Award-Winning War Confession Film Has No Home in Japan

A Japanese artist has created a video artwork that many critics abroad call powerful and important — and he cannot find a single museum in Japan willing to show it. The piece, called "The Angels of Testimony", opens in London in October. Its creator, Meiro Koizumi, is 50 and has spent years trying to bring it home.

The artwork is built around the recorded words of Hajime Kondo, a former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army. He was 99 years old when the footage was filmed, and he described, in his own voice, the killing of civilians and sexual assault committed by Japanese troops during the Sino-Japanese war. In the gallery, three screens rise out of the darkness. Kondo sits at the centre. Visitors do not read history in a textbook; they listen to a very old man describe what he did.

That directness is exactly why the work travels well overseas and struggles at home. Japan's wartime conduct in China remains a subject many institutions handle carefully, and museums appear reluctant to host a piece that centres on Japanese atrocities. Koizumi is not accusing anyone of a formal ban. He simply keeps asking, and keeps getting turned down. His own view is quiet but firm: "The work will only truly be complete when people can see it in Japan."

For anyone outside the art world, the story is really about who gets to decide which memories stay visible. A country can preserve documents and monuments and still avoid the uncomfortable voices. Koizumi's installation is one of those voices, recorded before it was lost. Until a Japanese museum says yes, the conversation it was meant to start happens everywhere except where it matters most.