I hope you have enjoyed a restorative and relaxing summer break. In the UK we have endured some of the hottest weather on record and seen the smoke from wild fires over Norwich. Much of the country has officially been in drought (干ばつkanbatsu), only very recently alleviated by the welcome sound of pouring rain (ざあざあ振りzaazaafuri). Japan has a new term for ‘cruelly hot days’ (酷暑日kokushobi) over 40 degrees. The country was shaken by earthquakes in the Kanto region and Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu, the latter undoing much of the painstaking restoration work undertaken by the last major quake there a decade ago. Unprecedented heavy rain brought devastation to the Chiba, Fukui and Ishikawa Prefectures, once again asserting the terrifying power of the ‘guerilla rainstorm’ (ゲリ豪雨geri go’u). Our thoughts are with everyone affected by these and other manifestations of the changing climate, whether in UK, Japan or elsewhere.
Members of the Institute have been busy over the summer. Thanks to the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation I was able to spend time in Niigata Prefecture preparing for our new International Archaeology Field School which we plan to launch in 2027 in partnership with the University of Cambridge and the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the first archaeological dig in Japan, undertaken by Edward Sylvester Morse at the Omori shell mounds in Tokyo. We returned to the Middle Jōmon Sanka site in Nagaoka where I took part in excavations two decades ago, and which will be the focus for our new project. We also visited sites and museums along the Shinano and Chikuma river system, including the well-preserved Okinohara site in Tsunan town – both sites famous for the Flame pots found there. Watch out for more information on this initiative shortly.
We were also able to visit two other international archaeology field projects currently active in Japan, on the tiny island of Rebun – a two-hour ferry ride from Wakkanai on the northern tip of Hokkaido, where remains from the Jōmon period up through Ainu cultural layers have been discovered, and in Nagano Prefecture, where the Italy-based International Research Institute for Archaeology and Ethnology (IRIAE) are excavating a Late Yayoi rice-farming settlement, complementing their ongoing work on a Jōmon fishing station and obsidian trading hub on Tsushima. Thanks to Professor Hirofumi Kato of Hokkaido University and Professor Daniele Petrella of IRIAE respectively for welcoming us to their sites. An impressive line-up of archaeologists working in Japan spoke at a special session at the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) meeting in Athens at the end of August organised by our incoming Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow, Dr Claudia Zancan of the Ca Foscari University in Venice and Professor Mark Hudson of the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena.
At the end of July I attended the 48th UNESCO World Heritage Committee meetings in Busan, South Korea, where the Ancient Capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara were inscribed on the World Heritage List. Many congratulations to everyone in Nara Prefecture and elsewhere who were involved in this. These sites were the subject of one of our Nara to Norwich blog-posts which you can read here. I took part in a ‘side event’ organised by the Fukuoka Prefecture World Heritage Promotion Committee heralding the 10th anniversary of inscription of the Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites of the Munakata Region on the World Heritage List in 2017 – indeed the last time I attended a World Heritage Committee Meeting was that year, in Krakow. Also in Poland, colleagues from the Centre for Japanese Studies spoke at the European Association for Japanese Studies in Poznan.
Following the World Heritage Committee meetings I spent a few days on the island of Jeju, off the south coast of Korea, formerly the independent kingdom of Tamna, established in ancient times and eventually absorbed into Joseon Korea in 1404. We were struck in particular by the harrowing story of what happened to the people of Jeju after the Second World War during the so-called Jeju 4.3 Incident (rather, massacre), recently revisited by Nobel laurate Han Kang in her novel We Do Not Part (English edition 2025), and by the resilience of the haenyeo women free divers.
Back in July, we saw the culmination of our inaugural Ishibashi Foundation Network Leader Fellowship (IFNet) Programme as we welcomed this year’s IFNet Fellows and their mentors to Norwich for a residential workshop exploring the research projects undertaken by the Fellows. Alongside a stimulating few days of presentations and roundtable discussions, the keynote for the Norwich sessions was given by Professor Bert Winther-Tamaki (Academic Associate at the Sainsbury Institute, and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine) at Norwich Castle on Japanese painter Kitagawa Tamiji (you can watch a recording of the talk here). The group then moved to London where the Fellows had to opportunity to conduct independent research across institutions in the capital before the programme was rounded off by a talk at SOAS from Dr Alicia Volk (University of Maryland) on her latest publication In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan. IFNet Fellow Olga Isaeva who was mentored by Alicia during the programme has provided a report on the talk which you can read here. We are grateful to the Ishibashi Foundation for their generous support of this new programme and to all the Fellows, mentors, and invited speakers who made the programme such a productive and memorable experience. We will be announcing our new cohort of IFNet Fellows shortly so do keep an eye on the IFNet website for more information.
I am writing this message from the Portuguese Algarve where Dana Arnold, our Professor of Arts and Heritage, and I were invited to give keynote lectures for the European Union-funded ERASMUS+ conference on Living with Earthquakes, to an audience which included some 70 faculty and students from across Europe. Dana spoke about the many lives of London Bridge, and I took the opportunity to revisit some of the work we undertook as part of our project on Cultural Heritage Loss. There were many architectural students in the audience, and our presence at the conference is part of a developing initiative at the Institute to explore Japanese architectural history. In connection with this we welcome Professor Bill Coaldrake of the University of Tokyo to give our September Third Thursday Lecture on the Taitokuin台徳院霊廟taitokuin reibyō, the mausoleum of the second Tokugawa shogun, Hidetada (1579-1632, ruled from 1605-1623) – you can register to join us for this online lecture here.
The Institute is now preparing for a lively autumn of activities, kicked off by an exhibition on Making Tokyo’s Craftswomen Visible in Norwich from 1 -13 September and associated conference organised by our outgoing Fellow Dr Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida. Congratulations are due to Clara who has secured both a prestigious Anne van Biema Fellowship at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC, to be followed by a two-year fellowship funded by the German Research Council.
Professor Simon Kaner
Executive Director