Kyoto Lectures

京都は、日本の主要な学問の中心地として、また世界中の研究者が集う場所として、古くから伝統文化を守ってきました。このシリーズでは、フランス国立極東学院(EFEO)・京都大学人文科学研究所の協力のもと、東アジアの文化・社会学の専門家が、ここ京都で研究成果を発表する機会を提供しています。
Holocaust Ashes on the Move

Kyoto Lectures

Holocaust Ashes on the Move

Incinerated Human Remains as Objects of Global Institutional Exchange

Ran Zwigenberg

July 24th, 2024 18:00

This lecture will be held on site and via Zoom

From 1963 onward, six urns containing of Holocaust victims remains have been interred in Japan. These urns’ journey was both transnational, converging with the Polish state museums memory diplomacy, as well as a very local one, as the meaning of and politics around the remains were intimately connected with Japan’s own experience. Indeed, this phenomenon is not unique to Japan. Polish museums have sent such urns all around Poland and globally, building a secular network of pilgrimage sites with its own relics and altars. Taking advantage of the fragile corporeality of ashes, this practice transformed them into portable commemorative objects. The (literal) objectification of the Jewish dead globally and in Japan meant different things for different actors in this story. Tracing the journey of the urns and their various uses, reveal the complex politics of transnational commemoration of World War II in its very local meanings in Japan and beyond.

 

Ran Zwigenberg is associate professor at Pennsylvania State University and Kyushu University. His research focuses on modern Japanese and European history, with a specialization in memory and cultural history. He has taught and lectured in the United States, Europe, Israel, and Japan, and published on issues of war memory, atomic energy, psychiatry, and survivor politics.  His latest manuscript Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (University of Chicago Press, 2023) deals with the psychological aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Japan. For more information on this and other projects, please see https://sites.psu.edu/zwigenberg/

 

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 894 1109 9080).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from July 22.