Interest is important, but we cannot sacrifice accuracy.

For example, we held "To Edo - Sankin-kotai of the Morioka Domain" in 2021. It was a time when many people from overseas visited Japan in conjunction with the Tokyo Olympics, and people all over Japan were on the move. So I wondered, "What is the connection between Morioka and Tokyo?" and came up with the "sankin-kotai" system that was practiced during the Edo period. I am not a history specialist myself, and I have as much knowledge as the non-experts who visit the museum, so I aimed to create an exhibition that would allow visitors to re-experience the things I had originally wondered about and the new things I learned and found "interesting" as I conducted my research, with the theme of "What is sankin-kotai anyway?"

Not only did we learn about the system of alternate attendance, but we also covered some small anecdotes from historical documents, which was well received by visitors. For example, there is the story of "rice cakes brought to the feudal lord by a local so-and-so." In one area of Morioka Domain, rice cakes were once presented to a feudal lord on his way to alternate attendance. Perhaps because the visit went smoothly, there was a custom that from then on, whenever the lord visited the area, he would eat the same rice cakes in the same place. At the time, "customs" were very important, and it seems that the fact that "the same thing had been done for decades" was thought to be a good omen for future success.

Hino
Things were going well at the time, so we kept doing the same thing as a custom.

Fukushima
It also had the significance of bringing good luck, and in the Edo period, it was important to maintain the "status of the family" by following customs. It may seem like an old-fashioned way of thinking in modern times, but for samurai, who placed the utmost importance on protecting their family and passing it on to the next generation, the status of their family was extremely important. For example, the tools that were permitted to be used on journeys such as the naginata (longitudinal sword) on permanent display, used on sankin-kotai (alternate attendance) trips, differed depending on the "status of the family," and the style of the palanquin carried by the lord was also different. Maintaining this "permitted form" demonstrated and maintained the high "status of the family."

Permanent exhibit: Left: Naginata Right: Scarlet jinbaori (replica)

Visually conveying the way local people cherish their hometown

forest
The exhibition "Wealthy Treasures - 40th Anniversary of the Donation of the Houyukan Collection," held in 2022, also had an interesting perspective. It asked art collectors, "Why did you collect this?" and shed light on works in the collection that are rarely shown to the public.

Fukushima
It all started in 1982 when an individual from Morioka donated the entire collection of his grandfather and father to the city of Morioka. In addition to marking the 40th anniversary of this donation, we wanted to present the approximately 100 pieces of art in the collection as a group in a special exhibition, rather than as individual works. This was the first time that our museum had attempted an exhibition focusing on art pieces, including modern works.

My grandfather, who started the collection, was born in 1873 and started collecting things of value from Morioka so that they wouldn't go out, and he treasured things that were rooted in the local area and related to Morioka. My father, who took over my grandfather's collection, always told donors, "This is not something that belongs to my family, but something that should be given back to society."

I wanted to display such meaningful things as "treasures" and create an exhibition that would show how much the local people care about their hometown. So, in terms of visuals, I placed various artworks between the logos to create a "treasure."

The visual design expresses the idea that "each piece of work is a unique treasure" by placing an image of the work between the "U" crown and the "1" and "," symbols.

A new approach to conveying ancient language in a modern way

Hino
I thought the exhibition "Crime and Punishment - Morioka in the Edo Period as Seen in Crime Records" was very innovative with its new approach. Did you find many cases after reading through the historical records of crimes and taking them up as a special exhibition?

Fukushima
This theme was originally a series of small-scale exhibitions, so I didn't just read them right before the special exhibition, but I spent about three years going through hundreds of records of incidents. There are a lot of records of incidents from the Edo period, and I could continue for years if I wanted to, so I planned this exhibition to take a major look at it once and bring it to a close.

The exhibition introduced what kind of incidents occurred in Morioka during the Edo period and what kind of executions were carried out, but the incidents were very wide-ranging, ranging from theft and fights to infidelity. Since the exhibition had a lot of text, I wrote the explanations with weekly magazine articles in mind to make them easier to read. It's not a very good way to put it, but the exhibition had a strong gossip element, and perhaps because of the old era, it felt less real and more like fiction, but many people seemed to enjoy it. There were many women at the gallery talk. The exhibition was polarized between those who were interested in history and law and those who looked at it like a novel, but I think it turned out well in the end.

Aoki
I believe the actual historical documents are written in archaic language, so what kind of ideas did you use to display them?

Fukushima
Rather than directly translating the historical documents, I used colloquial language to make it easier to understand, and I gave each incident a title, like the headlines of a weekly magazine, to make it easier to get interested in the content. Even if you don't read the whole thing, I'd be happy if just one or two of them made you go, "What is this!?"

Let's all think about it together without any conclusion.

Hino
The visual image is beginning to take shape for the special exhibition "Reading the Horai Painting - A Depicted Utopia" which will begin in December.

Fukushima
The "Horai" we are featuring this time is an ideal place thought to be located to the east of the Bohai Sea in ancient China, and is said to be a place that humans cannot reach. Therefore, we requested that the visuals be "a little mysterious."

This exhibition focuses on Kano Rinsen's "Horaizu byobu" (Screen Screen of Horai), and asks us to think about "Why can this be Horai?" I myself would like to find out by reading many old Chinese dictionaries, the Records of the Grand Historian, and Japanese materials.

