Scholarly record

EXPLORING THE ROLE OF ART MUSEUM FOR THE RECOVERY FROM DISASTER: THE POTENTIAL OF MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

M. Takahashi

Abstract

As the marketization of education continues to be promoted, it is necessary to ask what educational role museums and adult education programs are playing, and to clearly explicate the importance of their existence. Who visits museums? What kind of experiences do museum visitors have, and how do they learn? These are question that both researchers and practitioners must answer. The purpose of this paper is to examine how museum visitors in general respond to the exhibits they saw, and how survivors of the Great East Japan earthquake in particular constructed meaning when visiting museums, as well as to set forth the possibilities inherent to museum education. A survey was administered to 25 students participating in a university adult education course who viewed an exhibit of work by Ito Jakuchu. All of the visitors were survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake, although the degree to which they were impacted by the disaster varied. The survey results showed that while these museum visitors gathered information from curators and captions and adhered to interpretive framework, they synthesized this information with their own impressions of the exhibited items, constructing unique understandings of the exhibit and their own museum experiences. Furthermore, by communicating a “paean to life,” the Jakuchu exhibit affected the visitors on an emotional level and served to support their recovery from the disaster.

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