The Silk Road once linked East Asia to Western Europe and hosted flourishing oases of high art and civilization all along its great length. Today, many remnants of its brilliant past lie in ruin. The same is true of countless other cultural artifacts around the world. Whose responsibility is it to care for these treasures? Professor IKUO HIRAYAMA believes that they are the inheritance of the entire world; the entire world, therefore, should join in caring for them. He is setting the example.
Born in 1930, HIRAYAMA was attending middle school in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb destroyed the city and killed many of his schoolmates and teachers. He went on to study Japanese painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) and joined the school's faculty in 1952. Suffering badly from radiation sickness a few years later, HIRAYAMA endured a crisis that led to a spiritual awakening and recovery. He expressed his breakthrough in a painting depicting the seventh-century monk Xuanzang, bearing the message of Buddha across the Silk Road to China, from whence it reached Japan. HIRAYAMA's interest in Buddhism's origins and its path to Japan influenced his paintings for years to come and led him to explore the Silk Road for himself.
Year after year, he did so. All along the fabled route he encountered long-neglected Buddhist shrines and works of art. In Dunhuang, northwest China, he saw hundreds of cliff-side grottoes filled with ancient Buddha images and bright paintings-priceless antiquities that China lacked the resources to protect. HIRAYAMA pondered this. Each one of the Silk Road's historic entrepots and pilgrimage sites had contributed to the passage of Buddhism to Japan. This insight led HIRAYAMA to persuade the Japanese government to underwrite and equip a groundbreaking research and restoration project at the Dunhuang Caves.
But there were so many sites like the Dunhuang Caves in Asia. Some of them, like the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, lay in countries beset by turbulence and without the means or will to protect them. What was needed, HIRAYAMA decided, was an international campaign to save cultural treasures wherever they existed. By this time, his paintings had brought him fame and wealth, and he was a professor (and later president) of a prestigious art school. HIRAYAMA now put these assets to use as an activist for cultural preservation.
He spearheaded international efforts to rehabilitate Angkor Wat in Cambodia and to safeguard the ancient Korguryo tomb frescoes of North Korea. He helped rescue Chinese artifacts from the Yangtze River flood of 1998 and, in the city of Nanjing, fostered Chinese-Japanese reconciliation by recruiting Japanese volunteers to help rebuild the ancient city ramparts. He funded French-led efforts to save war-threatened treasures in Afghanistan's national museum and led an international appeal to the Taliban not to destroy the unique Bamiyan Buddhas. And much more.
HIRAYAMA channels his collaborative efforts through his own foundation and through governments, international organizations, and UNESCO, for whom he serves as a Goodwill Ambassador. Exhibitions of his paintings, in Japan and abroad, arouse public interest and generate funds for restoration projects. He has committed many millions of dollars personally.
HIRAYAMA believes that restoring works of art goes hand-in-hand with restoring human societies. Projects like those in Cambodia must always include training for members of the host community so that, in time, they can assume the restoration work themselves. This, he says, helps damaged societies to reestablish kinship with their own past and, in doing so, "restore their humanity."
In electing IKUO HIRAYAMA to receive the 2001 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding, the board of trustees recognizes his efforts to promote peace and international cooperation by fostering a common bond of stewardship for the world's cultural treasures.
