As this issue of our monthly e-bulletin reaches you, our Japanese colleagues will be enjoying Golden Week (春の大型連休), a cluster of national holidays including Shōwa Day, Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day and Children’s Day. And here in the UK we enter the spring bank holiday weekend, the first Monday in May being a national holiday in England since 1971 – offering the opportunity to celebrate ancient traditions associated with early summer including dancing round the Maypole, and chimney sweeps and milkmaids getting up to all sorts: the National Trust offers a convenient summary here.
Here at the Sainsbury Institute we are in the final stages of planning a full programme for the first half of May, with events in Cambridge, London and Norwich. We are delighted to be working with our friends at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, with whom we are co-organising the 26th annual Cambridge Heritage Conference on the theme of Heritage and Ontological Security in the Contemporary World. In London we have a workshop on the role of art and culture in postwar commemoration and reconciliation, part of our ongoing research project marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. We are honoured to be working with the Imperial War Museum for this.
On 13th May we look forward to welcoming His Excellency Mr Hiroshi Suzuki to Norwich for a series of events to mark the 15th anniversary of the creation of the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the 15th anniversary of the establishment of our Centre for Archaeology and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute. These events include the Robert Sainsbury Lecture, an event we organise with our colleagues in the Sainsbury Centre and the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia. Please do join us if you can for Rewriting History Through Art: The Challenge of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo by Katsuo Suzuki, Chief Curator of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, taking place on Wednesday 13th May, online and in-person.
This talk takes the place of our regular monthly Third Thursday Lecture. We are grateful to Dr Ra Mason, our Sasakawa Associate Professor in Japanese Foreign Policy and International Relations at UEA for his report on April’s Third Thursday Lecture given by our Robert and Lisa Fellow, Dr Eve Loh-Kazuhara. You can read the report here. We will be back with our regular Third Thursday slot from June.
I head to London again on 14th May to give the last lecture in our year-long Japanese Studies: Past, Present and Future lecture series organised in partnership with the Royal Asiatic Society and the Courtauld Institute of Art. On 23rd April, Professor Peter Kornicki gave the penultimate lecture in the series questioning the claim that Edo Japan was primarily a print culture. I will in fact be giving a couple of talks, designed to be heard individually or consecutively, on the history of Japanese archaeology and its entanglements with European archaeology. The first, as mentioned, will be at the Royal Asiatic Society (14th May) and the second (18th May) will be hosted online by the Asiatic Society of Japan. Further information on these lectures are available here and here. Recordings of both talks will be available afterwards. These talks mark the start of a new research project at the Institute marking the 150th anniversary of Japanese archaeology, beginning with Edward Sylvester Morse’s investigations at the Omori shell mounds in Tokyo in 1877 resulting in the first formal Japanese archaeological report published by the University of Tokyo (then Tokyo Imperial University) in 1879.
I will most likely be speaking from Heathrow Airport on 18th May as I will be shortly thereafter boarding a flight for Japan for some research into kofun burial mounds with colleagues from the University of Uppsala, with whom we are developing our Nara to Norwich project in new directions as part of their new Vikings in Asia initiative. Although it is unlikely we will come across any actual Viking remains in Japan, we will be meeting Japanese archaeologists with a particular interest in the Vikings, as well as visiting sites and museums with material of comparable interest.
The Museum attached to the Nara Prefectural Kashihara Archaeological Institute hosted a special exhibition in January comparing the Fujinoki Kofun with the royal burial centre of Sutton Hoo – one of the most famous archaeological sites in the UK, renowned for its ship burial perhaps containing the remains of the Anglo-Saxon King Redwald, all immortalised in the recent Netflix film ‘The Dig’. We hope one day to bring some treasures from Fujinoki to the UK. Many thanks and congratulations to Dr Kazuaki Yoshimura of the Kashihara Museum who curated this excellent exhibition. More details about kofun and Sutton Hoo can be found here.
Before that, however, we are very much looking forward to our conference on Transnational Japanisms: Art, craft and design on 15th and 16th May at SOAS and Chelsea College of Art, University of Arts London. This conference is in memory of our late Emeritus Professor of Japanese Arts and Heritage, Toshio Watanabe, and we will be joined by a galaxy of luminaries from the world of Japanese art studies, most of whom knew Toshio personally. Such was the response to our call for papers that the conference itself is now fully booked, but do join us online if you cannot be there in person. We are very grateful to the Japan Foundation, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation for their generous support of these projects.
I am writing this the day after attending the opening of the excellent Urushi Now exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, curated by Masami Yamada, who gave our Third Thursday talk in February 2024, in the aftermath of the New Year’s Day Earthquake on the Noto peninsula, which did so much damage to the city of Wajima and the Wajima-nuri lacquer industry. It was wonderful to see such an inspirational array of works by contemporary lacquer artists, many of whom travelled from Japan for the opening, including Living National Treasure Kazumi Murose, who has made several visits to Norwich over the years. The Institute has long enjoyed a warm relationship with the V&A. This new exhibition also marks the 40th anniversary of the Toshiba Galleries at the V&A, which were created during the Directorship of Dame Elizabeth Esteve Coll, who went on to become Vice Chancellor of UEA and one of the founding Trustees of the Sainsbury Institute. It was a great pleasure to meet Mr Kei Hirata, CEO of Toshiba Europe and Mr Hiroshi Yamazaki, President of the Toshiba International Foundation, which has provided such generous support to the Sainsbury Institute over the years.
This coincided with a visit by some of our colleagues from the University of Uppsala who have been involved in our Nara to Norwich and Japan and the Maritime Silk Roads projects. We were fortunate to be able to enjoy an early morning private view of the Samurai exhibition at the British Museum, so expertly curated by Rosina Buckland and Oleg Benesch (who gave our January 2026 Third Thursday Lecture). It was wonderful to see the show again – and renew my acquaintance with the Japan-inspired Darth Vader, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s fabulous feather gilet, and the wealth of other tremendous exhibits brought together to challenge our preconceptions about the Samurai. I also got to see the astonishing exhibition Threads of Life by Chiharu Shiota at the Hayward Gallery. Shiota-san was a recipient of one of the Japan Foundation Awards in 2024, along with the Sainsbury Institute. Both of these exhibitions close this weekend – do get along and see them if you get the chance.
Lastly, many congratulations to our former colleague at the Institute, Ollie Moxham, who got married on 23 April. Ollie produced our podcast series Beyond Japan, which is always worth another visit. Ollie is centrally involved in the Cambridge Heritage Symposium mentioned above, and is currently just completing his PhD at the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre. We wish him and his bride Laura every happiness in the future.
I hope you enjoy the spring holidays wherever you are, whether or not you are dancing round the maypole or taking the opportunity to celebrate the workers of the world. Thanks for reading, as always.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director