hankyoreh

Members of a committee to restore the Tanbamangan Museum cut a large ribbon at a ceremony to commemorate the reopening of the museum near Kyoto in Japan, June 26.

The committee said that it plans to donate around 350 thousand yen ($4,336) monthly to help cover the museum’s operating costs, and has succeeded in recruiting more than 1,000 supporters. The museum was closed in 2009 due to an annual deficit of as much as five million yen operating soley through admission fees without outside support since it opened in 1989.

As of June 26, 1,435 supporters made donations, with half of them in their teens and 20s. In particular, more than 500 individuals joined the campaign in just one day as Lim Soo-bin, a high school junior, posted a message encouraging participation in the donation campaign on a portal site.

“One thousand people with one mind protected a history that Japan has tried to erase. It is as worthy as writing a line of history,” she said in the post.

The museum is a former mangan mine in Tanba, 50 kilometers away from Kyoto, which has preserved the labor site where many Koreans were moved and forced to work under the Japan’s colonial rule.

(Photo courtesy of the Tanbamangan Museum Restoration Committee, Story by Lee Seung-joon)