Word: museum
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...Stieglitz Collection has languished but also pump millions of dollars into Fisk's general budget. Why not sell off just a bit of that famous art? But when the school moved to bring Radiator Building to market, it triggered what became a lawsuit by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which moved to block the sale on the grounds that it violated the terms of the painter's bequest. In February the museum offered Fisk a deal. It could sell Radiator Building, but only to the museum, and for $7 million, a price much below what...
...that is actually an improvement - until January, Yushukan had maintained that Washington tricked Tokyo into war in order to lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression. That was deleted in a recent revision of the some of the museum's historical explanations, although Yasukuni officials deny that the changes were made to placate any foreigners. They certainly don't go out of their way to soothe the feelings of Asian nations that suffered far more than the U.S. did at the hands of the Japanese army. Yushukan's exhibits on Japan's colonization of Korea in the first half...
...Yushukan's only flaw were its distortion of 20th century history, it might not have become such a lightning rod for criticism. After all, the shrine is not government-controlled, and the museum's version doesn't represent Tokyo's official view of the war - let alone what most Japanese believe. What is truly disturbing about the museum is the implicit approval of the imperialist ideology that led to the deaths of millions throughout Asia - and a blatant celebration of the most extreme expression of that ideology, the kamikaze...
...very young pilots - many kamikaze were university students - are lionized in gleaming oil paintings and bronze statues, but the museum does nothing to contextualize the waste of their lives. The kamikaze, after all, did nothing to stop the American war machine from bearing down on Japan. Sending them to their death as suicide bombers was as brutally absurd as the "bulletproof" vest on display in the museum that is nothing more than a cloth shirt stitched with coins from shrines. It's bad enough to lie to foreign countries; to perpetuate that lie to your own people seems unforgivable...
...Japan's wartime victims and to Japan itself - to have a memorial that honors the war dead without honoring the ideology that cost them their lives. As peaceful a square as any you might find in Tokyo, Yasukuni shrine could be that place, but only with a radically different museum. And if that ever happens, perhaps even Premier Wen could spare a visit...