On August 12th, 2020, the Taiwan Hakka Museum (part of the Hakka Affairs Council’s Taiwan Hakka Culture Development Center) held a joint opening ceremony for the Never-Ending Stream: Taiwanese Hakka and Japan International Exhibition and the Collecting Hakka Culture: Permanent Exhibition of Museum Classics exhibition. The Never-Ending Stream exhibition was born out of trilateral collaboration between the Hakka Affairs Council’s Taiwan Hakka Culture Development Center (THCDC), Japan's National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku), and National Chiao Tung University’s College of Hakka Studies (NCTU CHS). The exhibition is ongoing until November 14th, 2021; all are encouraged to attend.

 

The Hakka Affairs Council drew attention to the achievements presented in the final report for the Hakka Historical Artifacts Curated and Reborn: Building on Uematsu Akashi’s Foundational Survey of the Fangliao, Xinpu Hakka Village project. As stated in the report, project director and College Dean Huang Shaw-Herng personally visited Tokyo from 2017 to 2018. During that time, he received consent from Curator Yoshizawa Tadanori for a transfer, free of charge, of Hakka cultural artifacts to the NCTU CHS. He was then able to organize the objects, crate them up, and ship them back to Taiwan. The subsequent inventory listed 2,614 cultural objects and documents, which were then added to the Uematsu Collection.

 

On December 16, 2017, the THCDC signed a six-year collaboration agreement with Minpaku and the NCTU CHS at the Taiwan Hakka Museum. The agreement is designed to strengthen Hakka research and academic exchange between Japan and Taiwan. The scope of the agreement includes interchange between the different organizations’ personnel; collaborative research projects; museum exhibition collaborations; exchange and use of academic research data and published documents; and other collaborations, both regularly scheduled and occasional. 

 

To enrich and round out the content of the Never-Ending Stream exhibition, the THCDC borrowed items from the NCTU CHS Uematsu Collection. Content included field photographs and artifacts from Professor Uematsu Akashi. 

 

On the date of the opening, school representatives in attendance included College Dean Huang Shaw-Herng; NCTU Degree Program of Hakka Society and Culture Director Chiang Shu-Chen; College Secretary Fan Mai-Hua; CHS PhD student Liu Huai-Jen; and Graduate Program of Ethnicity and Culture alumnus Lü Ching. Following the ceremony, a group of attendees went into the exhibition space to view the exhibits. Through the guides’ detailed explanations, they were able to understand what the pieces represented; Dean Huang also offered some explanations regarding exhibit contents, and interacted with honored guests in attendance. It was a feast of new Hakka cultural knowledge.

     

(Text/THCDC & NCTU CHS PhD Student Liu Huai-Jen  Images/Liu Huai-Jen)

Dean Huang Shaw-Herng (front row, fifth from left) represents NCTU in attending the ceremony

Introduction to Professor Uematsu Akashi

Items borrowed from the NCTU CHS Uematsu Collection, including field photography and artifacts from Professor Uematsu