Kazuyoshi Ohtsuka
National Museum of Ethnology

In November of 2002, I visited Nepal for the first time in over a year and met Dr. Ganesh Man Gurung, who had participated as an observer in the 1999 Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) training course on Museum Management Technology (Collection, Conservation, Exhibition). In this essay I report on the progress that has been made thereafter towards the establishment of an open-air museum that he took the lead in planning; the Nepal National Ethnographic Museum.

My first involvement with the Nepal National Ethnographic Museum Management Committee (hereafter, Management Committee) came in 1997. Subsequently, every year when I went to Nepal, Dr. Gurung held a meeting of the committee and I accompanied him to places such as the Embassy of Japan and JICA's Nepal office to explain his plans to establish a museum. I tried to invite members of the Management Committee over as JICA museology seminar trainees, but was unable to do so because the museum was still at the preparatory stage of its foundation. Fortunately, however, Dr. Gurung was able to spend six months at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka (Minpaku) with a Japan Foundation subsidy and was able to participate in the seminar as an observer. Moreover, that same year Mr. Bharat Raj Rawat - an officer at the National Museum of Nepal, Chauni - was participating as a trainee, and it was fortuitous that the two of them met in Japan. This is because many of the members of the Management Committee were university anthropologists, and they did not have sufficient connection with specialists who work in museums.

Champadevi and the Toppan Project

In 1999 the Management Committee, Minpaku and the Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. concluded an agreement whereby the Management Committee was provided with a set of video-making equipment and the three parties were entitled to freely edit and use the video that was recorded with this equipment. This is the Toppan Project that is being pursued by a number of the trainees in their respective countries. In December of 1999, Mr. Yasushi Kobayashi of Toppan Company and I visited Kathmandu for the presentation ceremony of the video equipment. This was the first time that I inspected Champadevi, the planned construction site for the open-air museum. However, as soon as I got there I was stunned. The reason being that the place was at the foot of the mountains in the Kathmandu Valley, barely accessible by an unpaved road over which only Jeeps could pass. I suppose you could say that the place was appropriate for the construction of an open-air museum. However, a plan for the museum's establishment that necessitated starting with road construction seemed to me like a dream or a fantasy.

At that point, I proposed to Dr. Gurung a more realistic plan that could likely be achieved in about five years. As a first stage, this was to start the museum by renting a manor house of the former nobility - even a small one would do - located somewhere within Kathmandu's Ring Road, and after that succeeded the second stage would be to develop the open-air museum. Dr. Gurung and the vice chairman Dr. Som Prasad Gaucan were kind enough to give open-minded consideration to this sudden proposal, and they apparently persuaded the members of the Management Committee. I say this because the next time that I visited Nepal they had prepared a program to go and view the buildings that were candidates for the museum.