Japanese academic helps protect China's heritage

Nobuo Aoki, a Japanese professor at the School of Architecture, Tianjin University, has spent the past 14 years protecting China's cultural heritage.

He has successfully helped China complete many applications for world cultural heritage listings and worked on several projects at cultural sites with national-level protection. In 2012, Tianjin Municipal Government honored him with the Haihe Friendship Award.

Seven years later, the Chinese government gave him the national Friendship Award, the highest honor for foreigners who have contributed profoundly to China's modernization and reform and opening up.

After receiving the honor, he said: "This is the greatest encouragement for my devotion to the protection of cultural heritage for more than 10 years, and it also shows China's enhanced attention to protection.

"Cultural heritage is a witness to history, a sign of human civilization and our common spiritual home."

Witness to history

Aoki said his profound love of Chinese history was gained from reading the 14th-century classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of China's greatest literary works.

His first taste of China came in 1985 under a student exchange program between Tsinghua University and the University of Tokyo.

China and its people again intertwined with his fate in the 1990s when he met his future wife, Xu Subin, a Tianjin native enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Tokyo.

Aoki's path seemed headed inexorably to Tianjin, a city renowned for its Western-style architecture and Chinese cultural heritage. He and Xu are now professors in the architecture department at Tianjin University, where Aoki accepted a position in 2006.

His main achievement in heritage protection came in 2008, when the construction plan for a business center in Tianjin's Binhai New Area was being developed. The plan did not take into account preservation of the ruins of the Dagu Dock built in 1880. The industrial landmark dates back to the Westernization Movement (1860s-90s), at a time when China was trying to absorb knowledge and technologies from the West.

The dock played a key role in China's maritime protection and modern industrialization, and the country's first submarine was built there in 1886. The site was also where China built 15 ships from 1882 to 1890 to protect itself during the Jiawu War (1894-1895), also known as the first Sino-Japanese War.

To protect this heritage, Aoki made speeches at international forums, together with other experts and cultural heritage officials. In 2013, the Dagu Dock ruins were designated a cultural site protected at the national level.

"For nearly 20 days a demolition plan was about to be carried out at the site," his wife Xu recalled. "We seized the opportunities to advocate at a cultural relics protection forum and gained wide support from the authorities."

Community work

Aoki led his team to complete several applications for cultural sites in Tianjin to be protected at national level, including the Five Greater Avenues, Marco Polo Square and two areas with examples of Western-style architecture.

He and his team noted protection should not only focus on heritage, but also the residents who form part of a "collective memory" that also has cultural heritage value.

The Wudadao area is home to most of the sites and used to be part of the British concession. However, after 1949 the main residents were Chinese, so the nation's culture is embodied there, Aoki said.

In 2008, Tianjin University established the International Research Center for Chinese Cultural Heritage Preservation, and Aoki was appointed director.

He has worked to promote it as an international and interdisciplinary research institution, and many experts in the field of cultural heritage protection have joined him.

He is strict on himself and with his students.

"Only with practice can problems be solved, and it is important to cultivate young experts who can take up the work of protecting cultural heritage," he said.

He is a dedicated teacher and even though he is strict, his students appreciate him very much.

"From extraordinary effort comes an extraordinary career and success," he said, adding he hopes to continue his cultural heritage protection work.