Section 2: Images and Perspectives on Death and Life

Program Promoter

Reflecting back on the history of images, it is rather surprising to see how many of them are related to death and the world after death. Human beings cannot be disinterested in issues of death. Because we are all destined to die, we long for immortality and for an instantaneous glimpse of the afterlife. The story of the country of Kosen (a place where the deceased are believed to go) included in Kojiki accounts Izanaki's effort to bring back the deceased Izanami from death and his visit to and flight from the country of Kosen. Similarly, Dante's Divine Comedy narrates the travel to hell, purgatory, and heaven. These stories typify the longings I describe. When put into visual forms, our desires can be exemplified in fine works such as the Screen of Hell and Heaven (collection of Kurodani Konkai-Kohmyoji Temple) and illustrations for the Divine Comedy by Sandro Botticelli. It can be said that fear of the unavoidable death itself or the anxiety for the unknown afterlife has ceaselessly produced a rich culture of images which includes funeral art, graves markers and sepulcher and their accompanying objects, commemorative monuments, as well as portraits of the deceased for commemorations.

Death is not an issue confined in the field of biology. Rather, more than science, it is a cultural issue that includes varying degrees of cultural interests in terms of time and geographical areas. Disciplines such as Art History, Archaeology, and Cultural Resources Studies have conducted individual research on specific decorations and subsidiary objects of tombs, religious arts, iconographic images of worship and commemorative portraits. Recent exhibitions like "Rituals after Death: Funeral Culture of Ancient Mediterranean (2002) and "Portraits of Professors" (1998) at the University Museum of the Tokyo University as well as "Totentanz: the Collection of Sketches from Dusseldorf University" at the National Museum of Western Art (2000) exemplify such effort. Despite these activities and exhibitions, the synthetic exploration of the value of images about life and death has rarely been conducted from a cultural point of view.

In this section of the 21st century COE Program "Construction of Death and Life Studies Concerning Culture and Value of Life," we will focus on images relating to death. We will explore historical and contemporary issues of expression in visual form through graves, tombs, and commemorative monuments, and narrative language in eulogy, journalism, and biography, and of its treatment in society. Although death is fundamentally a "personal thing/event," society (nation and work place), families, and journalism media are deeply involved with death and affix a variety of meanings to the death of individuals. For this reason, there are cases of merciless deaths that are alienated from personal death. We plan to explicate these social aspects of life and death and posit death as a part of life.

Presently, the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims is collecting names and portraits of the victims of the atomic bombs while the Japanese government is discussing the construction of a new commemorative facility to memorialize the war victims and dedicated peace. In the present situation, the amount of social interest in these contemporary issues concerning the relationship between nations and the deceased, and medicine and death - as in the choices of euthanasia at home or death in hospital, as foreshadowed in Death in Hospital Room (1893) by Edward Munch-coexist and are increasing in its volume. It is in this context that we use images as the central axis of this section and conduct historical and cultural investigations.

In the west, where medicine and pests were deeply involved historically in the arts, there are academic associations known as "Totentanz (Dance Macabre)" in which scholars from the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences participate. Utilizing this as a guiding model, we hope to assist the goal of the larger project in formulating anacademic and synthetic "Death and Life Studies" through explicating the issues and topics of contemporary society regarding life and death.

OSANO Shigetoshi