Human Rights, Glass Elevators and Heights

The next morning I took the train to Osaka, where I parted ways with Rachel. I left my stuff in a locker, and set off to explore Osaka. The day got off to a pretty rough start---I lost my airport shuttle ticket immediately after purchasing it, I consequently had to take out yen on my last day (the calculus of having just enough foreign currency to last through a trip without running out or going over eludes me yet) and it took me roughly two hours to figure out how to navigate the station. Finally, I purchased a ticket and rode the circular route out to the Human Rights museum, feeling very independent, relieved, and triumphant.

The Osaka Human Rights museum was one of the best museums I have ever been to. Admission only cost about two dollars, even without a student membership, and at the door, the guides offered me a free headset that had an English translation of all the exhibits. (I'm still trying to figure out how the museum was funded. I think it's virtually impossible that the Japanese government funded it-- the exhibits were too critical. My best guess is that a Korean businessman who was successful in Japan during the postwar period but had to hide his identity sponsored it.

The museum was broken into three parts, the first section which discussed the way certain norms were enforced in Japanese culture, resulting in the exclusion of whole segments of the population. The final section had a series of narratives by people who were marginalized and the victims of human rights abuses. The middle section, my favorite, dealt with the historical and contemporary status of disadvantaged groups within Japanese society. The groups discussed included: women, people who were queer, victims of enviromental disaster, people with disabilities, slum dwellers, Koreans, Okinawans, people living with AIDS, the Ainu, and the burakumin (ghettoized descents of leather workers and undertakers who have continued to be treated as a seperate caste within Japanese society long after the caste system was abandoned).

I liked that the museum combined these disparate groups. I thought that offered a very sweeping perspective of human rights in Japan rather than, say, just looking at dissents or just focusing on members of a particular minority group. I was impressed by the museum's honesty in approaching these struggles as ongoing rather than historic battles the country has moved beyond. (The Museum of the American Indian in DC also does a nice job with this.) I also think it's very challenging to create exhibits about people who have been victims without creating a one-sided narrative in which they become agency-less objects, and are dehumanized. While it's also bad to create a fake story in which people who could not fight fought back, this museum did an excellent job of contextualizing the ways in which people had resisted oppression. It told stories of victims of enviromental discrimination who had sued, both losers and winners. It featured video of speech contest in which all the participants spoke Ainu. It had pictures of Burakumin youth drummers who spoke to communities about the way they were treated.

The curators at the museum were excellent, and I was really glad to go. I feel like I got a taste of Japanese history and culture that I otherwise would have completely missed. I think the discriminated-against in Japan face a very uphill battle because: a) sameness is so valued (how can such a conformist society also be so creative?) b) breaking consensus-- ie, complaining-- is frowning on and could bring further shame on one's family c) politics is not a forum through which every day people can exercise any will.

I ate some curry at the museum, then spent the afternoon wandering around Osaka. I meant to go to the aquarium but accidentally wound up at the water conservation museum instead. I think it was geared for enviromentally conscious Japanese-speaking ten year olds, but props that they have a free, interactive water conservation museum.

Osaka felt a little bit poorer and more industrial than Tokyo to me. Homelessness is nonexistant or invisible in all the parts of Tokyo I've been to, but in Osaka, there were people sleeping under bridges and taking shelter against the wind under cross-paths over the streets. There was occasional graffiti, although it still seemed a lot cleaner than most American cities. The city itself spans a river, and unlike Yokohama, which doesn't seem to quite know what to do with it's waterfront, there were lovely parks along the water and running trails. Rachel says Osakans are like the "Greeks of Japan" and are known for being more demonstrative and friendly.

That night, I went up to the "Floating Garden Observatories" in Shin-Umeda. There were two towers linked by an open observation deck at the very top. First, visitors rode up in an enclosed elevator, and then switched to a glass encased elevator offering a great (but sort of scary) pararoma of the city. On top, there was an indoor photo exhibit and a cafe, then a staircase that led up to the open deck. I walked around outside for a bit, then went inside to the cafe to watch the sunset over the city before boarding my flight home.