Issue 25 Winter 2019

Dear Friends, There is much to look forward to this year. 2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Sainsbury Institute. There will be a whole host of events in celebration of the two decades of research and dissemination of some of the best of Japanese arts and cultures in all their diversity. […]

Museums with Japanese Art

The British Museum: Innovating the presentation of Japan A few months ago, on 27 September 2018, the British Museum’s Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries reopened to the public after nine months of major refurbishment. The revamp celebrated the renewal of a 10-year partnership between the British Museum and Mitsubishi Corporation. The makeover transformed the once carpeted […]

Japanese Art Exhibitions outside of Japan

Japanese art exhibitions worth catching this winter A very warm New Year’s greeting to you! It may still be wet and gloomy outside, but I feel that the cheer of spring is coming just around the corner. This issue will continue to introduce more exhibitions organised in Paris as part of Japonisme 2018. It includes […]

Research Highlights

Quarterly Research Update As we begin a new year, Simon has outlined some of our key new developments on the horizon. Here, we take a reflective look back and briefly recap some of our research and outreach programmes from last autumn. One of the highlights was the 200th Third Thursday Lecture celebration, which took place on […]

Behind the Scenes

Greetings In December we spent ten days in Japan with Professor David Richardson, Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia and Chair of the Management Board of the Sainsbury Institute. There were visits to Nara, Osaka, Tokyo and Sendai, reconfirming valued relationships with old friends, and establishing fresh connections with new ones. This was Professor […]

Treasures of the Library: Maps of Japan by Luis Teixeira

I once introduced a map that has been described as ‘the earliest European rendition of Japan that depicts the state with a fair level of exactitude’ in the fourth issue of our e-magazine. It was a map sent from Luis Teixeira (dates unknown), a Portuguese cartographer, to Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598). Ortelius was a cartographer born in […]

Fellows and their Research: Junzo Uchiyama on the archaeology of neolithic cultures

As a specialist in environmental archaeology, my main academic interest has been human’s historical adaptation process to their environments from a long-term perspective since the late Pleistocene, using Japanese Archipelago during the Jomon hunting-gathering period (about 16,500-2,400 years ago) as a main research field. Since arriving at the Sainsbury Institute as a Handa Japanese Archaeology […]