January 2023

I would like to wish a very Happy New Year of the Rabbit to all of our readers as we enter 2023. The Year of the Rabbit is thought to bring more calm and balance after last year’s Year of the Tiger, and we hope it will be a healthy and productive one! We ended last year with an in-person Third Thursday Lecture, given by Paul Madden CMG and held on UEA campus. It was a pleasure to welcome Paul to Norwich, where he first gave a seminar to students about the idiosyncrasies of international diplomacy, before delivering a fascinating talk that gave a tour of Japan from a geographical […]

On Thursday 25th December, the Sainsbury Institute welcomed his excellency, Paul Madden CMG, former British Ambassador to Japan and Special Adviser to UEA’s Centre for Japanese Studies (CJS), for the final Third Thursday Lecture of the year. As a special bonus for a select group of UEA students, Paul also kindly led an hour-long seminar prior to his lecture on the topic of Japan-UK relations from the perspective of his experiences as Ambassador. The seminar provided a wonderful opportunity for some of East Anglia’s brightest young minds to supplement the theoretical side of their international relations studies by engaging with a practitioner of the highest level. What was perhaps particularly […]

Thanks to the collaboration between the V&A, the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University (ARC) and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC), a workshop as part of the project “Re-thinking Japonisme: Digitisation of the V&A’s Collection of Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints and Illustrated Books and Researching Its Formation in the Late 19th Century” was carried out from 27th November to 2nd December 2022 in the V&A Museum. The project was led by Yamada Masami, curator of the Japanese collections at the V&A Museum and Dr. Ryoko Matsuba, Lecturer in Digital Japanese Art History and a specialist of prints at the Sainsbury Institute, and assisted by […]

The Sainsbury Institute is delighted to announce the publication of the second volume in our Occasional Paper Series, Okinawan Art in its Regional Context: Historical Overview and Contemporary Practice. The paper is the result of a conference supported by the Sainsbury Institute in October 2019 and organised by Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay which brought together researchers specialising in art history, history, political science, and sociology along with contemporary artists active outside Japan. The important discussions on the socio-cultural complexities of Okinawan identity that were facilitated by the symposium highlighted the need for a paper to disseminate the findings and outcome of the conference to a wider audience, and encourage the continued […]