Talk:Living Human Treasure

Untitled

I agree that the various "Living National Treasure" etc. pages should be merged, with redirects for the ones not chosen as the main title. Kdammers 06:38, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Interesting info for expansion of the article

I don't know where to put it at the moment in the article, but don't want to lose this info either, so I put it here: At Ise Grand Shrine Living National Treasures are allowed as close to the main sanctuary as representatives of prefectural governments and officials of Ise Shrine. See the tamagaki article for details and a reference. bamse (talk) 18:15, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Sources

I happened to find a decent source that was in the Tradition article. I've seen this topic elsewhere as a section, not sure where though but there are definitely sources floating around out there that can be added. MyNameWasTaken (talk) 17:12, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there's no such thing in Japan

According to Robert Yellin's website (an expert in Japanese pottery) there is no such designation made by the Japanese government; it's merely a media invention. The Japan Ceramics Society does award ceramic artists, but not with that title. Yellin published an article by Aoyama Wahei on his site that bluntly states that there's no such title. The author discusses a "1954 Cultural Property Preservation Act, and the phrase "Important Intangible Cultural Property""

http://www.e-yakimono.net/html/living-natl-treasures.htm
http://www.e-yakimono.net/html/awards-jcs-all-winners.html
http://www.e-yakimono.net/html/lnt-critique-aoyama.html

Author, if you know of a source for this "living national treasure" title, please provide a real reference for it other than one US newspaper article, that confirms the claim. Otherwise, mentions of Japan should be deleted. Thank you, Wordreader (talk) 04:19, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Living National Treasure or Living Human Treasure

These might be alternate terms for the same concept, or two distinct concepts. There is little doubt that National Living Treasure (Australia) is a popularly-voted list and not the same thing as the UNESCO-sponsored concept. My quick Google search for the two terms got me

• "living national treasure" about 125,000 hits, the top of the list is dominated by Wikipedia and Japan
• "living human treasure" 5,910 hits, top dominated by UNESCO and the first page includes four different countries

So - LNT is the more popular term, but not for the concept described by the first sentence of this article. That's UNESCO's Living Human Treasure. It's not clear to me that Living National Treasure (Japan) refers to the Japanese interpretation of the same thing, but it might. There certainly appear to be a range of countries that could be mentioned here, perhaps referenced to the list I removed from the Australian article. It is likely that UNESCO intends to recognise and support intangible cultures at a level different to national governments, but needs the agreement and assistance of national governments to make it possible. --Scott Davis ^Talk 22:14, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it can be argued that UNESCO has some claim to "ownership" of the term Living Human Treasure. The other term, Living National Treasure, has been usurped for the purpose of the UNESCO-defined term, despite the fact that it has other uses in different jurisdictions. I boldly re-titled the article to reflect the UNESCO term, but was reverted by an admin without a reasonable explanation. Perhaps we should start a formal page move process to gather opinions and move the title with consensus. WWGB (talk) 22:33, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

Without having read much into it yet, I'd guess that ethnocultural minority groups are the key focus of preserving Living Human Treasure. We don't need to preserve the ability to create modern pop songs or build straight roads because "anybody can do it", we need to preserve the ability to navigate across a desert while finding food and water, singing the songs of the ancestors that provide the "map". The sorts of things that our 6x great grandparents might have done every day, but we have never seen done outside of a museum or cultural heritage display. --Scott Davis ^Talk 23:30, 30 August 2016 (UTC)