MA in Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies 学際日本学

One of the biggest success stories of CJS over the past few years has been the introduction of the MA programme. In 2020, the University of East Anglia together with the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures launched the MA programme in Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies. Spanning disciplines such as literature, history, politics, and art, the MA offers the opportunity to understand our increasingly globalised world through the lens of Japanese culture and relations.

Last year’s cohort of seven students took part in a host of seminars, activities and trips that have provided hands-on experience for studying Japan. We have recently welcomed our latest cohort of six students who are now starting their modules for the year.

Last year, in April 2022, students had the opportunity to view two of Kawanabe Kyōsai’s paintings, one of the most celebrated and prolific artists of late-nineteenth century Japan, as part of their Researching Japan module. They viewed the works up-close alongside woodblock printed books by Kyōsai held in the world-class Lisa Sainsbury Library. This session offered students an unparalleled opportunity to engage with important artworks and gave a real taste of work as a researcher. The session was taken by Dr Sadamura Koto, curator of the exhibition Kyōsai: The Israel Goldman Collection, which was on show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London earlier this year

Last year’s students of the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies in the Lisa Sainsbury Library with Dr Sadamura Koto.

This year’s cohort, although only a semester into teaching, have already had the chance to visit the Japan: Courts and Culture exhibition, currently on show at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, and were shown around by the Sainsbury Institute’s Research Director, Professor Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, and the curator of the exhibition, Rachel Peat. Dr Matsuba Ryoko has also coordinated an impressive programme of lectures for the module Constructing Japanese Heritage, which has already seen live workshops hosted in Japan and the UK on methods of digitising lacquerware, involving Living National Treasure and urushi artist, Murose Kazumi – you can read more about this workshop here.

Students of this year’s MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies course at the exhibition ‘Japan: Courts and Culture’

Both this year and last year, students have been offered the opportunity to work on a project at the British Museum and V&A, undertaken jointly by the Sainsbury Institute and the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University (ARC), which has so far seen the digitisation of 96 titles held in the Japanese painting albums collection. This will be part of an online open access database that will make accessible research materials in UK collections. Not only were students able to take part in a pioneering project that will improve accessibility to collections of Japanese works, but they also gained invaluable experience that can be taken forward throughout their postgraduate studies and beyond. You can read more about the digitisation from MA alumni Naomi Hughes-White here.

Administered through UEA’s Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities, home to the Centre for Japanese Studies, this MA course is a collaboration of Japan specialists from both the University and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. Lecturers with academic focus on Japan from several schools of study at UEA along with academic staff of the Sainsbury Institute have developed an innovative interdisciplinary curriculum for students who want to know about Japan, its place in the world, and its transforming cultural identity. For a taste of the diversity amongst our lecturers, watch our introductory video on YouTube or check our Beyond Japan podcast episodes Series 1, episodes 1-7 for in-depth discussion with the teaching team on their research areas. Feel free to get in touch with any questions you may have about the course and see the UEA course page for more information and how to apply for the programme beginning in September 2023.

The MA has continued to go from strength to strength in the past year, providing students with diverse opportunities for engaging with Japanese studies, including access to unique resources such as the Lisa Sainsbury Library, getting involved with the postgraduate workshop of the British Association of Japanese Studies, special training opportunities at the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, and collaborations with students and lecturers across the world – last year involving a joint seminar series with University of Colorado Boulder, and with Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. As this year’s cohort begin their studies, we look to continue to encourage the next generation of Japanese studies students through new initiatives, collaborations and world-class teaching.

The Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures were delighted to run the Online Summer Programme in Japanese Cultural Studies for a third year.

This year’s iteration, running from Monday 1st to Friday 12th August, focussed on the theme of “Tourism and Heritage in Post-Lockdown Japan”. As with previous years, the series of lectures, talks, and workshops was run as a free programme and organised in partnership with the Toshiba International Foundation. The programme was originally conceived as a temporary replacement for our in-person summer schools, which were prevented due to the Coronavirus pandemic. However, the programme has attracted incredible interest from across the globe, demonstrating a strong appetite for Japanese Studies internationally. The report for 2021's Online Summer Programme is available here

This edition of the programme considered directly the impacts of the pandemic on Japan. Throughout the world, tourism has been one of the industries most profoundly affected by the pandemic. For Japan in particular, which has sought to become a “Tourism Nation” and was host for the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games, the consequences have been significant. At the time of the programme this year, while Japan began to gradually open to overseas tourists, the strict entry requirements were a far cry from the experiences of the 34 million who visited in 2019. For organisers Oliver Moxham, Research Project Coordinator at the Sainsbury Institute, and Dr Christopher J. Hayes, Lecturer in Tourism & Events at Teesside University, these restrictions alongside rising cases of Covid at the time in Japan necessitated an adaptable programme that catered to the post-pandemic world in which we live. With this in mind, it seemed appropriate to take this time to reconnect with Japan and explore what tourism in Japan means postCOVID-19. The programme also explored Japan’s cultural heritage, and how COVID-19 has affected the heritage industry, discussing the uses and value of heritage in the absence of international tourism.

