新たなアジア研究に向けて6号
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Review1. Fifty Years of Research on Cambodia in JapanYoshiaki Ishizawa is a leader in research on Angkor worldwide who established the foundations of the modern field of Cambodian research in Japan and has led the field for over half a century. He visited Cambodia during his foreign language studies in 1961 for the first time (Ishizawa 2014: 268). As is widely known, a civil war began in Cambodia in 1970, and from 1975 to 1979 somewhere from one to two million people were killed under the Pol Pot regime. During this time foreign researchers were unable to enter the country. Ishizawa wrote about his feelings regarding this situation in Study on Ancient Cambodia History, published in 1982, as follows: “For these 12 years it was my dream to visit the ruins of Angkor. The grand temples at Angkor had made such an impact and moved me so much for a period in my youth. I devoted my younger days to the restoration of the ruins and tried my hand at historical research through reading inscriptions. Around 20 years slipped right by doing this. After Cambodia got involved in the Vietnam War, there were 10 years of continual civil war and unrest when Cambodia was closed to the rest of the world. During this time I was in complicated anxieties, feeling indescribable unease and exaggerated fear of the destruction of the ruins and alternating between ups and downs with each report about the Angkor ruins. In order to continue my studies I went to L’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient and spent all my time deciphering rubbings of inscriptions from the school’s underground archives” (Ishizawa 1982: 325). In his (New) Study on Ancient Cambodia, re-published in 2013, Ishizawa writes of this period, “I took it upon myself to be the supporter for Cambodia, a small nation being pushed and pulled about by international powers, and I took a firm stand for Cambodian peace in magazines and newspapers” (Ishizawa 2013, 695). In August of 1980, when the civil war had still not reached an end, he entered Cambodia before many others as “an expert on ruins from the West,” and made a detailed report of the state of the Angkor ruins (Ishizawa and Uzaki 1981). In (New) Study on Ancient Cambodia he writes that on this trip he witnessed Cambodians trying to return to their home villages in groups, some of whom had been relocated for forced labor by the Pol Pot regime and others who had fled to Thailand as refugees. Overlaid on these sights were scenes from hundreds of years earlier when Siamese armies invaded Cambodia (Ishizawa 2013: 31–32). From his descriptions we can see that not only is he a scholar conducting research on ancient Cambodia using historical materials on the desk, he also visits the country in person as a supporter of its revival and recovery.In the early 1990’s, as the Japanese Self Defense Force was dispatched to United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) in Cambodia rapidly advancing on a path towards peace, there was a surge in concern towards the country in Japan. However, there were very few Japanese researchers studying Cambodia at that time and people could not receive sufficient information. Ishizawa began a project to develop human resources in Cambodia in 1991, preceding for one year the establishment of UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) which is marked as the revival first year of the nation. The project involved bringing Cambodian exchange students to Sophia University, and by 2009 six doctorates and eleven graduate degrees had been conferred through the ReviewConferences& LecturesResearchActivitiesISHIZAWA Yoshiaki and MIWA Satoru,Cambodia: The Five Great Ruins of the Forest, Rengo Shuppan, 2014KITAGAWA TakakoAuthor001

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