I am currently analyzing the contents of the painting in detail. For example, there is a scene where a crane's baby is growing, and "the crane, a symbol of longevity, is raising its baby on a pine tree," meaning "it's only auspicious." Camellias are evergreen trees that bloom in the cold season, so they are considered to be lucky.

The only thing that I wonder about is that the iris is the only one that does not have any particularly auspicious elements. One hypothesis is that the iris was included to fill the seasons when the other plants depicted do not have any fruits or flowers. I have hypothesized that the four seasons represent a special space that is separate from the flow of time in the real world, which means that it is a happy place, not the human world.

There are two common types of Horai paintings. One is a typical Chinese expression, with pine trees growing on a rocky mountain on the back of a giant turtle. This is considered to be a relatively old style, and after it was introduced to Japan, it is said that a style with a sense of "auspiciousness" that is easy for Japanese people to understand, such as a crane and turtle by the water with pine, bamboo, and plum blossoms, was created. I think this Horai painting is one of the forms that has changed to be more Japanese. There will also be a gallery talk, but rather than presenting any big conclusions, I hope that everyone will have fun thinking together, "What is a Horai painting?"

forest
I don't think it's very common to exhibit the "Horaizu" painting in this way.

Fukushima
Yes, I have had many opportunities to exhibit this work, but I thought to myself, "I have never delved deeply into the Horai painting itself." So I came up with the idea of an exhibition that would deeply analyze one piece of work, with the theme, "Is Horai what is being depicted here in the first place?"

This is not an ordinary art exhibition, but an exhibition that asks, "What is Horai?" and "What does this painting represent Horai?" while understanding the meaning of the motifs depicted and unraveling the religions, ideologies, history, and local legends related to Horai. The exhibition is planned to have historical, folklore, and literary aspects. Since there is unlikely to be a clear answer, the exhibition will present a way of looking at the works, asking, "You can look at it that way, right?"

Hino
Your previous exhibitions have left an impression on me, but do you often choose to display your works without drawing any conclusions with these special exhibitions?

Fukushima
As for this exhibition, as we were preparing, I thought, "There's no definitive answer, 'This is it!'" and decided on this approach. Usually, we conduct repeated research and then display the results in an exhibition, but our museum is a pedestrianized operation, so we conduct full-scale research after deciding on the theme of the exhibition. In past exhibitions, we have presented cases where we were unable to confirm materials and were unable to reach a conclusion by saying that "further research is required," but we received several surveys saying, "It was interesting to learn the current state of the research as it is." Since then, I have thought that there is a demand for things that have not been concluded, so I have occasionally done this. However, this is the first time that there is no conclusion for the entire exhibition.

Although I haven't come to a clear conclusion, I would like to introduce the legends related to Horai that are still passed down today, and help people who are interested in "Horai" take the next step. There is a man called "Jofuku" who went to Horai to search for the elixir of immortality at the command of the First Emperor of Qin, and there are places all over Japan where he is said to have arrived, so I go there to take pictures of those places.

forest
I think that this stance, of approaching the mystery together with visitors and being on the same level as them, is what makes it interesting and different from other history museums, and creates an opportunity for people to want to learn more about history.

The charm of Morioka History and Culture Museum lies in the love for the city and people of Morioka

forest
After looking at the permanent exhibition and listening to Mr. Fukushima today, I was reminded that the charm of Morioka History and Culture Museum lies in its focus on local matters and the everyday lives of the local people.

Aoki
History can be a bit intimidating, but each exhibit was broken down into easy-to-understand pieces and the themes were familiar, so I found the content very engaging.

Fukushima
The most recent period is the Edo period, which is 150 years ago. But even that long ago, people were living in the same places, going about their daily lives, and there were incidents and accidents too... I've always thought about this perspective: maybe the fundamentals of human life aren't all that different from today, even though times have changed.

Aoki
That's an interesting perspective, especially for locals.

forest
With so many historical documents remaining and this can be felt even when walking around the city, it gives the impression that the local characteristics have been utilized very well.

Fukushima
Morioka was a castle town, so many of the roads remain unchanged since the Edo period. Thanks to this, locals can find the location of places with a high degree of accuracy even when looking at maps from the Edo period. Even elementary school students can easily understand the location when shown a map from the Edo period and explained, "This is your school."

Hino
Speaking with you today, I could sense your passion for planning exhibitions. What motivates you to plan exhibitions on a regular basis?

Fukushima
I deal with themes that I find "fun," so that's the first priority. And I think it's important that the content is something that makes me want to "communicate" how interesting it is to many people. It would be even better if the exhibition allowed viewers to remember at least one keyword or take something home with them. In the case of this exhibition, it allowed viewers to learn what is depicted in the "Horai Painting," or that "Horai" is apparently depicted on the back of a turtle. And it would be enough if they could later remember that they saw the exhibition in Morioka.

I always want to lower the barrier to entry for museums. Basically, I want to target people other than specialists, and it's most important that they can enjoy the exhibits even without prior knowledge. Ideally, the exhibits should also provide specialists with something to gain or reaffirm. I'd rather hear people say "I had fun" than "I learned something," so I want to come up with exhibits that are as easy on the eye as possible and allow as many people to enjoy history and culture.

Permanent Exhibition Photo Gallery

Special exhibition "Castle Ruins - Remaining Materials Related to Morioka Castle"