Ceremonies exhibit at the downtown Salt Lake City Library.
“If we are going to take advantage of the assumption that all people want peace, then the problem is for people to get together and to leap governments—if necessary to evade governments—to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other.” – President Dwight David Eisenhower
Ceremonies: A Tale of Sister Citiescelebrates fifty years of friendship between the people of Matsumoto, Japan and Salt Lake City, Utah. Comprised of many stories, the exhibit conveys this relationship through interviews, letters, journals, and memoirs. Photos in the display were pieced together from archives and scrapbooks in both cities. Most of the photos are snapshots, personal items never intended for public display. Their presence reflects the grassroots nature of the cultural interactions they capture and the importance of ceremony in American relationships with the Japanese.
Salt Lake’s sister city program developed from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “People to People” initiative. Originating in the wake of World War Two and during the early years of the Cold War, this idea sought to affiliate international communities by encouraging “people to people” interactions at all levels of society. Leaders in Salt Lake City and Matsumoto embraced this concept and laid a foundation that allowed the affiliation to expand and sustain itself.
Developed by Ross Chambless, the exhibit introduces us to ordinary people who utilized relationships to repair the wounds of war. Exhibit panels are loosely based on movable Japanese shoji partitions, which are made with a layer of paper over a wood lattice screen. Shoji screens are traditionally used in Japanese homes to filter sunlight entering a room and to separate interior and exterior spaces. The exhibit comes with a curriculum guide for grades 4-12 (which can be accessed at the UEN webiste at http://www.uen.org/ceremonies/) as well as a content-rich, foldout brochure.
Ceremonies offers students a unique vehicle for the study of Japanese culture, the history of Japanese-Americans, American and Utah history, and reconciliation after violent conflict.