I am writing this en route from London to Fukuoka in northern Kyushu where I will be speaking at a conference on The Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites of the Munakata Region World Heritage Site, where we will be concluding a Memorandum of Understanding with the Fukuoka Prefectural World Heritage Promotion Division to enable further collaborations around the 10th anniversary of the inscription on to the World Heritage List. Okinoshima currently features in a new exhibition, Japan: Between the Ocean and the Seas, at the Embassy of Japan in London. Well worth a visit if you get the chance.
While the trees in the Cathedral Close are taking on their autumn hues, we are mindful of all our friends in Tokyo who are enduring an exceptionally prolonged period of rains: 35 successive days and counting. Autumn in the UK of course brings the new academic year. At the Institute we are excited to be launching the second year of our Ishibashi Foundation Network Leader Fellowship programme, with seven new Fellows from around the world taking part in online sessions as they each shape up a project on Japanese art. We were delighted to recently welcome Noriko Ikai from the Ishibashi Foundation to Norwich for the first time. We also welcome our two new Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellows. Dr Claudia Zancan joins us having completed her PhD on the decorated tombs of the later Kofun period in Kyushu at the Ca Foscari University in Venice – and we are pleased to showcase her research in this issue. Dr Andrea Jung-An Liu arrives shortly from the University of California, Berkeley and we will introduce her in more detail in due course.
I had the chance to visit Dr Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida‘s excellent photography exhibition, Making Tokyo’s Craftswomen Visible: Traditional Techniques in Motion at The Old Piano Shop, Norwich. Olivia Butler, Digital Research and Project Coordinator, reflects on this exhibition, and the associated workshop Women in Traditional Craft: Past, Present, and Future Possibilities, in a short report that can be read here.
We were also honoured this month by a visit from Professor Hiroaki Adachi of Tohoku University following his Centre for Japanese Studies seminar on “Imperial Japan Rules Asia: Visions and Policies.”
Many thanks to Professor Nathan Schlanger of the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris and his colleagues for hosting, Beyond Exteriorization, a workshop we co-organised with our colleagues at the Materia Mind project based at Okayama University, led by Professor Naoko Matsumoto in mid-September. A PDF of the programme is available here. The workshop addressed the legacy of André Leroi-Gourhan, a pioneer in the field of the anthropology of technology and renowned for his work on the chaîne opératoire (the sequence of actions that lead to the production of artefacts, notably stone tools) and for his detailed studies of the Palaeolithic cave art from the Dordogne valley in France, including at Lascaux. Over two days colleagues from Japan, France and Germany engaged in some very productive and wide-ranging discussions about Leroi-Gourhan’s legacy, from quantum physics to how to make a Flame pot. Our October Third Thursday Lecture will be given online by one of the speakers, Dr Marion di Santi, who has made some major discoveries in Leroi-Gourhan’s archives relating to his two years in Japan, from 1937-9.
I was honoured to be invited to speak at a conference on Art and Archaeology in Wrocław, capital of Polish Silesia at the end of September. The programme can be viewed here. Much of our work at the Institute sits at the interface of these two disciplines, and it was wonderful to see how many synergies there are between what is happening in this field in Japan and in Poland. My virtual algorithms were obviously listening in as I received posts about current work being undertaken by two artists we have worked with closely in the past, the illustrator Aki Sahoko and the Jomon ceramicist Ifurai just before giving my presentation. An article I wrote on Ifurai in Ceramic Review can be found here and you can read Ilona Bausch’s interview with Aki Sahoko in the IIAS Newsletter here. The morning after speaking I joined an online workshop with colleagues from the National Institute for Cultural Properties (Tobunken) and some of our former and new Fellows. It was a great opportunity for exchanging views and introducing research topics – which ranged from Korean ceramics to decorated kofun tombs, via Tanaka Isson’s vegetal turn in art, and ancient swords.
We bade farewell to Professor Woodae Kim from Shiga Prefectural University, who has spent the last six months as a Visiting Scholar at our Centre for Archaeology and Heritage. Just before he left Professor Kim, a specialist in ancient Japanese swords, made a study of a little-known Japanese treasure in the Sainsbury Collections at UEA: the pommel of a sword from the Kofun period. We look forward to hearing more about this in the future.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director