Cultural Resources / Cultural Heritage Management Explaining and Safeguarding the Universal Value of Heritage for Local Communities
The terms cultural heritage and cultural resources lack a universally agreed definition, but I explain them as follows.
First, regardless of form—tangible or intangible, movable or immovable—and regardless of whether they are widely recognized or not, all cultural assets that exist within a community can be considered cultural resources. In order to sustain regional cultures, it is vital to identify and recover these assets, many of which risk disappearing in the face of social decline, and to make them more widely known so they are not lost in vain.
For this to happen, someone within the community must begin to see such latent “resources” embedded in local spaces and everyday life as worthy of being passed down as heritage. When the value of these cultural resources—what one person regards as important—can be expressed as a universal value in the form of a narrative or story that others can also understand and embrace, it then becomes recognized and shared as cultural heritage to be preserved by all.
This approach has been nurtured in initiatives such as the Citizen’s Heritage of Dazaifu City, the Tono Heritage of Tono City, and the Hagi Machiju Museum. Today, it is being expanded across Japan, often in the form of Regional Plans for the Preservation and Utilization of Cultural Properties.
Traditionally, the term cultural properties was associated with elite assets to be protected by the government or local authorities. In recent years, however, revisions to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties have broadened its meaning to encompass nearly the same scope as cultural heritage, fostering a perspective in which heritage is preserved collectively by entire communities.
