Our most pressing task as June begins is to select our inaugural cohort of Ishibashi Foundation Network Leader Fellows. We have been delighted by the response to this new programme and with the deadline for applications just past, we are looking forward to reading all the proposals – although the decisions will doubtless be difficult. We thank the Ishibashi Foundation for their tremendous support enabling us to provide these opportunities for a new generation of Japanese art specialists.
We also welcome Professor Sherry Fowler from the University of Kansas, our Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow in 2006-7, back to Norwich along with other colleagues for a fascinating workshop on Anger, Conflict and Gender Bias in Japanese Art, convened by our current Fellow, Dr Pauline Ota. Pauline gave our May Third Thursday Lecture on ‘Wicked’ History in Print, just a couple of days after delivering our annual Sainsbury Lecture in Japanese Art at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. Many thanks to Helen Nagata for her report on Pauline’s talk.
I spent the last two weeks of May in Japan with our Professor of Silk Road Studies, Susan Whitfield and colleagues from France and Sweden. The visit began with a collaborative workshop with the Materia Mind project led by Professor Matsumoto Naoko at Okayama University which explored the role of technological innovation, beads, glass and iron. Research for the next phase of our Nara to Norwich project, which is investigating Japan’s place in the so-called ‘Maritime silk roads’, took us to the coast of Wakayama, the breathtaking Nachi waterfall, and Fudarukusan temple – an important stop on the famous Kumano pilgrimage routes, as well as the point of departure for a series of Buddhist priests who set off on one-way voyages to find the southern Pure Lands. It was then on to the islands of Oki, Tsushima and Iki, where we met local specialists, made site visits and developed a greater understanding of these border regions of Japan. We also took in the exceptional exhibition of National Treasures, Oh Kokuho!, at the Nara National Museum, where we were delighted to be invited to the events marking its 130th anniversary. Two particular highlights among many were the opportunities to walk around the Kudara Kannon, normally viewed safely behind glass at Hōryūji temple, and the Pensive Boddhisatva from the nearby Chūgūji temple.
The trip ended in Sasebo on the northwestern tip of Kyushu, which is celebrating the designation of the Fukui Cave there as a Site of Special National Historic Importance (特別史跡). There are over 30 caves in Sasebo, and excavations at Fukui Cave in the 1960s proved for the first time that ancient pottery from the Japanese archipelago was associated with Palaeolithic stone tools, with the pottery fragments now dated to around 16,000 years ago. The commission that oversaw this process was chaired by our Special Advisor on Archaeology at the Institute, Professor Kobayashi Tatsuo, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Kokugakuin University and Honorary Director of the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History. I was greatly honoured to be invited to give the keynote address at the ceremony marking this designation, which provided a great opportunity to revisit cave sites in Britain and France I had visited with Professor Kobayashi and his colleagues, including Yanagita Yūzo who directed the latest set of excavations at Fukui Cave during the 2010s. Congratulations to everyone involved in Sasebo: I can highly recommend a visit to the new Fukui Cave Museum, and the converted bomb shelters in the city that now offer welcome refreshment after a hard day of site visits.
June sees our Associate Professor in Japanese Art and Heritage, Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, in Japan working on the archives of the renowned calligrapher Morita Shiryū, supported by the Toshiba International Foundation. Eugenia will be presenting our June Third Thursday lecture online from Kyoto. I hope you can join us for that.
Over the coming months my colleagues at the Sainsbury Institute will be guest-editing our e-bulletins. This month it is the turn of Dr Andy Hutcheson, our Research Fellow at our Centre for Archaeology and Heritage, who provides insight into some of our current projects in that area.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director