And so we approach the end of another year, Norwich has already enjoyed its first snowfall of the season and the Christmas decorations are up at 64 The Close. We still have a few more events to squeeze in before we break for Christmas and the New Year. I am heading to San Francisco this weekend to see The Art of Manga at the DeYoung Museum, curated by our own Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere. The exhibition has already broken records for the Museum and confirms the place of manga firmly within the canon of Japanese arts and cultures. And we look forward to welcoming Minister Katsuki Kotaro from the Embassy of Japan to the UK and Professor Hirafuji Kikuko from Kokugakuin University in Tokyo who will be giving our Christmas Third Thursday Lecture online and in person at UEA on Thursday 18 December. Do join us if you can, and for our seasonal reception after.
November began with the wonderful exhibition of Okinawan Kōgei at the Crypt Gallery in Norwich, expertly curated by our Sainsbury Institute Associate Professor in Japanese Art History at UEA, Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, who has kindly provided a full report and images of the exhibition and associated programme here.
It was a busy month for board meetings. Our Management Board autumn meeting coincided with a visit by a large group of students on the MA in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at UEA, who were treated to a special viewing of materials in the Lisa Sainsbury Library. You can read more about the event here.
We finished November hosting the International Advisory Board of the World in the Viking Age (WIVA), a major research environment led by Professor Neil Price at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, funded by the Swedish Research Council. Neil and his team have been an important part of our own Nara to Norwich project for several years. We are delighted to be involved in their latest Viking adventure: the Vikings in the East (VIA), funded by the Swedish Riksbanken Jubileumsfund. Read more here. As well as holding the WIVA advisory board meeting in Norwich, with colleagues from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Ukraine, we made study visits to the royal burial ground of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk (recently made even more famous through the film The Dig) and the princely burial discovered at Prittlewell in Essex, and now superbly displayed at the Southend Museum. The weather was the best of the English autumn – a misty start eventually revealing leafless trees engulfed in a beautiful white hoarfrost (‘the frozen sweat from the steeds of the Valkyries as the ride through the sky’), and then clear blue sky with fabulous raking sunshine brilliantly illuminating the mounds at Sutton Hoo. En route we stopped in at scenic Woodbridge and visited the boat building project being undertaken in full sight by the Sutton Hoo Ship’s Company. What a wonderful way to get a sense of the scale of undertaking the Sutton Hoo ship was. Neil gave a fascinating lecture on the Vikings in the East at the Royal Asiatic Society, and the following day we boarded a boat to Greenwich to see the Pirates exhibition at the National Maritime Museum. Sutton Hoo featured in our earlier project, Global Perspectives on British Archaeology, and we are currently developing future collaborations relating to the site with the Museum associated with the Nara Prefectural Kashihara Research Institute.
We were already in a maritime frame of mind thanks to our November Third Thursday Lecture, given by Dr Michelle Damian of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater – see the report on this talk here.
The week before found me at the British Academy attending a conference titled Taken by the Flood and that marks a further cluster of research projects with which we are associated, developing innovative new approaches to mapping and surveying archaeological sites on the sea bed. Read more here. These projects, led by Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Bradford, are transforming our understanding of the potential for coastal archaeology, a theme of particular relevance given the likely impact of climate change-related sea level change. While the COP30 in Brazil worried us all with scenarios of sea level rises of a metre or two, it was instructive to be reminded that at the end of the last Ice Age sea levels were 120 metres lower than the present day.
Congratulations are in order for our Academic Associate Professor Junzo Uchiyama and his colleagues Professor Peter Jordan (University of Lund), Oliver Craig (University of York) and Professor Enrico Crema (University of Cambridge) who have been awarded a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council worth over 10 million euros. Over the next six years they will research demographic change in hunter-gatherer societies around the world, including at the transition between the Middle and Late Jōmon periods. Read more here. This builds on an existing research project involving Junzo looking into disaster archaeology. Read more here.
We continue our collaboration with the Centre for Japanese Studies at UEA: on 4 November several colleagues took part in a Japan Foundation event reflecting on the impact of the anime Grave of the Fireflies in this 80th anniversary year of the end of World War II. And on 4 December we co-host a seminar with Tashiro Yuichiro from the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, examining aspects of the Japanese colonisation of Korea. Read more here.
As I write this we have just welcomed William, Annie and Rosie Cortazzi to Norwich. William and Rosie’s parents, Sir Hugh and Lady Elizabeth Cortazzi have been staunch supporters of the Institute since its inception. Sir Hugh (1924-2018) was a passionate advocate for Japanese studies in the UK, and Honorary Graduate of the University of East Anglia. We are delighted to provide a home for their exceptional collection of early books and maps on Japan, woodblock prints including an important series of Yokohama-e and a beautiful set of ceramics by the late Living National Treasure, Shimaoka Tatsuzō, who has a special place in my heart as a recent Japanese potter who used the ancient technique of Jōmon (cord patterning) to such great effect in his works.
On behalf of everyone at the Sainsbury Institute, I wish you a very merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director