Tokyo, April 17 (Jiji) — UNESCO’s Executive Board on Thursday inscribed Buddhist scriptures preserved at Zojoji Temple in Tokyo on the Memory of the World Register, making it the ninth Buddhist scripture in Japan to be inscribed.
The series of Buddhist scriptures, which consists of about 12,000 volumes and was printed in China and the Korean Peninsula in the 12th and 13th centuries, is an important source for fields such as history, linguistics, and Buddhist studies.
The scriptures were collected and donated to the temple by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period of Japan.
Meanwhile, 1,532 photographs and two films taken between August 6 and December of 1945 (after the U.S. atomic bombing of the western Japanese city of Hiroshima) failed to be inscribed on the Memory of the World Register this time.
The UNESCO Council decided in 2021 that if a country raises an objection, it will not be allowed to be inscribed unless the country agrees.
Some may object to the record of the Hiroshima bombing.
