looted artifacts and documents

[drama watcher]

Even scholars do not know the extent of looting because they do not know what has been stolen.
Most of the looted documents are sitting in the museums of some university in Japan and locked away by the Japanese government or claimed by Japanese as their own cultural artifacts and documents.

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[fixed link-Bo]

[drama watcher]

Looted treasures find a way home
By Deborah Cameron in Tokyo
December 11, 2004

For more than a generation, a small gilded urn said to contain Buddha's
bones was locked in a family warehouse in Japan, seen only by the wealthy
collector who owned it. The warehouse also stored hundreds of other
antiquities, all from South Korea, many of them dug up from graves.

Only after the collector died and his sons got into a dispute over his
estate did the existence of the hidden treasure become widely known.

The surrender of the collection to a South Korean museum, complete with the
urn, bones, a seventh-century statuette of Buddha, hundreds of ancient
pieces of jewellery, ornaments, bronze tools and stone arrowheads, is one
for the reference books, according to historians and archaeologists from
Japan and South Korea.

But much more South Korean treasure still remains secretly in Japanese
hands, says Yoko Hayashi, an art historian at Shobi University, who first
heard of the return of Buddha's bones in 2002.

"At that time, for me the words "looted art" conjured images of Greek
marbles in the British Museum or else the rampage of Nazi troops," Professor
Hayashi said.

"The idea that Japan had robbed Korea of its art treasures was like a bolt
from the blue."

In some cases modern-day thieves have taken matters into their own hands,
stealing the antiquities back from Japan.

A Korean Buddhist painting kept for centuries in a temple in Japan turned up
recently in a temple near Seoul, The Korea Herald reported last month.

The two men arrested over the painting's theft were motivated by "avarice
mixed with distorted patriotism" and had done "cultural acquisition" tours
of Japan between 1998 and 2000, allegedly removing 47 cultural and historic
items from Buddhist temples, the paper said.

Art experts in both countries believe there are 300,000 pieces of Korean art
and artefacts in Japan - more than 90 per cent of them in private
collections.

Of particular interest to Japanese collectors are fine pottery tea bowls,
delicately patterned and green-tinted celadon pottery, ornamental jewellery
and stone pagodas from temples that became garden ornaments.

Professor Toshiyuki Kono, a lawyer and member of the UNESCO experts
committee on the return of cultural property, says using the courts to seize
the treasure might put it "behind the door or under the table" and even
further out of view.

He also thinks that compensation and tax benefits should be given by the
Japanese Government as an incentive to collectors to relinquish what they
hold.

For those involved, the effort to return the treasure helps reconciliation
between two countries which share a bloody history. Japan first invaded
Korea in the 16th century and although driven out, started a lasting pattern
of enmity. Scars remain from Japan's 40-year colonial occupation of Korea,
which ended in 1945.

The Japan representative of the Asia Foundation, Andrew Horvat, said a
healthy debate is going on between historians and art experts in the two
countries about the artefacts and which ones belong in South Korea.

Business and cultural ties are growing. Last year Japan's Cabinet Office
published a survey showing that the population felt more affinity for South
Korea than it did for China.

Last weekend at one of Japan's biggest contemporary art museums, the ticket
office was besieged by women buying tickets to see an exhibition of
photography by the South Korean soap opera star Bae Yong Joon.

[drama watcher]

This by France.

www.american.edu/TED/artifactkorea.htm