Zojoji Buddhist Scriptures Added to UNESCO Memory of World

Jiji Press

16:31 JST, April 18, 2025

Tokyo, April 17 (Jiji Press)—UNESCO’s executive board on Thursday added Buddhist scriptures kept at Tokyo’s Zojoji Temple to its Memory of the World register, making it the ninth Japanese inscription.

The series of some 12,000 Buddhist scriptures, printed in China and the Korean Peninsula between the 12th and 13th centuries, is a key material in fields such as history and linguistics, as well as Buddhist studies.

The scriptures were collected by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan’s Edo era, and donated to the temple.

Meanwhile, a set of 1,532 photographs and two films taken between Aug. 6, 1945, and December that year, following the U.S. atomic bombing of the western Japan city of Hiroshima, did not receive a Memory of the World listing this time.

The UNESCO board decided in 2021 not to allow inscriptions if objections are raised by a country, until the country gives its consent.

There may have been objections raised to the Hiroshima bombing records.