On Saturday 22nd July, twenty two international scholars of Japanese arts and cultures arrived in Norwich to participate in the second Ishibashi Foundation Summer Fellowship. Organised by the University of East Anglia and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, and generously funded by the Ishibashi Foundation, the three week-long programme immerses the fellows in various aspects of Japanese arts and cultures, led by leading academics from top universities around the world.
The fellows have come from all over the world, and are a broad mix of MA students, PhD candidates and also professional museum curators, all with different interests, from photography to ukiyo-e to tea ceremony. In the programme’s second week, the fellows spent the week in London, where they were given a behind-the-scenes tour of the British Museum’s Manga Exhibition by its curator, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere. Exclusive access and tours were also arranged at the V&A, the British Library and the Tate Modern. Fellows also had an opportunity to work with further collections and archives for their own research, supported by expert advice from SISJAC’s Jennifer Coates and Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, the programme’s academic leads. The programme concludes on Friday.