Alongside Germany’s Goethe Institute and France’s Alliance Française, the Japan Foundation is probably one of the most popular international organizations that excels in promoting its country’s arts, culture, language and civilization.
The Japan Foundation is present in over 130 countries around the world and, through its collaboration with overseas museums, organizes traveling exhibitions of paintings, crafts, photographs, design, and architecture. About twenty such exhibitions are touring the world at the moment.
One of them is “The Spirit of Budo: The History of Japan’s Martial Arts” which, after being on the road since 2007, when it opened at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, USA, has returned to Japan after its recent stop (between February and March 2013) at Brunei Museum in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.
The touring exhibition was organized due to a sustained and increased interest in Japan’s martial arts, one of the many aspects of this fascinating Asian culture. The objective of the exhibition is to “seek the understanding of the viewers about the brief history of Japanese martial arts – from battlefield combat techniques (bujutsu) to popular sports of physical exercise tempering body and spirit (budo).”
The exhibition is made up of two distinctive parts. In the first part, originals and reproductions of historical weapons such as bows and arrows, suits of armor, helmets and swords are on display for the viewer’s scrutiny. These are representative of the development and changes of Japanese martial arts during the 8th to 9th century. As many of the ancient types of armor and weapons have not survived the plight of history and time or are too fragile and valuable for international transport, high-quality reproductions of suits of armor and helmets are displayed instead.
The second part of the exhibition deals with the reorganization of bujutsu to budo in the 19th and 20th centuries, demonstrating how the spirit of Japanese martial arts is still part of the everyday life of the Japanese people. Nine budo associations are introduced via a variety of clothes and implements (bamboo swords, protectors, bows and arrows, etc.), as well as display boards detailing the modern developments of each martial art in part. The nine disciplines covered are judo, kendo, kyudo, karatedo, sumo, naginata, shorinji kempo, aikido, and jukendo.
The exhibition also aims at drawing the viewer’s attention to the aesthetics and creativity of the artisans involved in making the items on display. Apart from the Federations of each martial art in part, many other institutions brought their support in making “The Spirit of Budo” exhibition possible. Among them is Nippon Budokan Foundation, a Tokyo-based center promoting all Japanese martial arts.
For the past six years, The Japan Foundation has taken the spirit of Japan’s martial arts all over the world. In 2008, it visited Toronto and Montreal (Canada), Santos (Uruguay), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Port of Spain (Trinidad and Tobago), and Mexico City (Mexico). In 2009, the exhibition went back to the USA to Fort Wayne City, Indiana and Novi, Michigan, then to Paris (France), Keszthely and Budapest (Hungary), and Sofia and Plovdiv (Bulgaria).
In 2010, it continued its Eastern European tour in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and then went to Izmir, Istanbul and Ankara (Turkey), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Zagreb (Croatia), Moscow and Krasnoyarsk (Russia), and Reykjavik (Iceland). In 2011, the exhibition opened in Janadriyah (Saudi Arabia) and then in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (Russia). In 2012, the exhibition visited Nice (France), Baku (Azerbaijan), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Chiang Mai and Bangkok (Thailand), and Islamabad (Pakistan).
The exhibition that I visited was held between September 8 – 27, 2012 at G23 Art Gallery, on the third floor of the Innovative Building, located on the campus of Srinakharinwirote University in Bangkok. The Japan Foundation’s Bangkok office secured the bilingual Thai-English translations for all the exhibits and promotion poster.
Early next year, between January 6 – 18, 2014, “The Spirit of Budo” exhibition will be at Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR in Kolkata, India.
