What is Cultural Resources Studies?
Cultural Resources Studies emerged from the following set of ideas.
The Department of Cultural Resources Studies was founded in 2000. It is a relatively new department within the Faculty of Letters and the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, both of which have a history of more than one hundred years. Strictly speaking, it is a graduate department and has no corresponding undergraduate program. Beginning in the 2027 academic year, the Department will consist of three courses: the Cultural Resources Studies Course, the Cultural Infrastructure Studies Course, and the Cultural Management Course.
Since the 2015 academic year, the Department has offered two courses: the Cultural Resources Studies Course and the Cultural Management Course. Before that, it consisted of three fields: Cultural Management, Material Culture Studies, and Textual Studies. The integration of Material Culture Studies and Textual Studies into the Cultural Resources Studies Course, and the placement of that course before the Cultural Management Course, were based on the following idea.
The world contains an enormous accumulation of “forms” and “words.” Documents are written “words,” and books are “words” that have taken the form of publications. Many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have dealt primarily with such “words.” Today, however, academic fields have become highly specialized, and the development of information and communication technologies has weakened the relationship between “words” and the media that transmit them. Universities have long emphasized training students to carefully analyze and create “words,” but they have tended to pay less attention to the media that carry those “words” to us from the past or from distant places: writing systems, documents, books, and other material forms.
Yet from the moment writing was invented, “words” could never have been separate from the concrete “forms” of media. The two cannot be considered in isolation. “Forms” may constrain “words,” but they also open up various possibilities for their transmission and preservation. To engage seriously with “words,” therefore, we must also pay attention to the physical objects of documents and books, to materials such as paper, stone, and wood, and to tools such as brushes, pens, computers, and smartphones.
On the other hand, within a traditional Faculty of Letters, the existing fields that take “forms” as their primary object of study are mostly limited to art history and archaeology. Once academic fields are defined in this way, countless “forms” are excluded from view simply because they are not works of art or archaeological artifacts.
Something similar to what happens in the study of “words” also occurs in the study of “forms.” That is, there is a tendency to lose sight of the materials and objects that actually produce those forms. Take painting, for example. An image can leave the painting itself and circulate freely across media such as prints, photographs, printed matter, television, and the internet. To study images in this way is certainly important. At the same time, however, the formats of painting—murals, sliding-door paintings, ceiling paintings, hanging scrolls, picture scrolls, votive tablets, framed paintings, paintings digitally displayed on screens, and so on—and their material dimensions provide important clues for thinking about what painting is in the first place. The format of a painting tells us what role it played in a particular time and place.
Cultural Resources Studies also pays attention to “sounds.” Here, we consider how something invisible to the eye — “sound” — comes into being and is transmitted together with various “forms,” such as the body, musical instruments, notes, scores, music schools, concert halls, records, tape recorders, CDs, and music streaming platforms.
Cultural Resources Studies begins not by standing on the side of existing academic systems, but by entering into the bodies of materials from which those systems were formed. It seeks to return to the roots of culture, to re-examine it from the ground up, to extract new information from cultural materials from multiple perspectives, and to return that knowledge to society.
We deliberately use the word “resources” rather than “materials.” The word “resources” contains “source,” whose primary meaning is a spring or the place where a river or stream begins. The prefix of “re” strengthens the sense of returning to the source. In other words, Cultural Resources Studies seeks to think again from the source.
The use of the phrase “cultural resources” also reflects a conscious distance from the notion of “cultural properties.” In Japan, more than half a century has passed since the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties was enacted in 1950. During this period, the term “cultural properties” became firmly established, but so too did a system in which value was assessed and officially designated by the national and local governments. At the same time, the limitations of this designation system became increasingly apparent, and there has been growing demand for the re-evaluation of things that have not been officially designated. This is why a registration system of cultural properties was introduced in 1996 and the category of cultural landscapes was established in 2005. In recent years, the term “cultural heritage” has also come into frequent use, partly under the influence of UNESCO World Heritage.
The choice of the term “cultural resources,” rather than “cultural properties” or “cultural heritage,” whose values are already defined, is also a declaration of our intention to turn our attention to contemporary society and culture.
