Local Heroes
Margaret Mehl explains the surprising adoption of two Japanese scholars by their hometowns as major tourist attractions.
In 1988 Japan’s prime minister Takeshita Noboru announced his intention to give one hundred million Yen (more than half a million pounds) to each of Japan’s 3,268 local governing towns and villages. How does one spend one hundred million Yen? One town opted to buy a 63kg lump of gold and put it on display. But the small town of Kannabe in Hiroshima prefecture and the village of Shitada in Niigata prefecture used their grants to build museums to local heroes – in both cases scholars of Chinese learning, even though this field of knowledge has been in sharp decline since the mid nineteenth century.
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