As with previous years, we received a strong selection of applications – with 256 applicants in total from a range of nationalities, the top places being India (16.4%), US (11.3%) and UK (10.2%). Additionally, 72.7% of applicants had not attended one of the previous iterations of the programme, and it was promising to see that the course was continuing to reach new audiences in its third year.

A series of roundtable discussions were planned across three locations in Japan – Tokyo, Kyoto and Fukuoka, with panels formed of a mix of academic researchers and heritage and tourism industry professionals, ensuring a diversity of viewpoints and experiences to stimulate interesting conversations. Unfortunately, due to rising Covid cases in Japan at the time of the programme, the panel sessions were moved online but still retained their geographic focus. For the roundtables, the insights of high-profile and influential academics, including Professors Philip Seaton, Joseph Cheer, and Natsuko Akagawa, among others, were complimented by industry perspectives from professionals such as luxury travel designer Satoko Nagahara, international tourism manager Pepijn Cox, and Kenny Macphie of the Fukuoka Convention & Visitors Bureau. Discussions touched on a range of topics and issues, including overtourism, sustainability, difficult heritage, host-visitor relations, the influence of popular culture on tourism, the impact of COVID19, and what lies in the future for heritage and tourism in Japan.

This year’s programme also incorporated a new feature in the form of livestreamed tours of tourist sites across the three locations. Despite not being able to visit Japan themselves, this gave participants the opportunity to explore the sites and note the stark contrast in tourist attendance compared to pre-pandemic levels. Organisers Chris and Oliver remained mindful of restrictions throughout their time in Japan, and were very adaptable to a situation that was continuously changing. We are grateful to them for all their hard work in arranging another successful programme which has introduced more participants to Japanese studies, as well as the growing community that has come out of this series of programmes. As Japan’s borders have now opened to near pre-pandemic levels, we will watch with interest to see how the themes addressed in this year’s programme shift and change as tourists begin to re-enter sites and locations across the country.

A message from our alumni:

I found last year's Online Summer Programme 2021 and also the Online Summer Programme 2020 from two years ago very interesting for the opportunity to participate in such structured summer schools and interesting for the variety of insights provided. The variety of the summer school made it possible to follow the talks by specialists and read specific articles, deepen one's own interests, and above all discover new ones! It was useful to keep the curiosity about Japan and all its cultural aspects alive at a time of stalemates such as the lockdown and the still uncertain following months. It was also useful to meet other students who are passionate about this sphere outside of my own context, I recommend it to everyone!

A map of the 69 countries where our listeners tune in from, most prominently the UK, USA and Japan.

Two years have now passed since Beyond Japan was innovated in response to an abrupt halt of our CJS research seminar series at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since our first episodes introducing our CJS colleagues and their research, the podcast has continued beyond the return of our online seminars as an accessible, engaging and global means of broadening understanding on the many faces of Japanese Studies. We have had 15,000 downloads since our start across 69 countries, the top three being the UK (31%), USA (29%) and Japan (16%), demonstrating the global appeal of Japan-related research. You can find Beyond Japan across 9 servers, including Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Anchor

As series 2 came to an end earlier this year, we are delighted to announce that Oliver Moxham, host of the series, has been awarded the 2022 UEA Engagement Award for his work encouraging public engagement with academia through the podcast. Series 3 of the podcast began in October 2022 with monthly episodes on the first Thursday of every month. Episodes so far have focussed on constructing national histories, manga and underwater archaeology. More information is available here. If you’re new to the series, have a listen to some of our most popular episodes below:

Events, Projects and Collaborations

The last year has seen successful events and collaborations across organisations both within UEA and beyond.

CJS Research Seminars

The Centre for Japanese Studies has not only brought together colleagues researching Japan across UEA, but globally through inviting speakers to join our Research Seminar Series. Since 2017, we have held 38 seminars both in-person and online with over 1,200 plays of our recorded sessions. The wide range of topics from cinematography to international politics highlights the interdisciplinarity of Japanese studies.

This autumn, we were pleased to bring some of our autumn seminar series back to UEA campus with a few hybrid events amongst our largely online offering. We have already seen an excellent series of talks focusing on flashpoints within conflict in East Asia, ideas of territorial sovereignty in early modern Japan, and a roundtable discussion on the role and interaction of the Imaginary and the Real within scholarship and our perceptions of the past.