In order to preserve, make public, and use the knowledge and information gained by returning to these “sources” in contemporary society, we must also consider the infrastructure that supports them. Today, the digitization of cultural resources, the construction of digital archives, the design and operation of information systems, long-term preservation, and the creation of mechanisms for public access and use have become indispensable issues for cultural activities and cultural institutions. Museums, art galleries, archives, libraries, theaters, and other cultural institutions now face the question of how to digitize their collections and records of activity, how to preserve them, and how to open them to society. Since the revision of the Museum Act in 2022, the roles and capacities expected of museums and related institutions have changed significantly. In addition to the collection, preservation, curation and exhibition of cultural objects, the organization, sharing, communication, and use of information through digital technologies have become increasingly important.
In response to these challenges, the Department will establish a new Cultural Infrastructure Studies Course beginning in the 2027 academic year. This course will focus on the study and research of the digitization of cultural resources and the design, construction, and operation of information infrastructure that supports their long-term preservation, public access, and use. It aims to train individuals who can connect specialists involved in cultural activities with specialists in information technology, and who can design systems that allow cultural resources to be used sustainably within society.
If Cultural Resources Studies is an endeavor to return to the sources of “forms,” “sounds,” and “words” in order to re-examine culture, then Cultural Infrastructure Studies is an endeavor to consider the foundations that allow the knowledge and information drawn from those sources to be preserved, shared, and transmitted to the future within today’s technological environment. Cultural Management, in turn, is the field that returns such knowledge and information to society.
Cultural Management considers the past, present, and future of historical documents and objects, libraries, museums, art galleries, theaters, concert halls, cultural policy, cultural administration, systems for the protection of cultural properties, copyright systems, and other institutions and frameworks. Through this work, it seeks to make active use of cultural resources. The management of cultural institutions, the evaluation and support of cultural activities, and the formulation of cultural policy are also important concerns of Cultural Management.
What should be emphasized here is our commitment to exploring cultural infrastructure and cultural management on the basis of careful thought and research concerning “forms,” “sounds,” and “words.” Material culture leads to museums, art galleries, and theaters, while textual studies lead to archives and libraries. But “forms,” “sounds,” and “words” come first, not museums, concert halls, or archives. To manage such cultural institutions, it is not enough to acquire managerial techniques. One must also have a deep understanding of the culture woven together by “forms,” “sounds,” and “words.” At the same time, today it is equally essential to understand the digital technologies and information infrastructure that enable those resources to be preserved, made public, and used.
The order of the three courses—the Cultural Resources Studies Course, the Cultural Infrastructure Studies Course, and the Cultural Management Course—reflects this logic. First, the Cultural Resources Studies Course analyzes and evaluates cultural products composed of “forms,” “sounds,” and “words” as cultural resources. Next, the Cultural Infrastructure Studies Course considers the information infrastructure needed to preserve, make public, and use the cultural resources identified in this way. Finally, the
Cultural Management Course examines how cultural institutions, cultural activities, cultural policy, and cultural administration should be developed on the basis of those cultural resources and infrastructures. In other words, the three courses represent a continuous process: discovering cultural resources, building the infrastructure that supports them, and making use of them in society.
At the same time, students should understand that, after entering the Department, they will study together across these courses. The three courses are not separate, closed-off fields. Rather, they are deeply interconnected through a shared concern with cultural resources. Through these three courses, the Department of Cultural Resources Studies pursues research and education that re-examine culture from its sources, build the infrastructure that supports it, and open it to society.
▼ Connections across disciplines and organizations
Reflecting its multidisciplinary nature, the Department of Cultural Resources Studies works closely with colleagues based at other departments in the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology. Researchers of varying research backgrounds and experience, including faculty from Sociology, Art History, Aesthetics and Religious Studies have joined our staff.
We also have partnerships with various research organizations outside and inside the university. Within the university, we are affiliated with the Historiographical Institution, the University Museum, the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia and the Archaeological Research Unit, whose staff contribute to the courses we offer. Outside of the university, we collaborate with the National Museum of Western Art and the National Institute of Japanese Literature to offer practical learning experience.