ABSTRACT
The Himeyuri Peace Museum in Okinawa, Japan, is a privately owned museum dedicated to the Battle of Okinawa. For nearly 30 years since its opening in 1989, survivors of the Himeyuri Student Corps have managed the museum, telling visitors about the tragedy of war and the importance of peace that they learned from their experience of the Battle of Okinawa. The museum’s exhibits have been praised by visitors as exhibits in which you can see each person’s face. Through the exhibit, visitors feel that the students who died in the war are ordinary people just like themselves, and they can imagine how they must have felt at the time. They come to see them not merely as dead people, but as people who were alive. In this article, we will introduce the exhibition ‘An exhibition in which each person’s face can be seen,’ by tracing the postwar experiences of the survivors, former Himeyuri students, and the characteristics of each exhibition room.
