Memories of Air Raids in the Region and Their Representation in Museums : Focusing on Hiratsuka City Museum

Hiratsuka(平塚市, Hiratsuka-shi), located in south-central Kanagawa Prefecture, is a typical bedroom town in the Tokyo metropolitan area with a population of about 260,000. Hiratsuka City Museum, which opened in 1976 as a comprehensive museum for the city of Hiratsuka, aims to be a ‘Community Museum’ whose main users are local residents, and covers a wide range of subjects from local folklore to history, nature, and astronomy. This paper examines the role and limitations of museums and local residents as a place to inherit and share memories of war by following the process of representation local air raid memories in Japanese public museums, focusing on Hiratsuka City Museum's ‘Hiratsuka Air Raid and War Damage Recording Group’. The city of Hiratsuka, which underwent rapid industrialization in the early Showa period and later became a military-industrial city, was severely damaged by air raids conducted for about 100 minutes from midnight on July 16, 1945. As such succession of war memories emerged in earnest as a community task, the Hiratsuka City Museum established a ‘Hiratsuka Air Raid and War Damage Recording Group’ in June 1989 with members of the general public. Since then, the Recording Group has been active for more than 30 years, proactively identifying and collecting local air raid memories, participating in the creation of exhibitions based on the results of these activities, and creating a new civic culture that addresses the transmission of local war memories. However, there is a limitation that emphasizing the tragic air raid damage in the region leads to a sense of victimhood, making it difficult to subject war cooperation and war violence as a military city. This can be said to be a challenge faced by many public museums displaying local air raids.