October was a busy month for Japan: a first woman prime minister, a visit by Donald Trump, unprecedented encounters with bears, Sumo wrestlers in London (and at Stonehenge!). I spent much of the month in Korea and Japan: world heritage dolmens in Gochang (my distinguished forebear William Gowland noted the presence of these monuments during his visit to Korea in the early 1880s, when he was chased away by unwelcoming locals – quite the opposite experience to mine – you can see my talk on Gowland here); on the pilgrimage trail from Hasedera to Ise with the intrepid Susan Whitfield and Olivia Butler; revisiting our exhibition Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan for the Ishibashi Foundation Forum at the Artizon Museum; enjoying the opening of the 77th Shōsōin exhibition at the Nara National Museum (where we were guests at the 130th anniversary celebrations back in May); at the Japanese Archaeological Association meeting in Niigata; and catching up with friends and supporters in Tokyo. Just before setting out we welcomed Dr Simon Fitch from the University of Bradford and Professor Yasuhisa Kondo from the Research Institute for Humanities and Nature in Kyoto to the Institute to discuss progress and collaboration with the Life on the Edge project mapping submerged ice-age landscapes from the North Sea, Mediterranean and Japan.
Congratulations to Professor Nobuo Tsuji for being awarded an Order of Culture. An interview with Professor Tsuji, recorded as part of our 25th anniversary in 2024 can be seen here. Leiko Ikemura, whose exhibition Usagi in Wonderland we curated at the Sainsbury Centre in 2021 was honoured with a Person of Cultural Merit. An interview with Leiko can be read here.
We welcome Dr Michelle Damian for our Third Thursday Lecture this month. For some time we have been fostering links with the National Maritime Museum, part of the Royal Greenwich World Heritage Site. Michelle’s talk on Japanese pirates coincides with the NMM’s major exhibition on Pirates, which I for one am looking forward to seeing on my return. It also marks the first public outing for our newly minted Japan and the Maritime Silk Roads project, one of a number of developments from our Nara to Norwich initiative, which recently launched a revamped website. Congratulations are in order for our project partners at the University of Uppsala, led by Professor Neil Price, who have just been awarded a major grant by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond to investigate the Vikings in Asia, a project in which the Sainsbury Institute is delighted to be a partner. We look forward to welcoming Neil and his colleagues to the UK in late November, when he will be speaking at the Royal Asiatic Society. Further details on this event can be found here.
Our collaborative lecture series at the RAS continues on Friday 7th November when the photographer Bashar Tabbah will be speaking about his forthcoming book on Japanese castles. Further details on this event can be found here. Our own Norwich Castle has just reopened following a £27 million refit and we look forward to more on castles in the coming months.
Congratulations to Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay on a tremendously successful exhibition on Okinawan contemporary crafts in the Crypt Gallery in Norwich, which she introduced in our September Third Thursday (a report on the lecture can be read here), and a series of associated events with the Norwich University of the Arts which included a keynote by Professor Junko Kobayashi of the Okinawa Prefectural University of the Arts. Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere’s Art of Manga exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco continues to generate great interest. Many thanks to Nicole for finding time to deliver our October Third Thursday Lecture, and to our Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow Dr Clara Momoko Géber-Merida for her report on the talk. We were also very pleased to welcome the Japan Foundation to Norwich for an event about the impact of the anime Grave of the Fireflies, part of the Foundation’s current series of talks exploring the world of Japanese Studies Further details on this event can be found here.
We bade final farewells to two important figures at the Institute. On Saturday 25th October we attended the memorial service for Professor Toshio Watanabe, our Emeritus Professor of Japanese Arts and Heritage in the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford. We are grateful to his family for including us in this moving event, and to Professor Dana Arnold for reading a eulogy on Professor Watanabe’s professional achievements. On Monday 3 November, appropriately on the Culture Day (文化の日) holiday, I joined a large gathering at Kokugakuin University to celebrate the life of Professor Tatsuo Kobayashi, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Kokugakuin, Honorary Director of the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History, and Senior Advisor on Archaeology at the Sainsbury Institute. There were many heartfelt tributes, and we all felt Professor Kobayashi’s presence as we were treated to a spectacular sunset over Mount Fuji.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director