Thursday 18 June, 2026
6:00pm BST - 7:00pm BST
In person lecture at Norwich Cathedral Hostry and online via Zoom.
50 min lecture followed by Q&A.
Free and open to all, booking essential.
To check your time zone conversion if you are joining from outside the UK, click here.
To attend in person, please email sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org or call +44 (0) 1603 597507 to book your place. Zoom booking is available at the bottom of this page.
Doors open at 17:45. Please note that in-person spaces are limited and will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.
Speaker
Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida (Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow 2025-2026)
About the Talk
Despite the longstanding dominance of men in Japan’s traditional craft industry, women have always been integral to it, even if largely invisible to outsiders. Working behind the scenes in workshops, they were often responsible for administrative tasks and specialist techniques that enabled master craftsmen to focus solely on creating objects. It is only recently that women have begun to receive the recognition needed to forge their own pathways into the field. Today, women still constitute a minority, making up just sixteen per cent of all registered craftspeople in Japan. Yet with greater visibility has come new responsibility, and with it the opportunity to construct new professional identities.
Nowhere is this emerging generation of women more visible than in the district of Arakawa, Tokyo, known as the ‘City of Traditional Craft’ (dentō kōgei no machi). Arakawa’s distinctive apprenticeship system, designed to train the next generation of young craftspeople, has opened pathways for women into an industry that long excluded them. This lecture traces the stories of women who are challenging tradition across disciplines such as metal carving, lacquerware, ornamental hairpins, and woodblock printing: From family members working as invisible ‘assistants’ to a new generation of craftswomen actively reshaping the industry through their designs, visions, and teachings.
About the Speaker
Dr. Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida is a Japanese-Austrian scholar of modern and contemporary craft studies with a focus on Japan, gendered labour, and jewellery. Currently serving as a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, she previously spent six years as a lecturer and assistant professor in Japanese Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her monograph on women in the traditional craft industry of Tokyo is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing as part of the SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary Japan series. Her Sainsbury Institute profile is available here.
Image: Kumaki Kaho heating up the spouts of copper teapots at Nagasawa Workshop on 17 November 2022. © Clara Momoko Geber-Mérida.
The Third Thursday Lecture series is funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Yakult UK.