Welcome back to our monthly e-bulletin. It was a busy summer for the Institute, interspersed with some welcome holidays, and we look forward refreshed to the new academic year.
Our Research Director, Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, launches her latest project, Art of Manga, a major new exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco at the end of September, accompanied by a spectacular catalogue. The Institute’s Management Board were treated to a preview by Nicole at our July meeting at SOAS. Nicole is our guest editor this month and we have lots of Manga-related content to encourage you to see the exhibition if possible. If San Francisco is a little too far, we look forward to welcoming Nicole to give our October Third Thursday Lecture.
This month’s Third Thursday Lecture looks forward to some exciting events in Norwich at the end of October, when our Sainsbury Institute Associate Professor in Japanese Art in the School of History and Art History at the University of East Anglia, Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, will speak about Okinawan Kōgei: Crafting Continuity and Change, the exhibition she has curated on contemporary Okinawan crafts. The exhibition will take place at the Crypt Gallery and is accompanied by what promises to be fascinating additional programming. This autumn Eriko also takes over from me as the Director of UEA’s Centre for Japanese Studies.
Highlights of the summer for me included a week in Tokyo at the start of August, coinciding with record-breaking temperatures in excess of 41 degrees. I was delighted to be able to catch a glimpse of the Osaka Kansai Expo at Yumeshima (Island of Dreams), a landfill site seemingly appropriate with its theme of ‘Designing Future Society for our Lives’ and its multiple-eyed yuru-kyara Myaku Myaku. A quick check with Wikipedia will provide all you need to know about this ‘mysterious creature’ and its equally mysterious name. A cooling evening sea breeze encouraged a stroll around Sou Fujimoto’s magisterial Grand Ring, the largest wooden structure in the world, refreshed by an ice-cold beer brewed in Windsor outside the U.K. Pavilion. I was also fortunate to be able to catch the excellent exhibition about Fujimoto at the Mori Art Museum on my last day.
There was an important exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, intriguingly but not particularly revealingly titled Opening Documents, Weaving Memories: a Special Exhibition featuring Works from the Museum Collection. Highly recommended if you are in Tokyo before it closes on October 26th, this exhibition features works of exceptional relevance to the commemoration of the end of the Second World War. I was able to make a day trip to Hiroshima on 6th August, the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of that city. The evening before my flight to Tokyo I attended a powerful performance by Michael Mears at Daiwa House in London based on John Hersey’s 1946 book based on eye-witness accounts of what happened at Hiroshima. Mears’ The Mistake will be touring locations in Japan throughout September and October. More information can be found here. Upon my return from Japan I attended the national service of commemoration of the 80th anniversary VJ Day at Norwich Cathedral, and watched the BBC adaptation, also harrowing, of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. On August 9th colleagues from the Institute joined the Norwich Peace Camp led by the Reverend Joy Croft for a gathering at the Peace Pillar in Chapelfield Gardens in Norwich, where a message of peace, hope and reconciliation from our friends at Hasedera in Nara was read out. A special thanks to PhD student Lauren Constance, who travelled from Cardiff to share a powerful speech inspired by her research of memorialisation in Japanese museums.
We bade farewell to our Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow Dr Pauline Ota, and welcome our two new Fellows Dr Eve Loh-Kazuhara (PhD, National University of Singapore), working on the Nihonga artist Tanaka Isson, and Dr Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida (PhD, Free University of Berlin), working on female crafts people of Arakawa, Tokyo. They will each be giving Third Thursday lectures in due course.
Professor Satoshi Unno of the Department of Architecture at the University of Tokyo also returned to Japan following a three-month stay with us during which he toured important examples of reconstructed architecture across Europe. We enjoyed an excellent workshop co-organised with the Royal Asiatic Society on the theme of Japanese architectural history in action: reconstruction, conservation, restoration, with presentations from Professor Unno and Luke Winter of Historic Concepts Ltd, who this autumn will be building a Neolithic great hall at Stonehenge. We embark on a new collaboration with the Royal Asiatic Society and the Courtauld Institute of Art on September 9th, with the first in a year-long series of lectures about the past, present and future of Japanese Studies in the UK, kicking off with Professor Jennifer Coates from the University of Sheffield (and formerly Senior Lecturer in Japanese Arts and Cultures at the Sainsbury Institute), newly installed as the President of the British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS). As I write this I am preparing to leave for the 50th anniversary conference of BAJS at the University of Cardiff where we have a session on An interdisciplinary approach to relating the past to the future: continuing to commemorate WWII.
Also in early August, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery fully re-opened following an extensive remodelling of the inside of the 900-year old stone keep paid for by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, restored to look as it did when King Henry II stayed there for Christmas 1122. We enjoyed a screening of the documentary about this project at Norwich’s Cinema City, also (of course) housed within its own wonderful medieval building. I spent the last week of August in Aberdeen, at the 10th World Congress of the Society for East Asian Archaeology, where we had a special session in honour of Professor Gina Lee Barnes, who founded the Society some 30 years ago, and my mentor and supervisor in Japanese archaeology. We were joined by some of Gina’s other former students and a new generation inspired by her ground-breaking scholarship in East Asian archaeology especially on the emergence of the early Japanese state. As reported in my previous message, our Emeritus Professor of Japanese Art and Cultural Heritage, Toshio Watanabe, left us in August while on holiday in Hokkaido. We were also greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Tatsuo Kobayashi, our Senior Advisor on Archaeology. I was fortunate to be able to visit Professor Kobayashi while in Tokyo in early August. We offer our sincere condolences to all of Professor Kobayashi and Professor Watanabe’s families, colleagues and friends.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director