Autumn has arrived in the Cathedral Close, blown in on the wings of the first named storm of the season, Storm Amy. Fresh autumn breezes have also ushered in a new age in Japanese politics, with the election of Takaichi Sanae as the first female President of the Liberal Democratic Party and on track to become the first woman Prime Minister of Japan; and closer to home Sarah Mullaly was appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. We wish them both every success.
We are delighted to be supporting Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, our Sainsbury Institute Lecturer in Japanese Arts at the School of History and Art History at the University of East Anglia, and newly installed Director of the University’s Centre for Japanese Studies, with a wonderful exhibition and associated programme on Okinawan kōgei in Norwich at the end of this month. I encourage as many of you as possible to come and experience it for yourself. Many thanks to Eriko for the excellent Third Thursday lecture in September which kicked off our 2025-26 season, and to Tanya Lee for her report on the lecture.
The first online meeting of our first cohort of Ishibashi Foundation Network Leadership Fellows was held last week. Full details of this year’s successful candidates and their projects can be found here. We are all looking forward to seeing how these projects develop.
Further afield in the Institute’s galaxy, The Art of Manga is creating waves in California, and we will be hearing directly from Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere who has curated this exhibition in our October Third Thursday Lecture.
We congratulate our colleagues at the UEA Publishing Project on the publication of KANATA, a second series of their widely acclaimed translations of short works of fiction by contemporary Japanese authors.
It was a pleasure to welcome Professor Yasuhisa Kondo from the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature to Norwich, along with Dr Simon Fitch, who runs the Life on the Edge project at the University of Bradford, on whose Advisory Board I sit. The next stages of the project have received funding from the Royal Society and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, so congratulations to all involved. This project is investigating submerged prehistoric sites in Japan as well as in the Mediterranean and North Sea. Earlier iterations have included the astounding revelations about Doggerland, the submerged landscapes under the North Sea. Watch this space for news about further maritime entanglements for the Sainsbury Institute.
I head to Korea later this month for a conference at the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Gochang prehistoric dolmens and then on to Japan supported by the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee to research our developing project on the art and archaeology of pilgrimage, developing out of our Nara to Norwich project, whose revamped website was just launched.
On 25th October there will be a memorial service celebrating the life of Professor Toshio Watanabe at Exeter College, Oxford. Please contact the Sainsbury Institute at sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org if you are interested in attending.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director