Potential of “War Experience Drawings and Paintings” by Citizens

This paper reports the presentation themed ‘Potential of “War Experience Drawings and Paintings” by Citizens: Discussion Based on Five Thousand Pieces Collected by Local Broadcasters’ held on March 4^th 2021 as part of the NHK BUNKEN FORUM 2021. At the presentation the authors examined past NHK’s projects of collecting war experience drawings/paintings from various perspectives. First, Inoue indicated the characteristics of war experience drawings/paintings, which included “the person who made the piece were actually at the very sites where events happened” and identified the advantages of war experience drawings/paintings such as the capability of presenting multifaceted viewpoints of many different war survivors and that of preserving the crucial moment that photographs cannot capture. Following this, Yoshida discussed the powers of drawing/painting with videos depicting actual cases; drawing war experiences itself have a power, the war experience drawings/paintings can facilitate the dialogue between war survivors and the interviewers, and specific locations intrinsically portrayed in war experience drawings/paintings serve as a medium for connecting people who know these places. Then, Inoue presented local broadcasters’ projects of collecting war experience drawings/paintings and pointed out that their projects and “civic journalism” pursued by local papers in the United States in the past shares a common ground. This article also introduces some of the feedback from online participants posted after the presentation.