Find out more about our more recent seminars here

Japanese Language Courses

We were delighted to welcome 24 new first year students to the Japanese degree course in 2022-23. We would also like to extend a warm welcome to Dr Yumiko Kita, who joined our team as Lecturer in Japanese this academic year. Our students have continued to excel in the prestigious National Japanese Speech Contest for University Students, with Apolline Debroux, second year student, being awarded 2nd place in the Individual Presentation Category 2022. The past three cohorts of students, including those who had been waiting to study in Japan since 2020, are now finally all in Japan for their study abroad programme. We have also relaunched the Japanese language evening courses as a part of the UEA Evening Language Programme for the public, and several other events related to Japan are being planned this academic year.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA)

One of the unique advantages of the Centre for Japanese Studies is its position within UEA which allows for important collaborations across staff, departments, and organisations within the university. Particularly over the last few years, CJS has been fortunate to work with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA) on several projects. Faces of Faith, which ran 18 July 2021 – 31 January 2022, took as its focus a female Shinto deity figure from the collection at the Sainsbury Centre (SCVA) and was created in collaboration with the Sainsbury institute (SISJAC). Held as part of the Japan-UK Season of Culture, the exhibit recognised the important role that Prince Regent Shōtoku Taishi played in bringing religion to the Japanese courts at a time when museums across Japan commemorated the 1,400 year anniversary of the death of Prince Shōtoku. The exhibition was also accompanied by a digital display space which explored themes of identity, myth and religion.

Also forming part of the Japan-UK Season of Culture was the exhibition Usagi in Wonderland by Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura which ran 18 July – 12 December 2021, formed as a collaboration between SCVA, SISJAC and CJS. This exhibition, the first of its kind in the UK that focussed on the artist, explored themes of nature in all its facets through sculpture, drawings and paintings. Due to the pandemic, the exhibition was also partly curated with the artist over Zoom – a testament to the innovation and adaptation required in a pandemic world. Usagi Kannon, a monumental bronze sculpture designed to evoke ideas of rebirth, fertility and renewal, also now stands in the SCVA sculpture park for visitors to enjoy until 2024. You can hear more about the exhibition in the Sainsbury Institute January Third Thursday Lecture, and watch this space for an upcoming publication focussed on the exhibition and Ikemura’s work.

The Sakura Project

This year, the Centre for Japanese Studies in collaboration with the Sainsbury Institute and UEA also took part in the Sakura Project, led by the Japanese Embassy and funded by Japanese Business, which saw the donation of over 6,000 sakura 桜, or cherry blossom, trees to locations across the UK to celebrate UK-Japan friendship and co-operation.

A total of 30 trees were donated to locations across Norwich, including to the Cathedral, UEA and across several city parks. To mark the occasion, Vice Chancellor of UEA, Professor David Richardson, and Director of Governance and Assurance, Andrea Blanchflower, gathered with Executive Director of SISJAC and Director of CJS, Professor Simon Kaner, and UEA’s International Ambassadors for Japan, Aiko Imamura, and for Korea, Seungyeun Lee, to toast the planting outside INTO - an on-campus centre offering academic preparation courses and English language programmes designed specifically for international students.

As is tradition in Japan, we held our very own hanami (花見 blossom-viewing) party at the site of the planting and enjoyed some saké around the new trees. The planting and project encapsulated the continued efforts of CJS, along with SISJAC and UEA, to foster and grow important relationships and networks between the UK, Japan and across the world. As we move forward into a post-pandemic world, we hope the important friendship and co-operation between the UK and Japan symbolised by the cherry trees will continue to grow and bring more opportunities for collaboration and exchange in Japanese studies and beyond.

Nish & Hook Library Collections

The Centre for Japanese Studies was also grateful to receive a generous and extensive donation of books from Professor Ian Nish, renowned specialist in Japanese Studies who sadly passed away in July. Ph.D. student, Hirohito Tsuji, has worked hard this year to catalogue the books which are now available to be used. You can explore the titles in the collection here

"The online catalogue of approximately 700 materials in six languages, donated by Prof. Nish, has been completed. This allows users to search for materials from anywhere, and, as a rule, copies of books are arranged in ABC/

えおorder by author, making it quick to access the materials they are looking for. The collection contains many valuable materials that are very difficult to obtain, so must be of great use to staffs and students in their studies."

Hirohito Tsuji, Ph.D. Student at UEA

"A huge thanks to Professor Nish and his family for welcoming us into their Oxshott home on more than one trip from Norwich to collect the invaluable and very gratefully received donation of wonderful books on Japan that have now been transformed by our dedicated staff into the Nish Collection. This will no doubt be treasured by staff and students alike for generations to come!"

Dr Ra Mason, Sasakawa Associate Professor, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies

We have also recently received another kind donation of books from Professor Glenn Hook which cover a wide range of topics from across Japanese studies which Hirohito has recently finished cataloguing, with over 2,000 titles in the collection. Building and maintaining such collections is essential to ensure that future students of Japanese studies are able to access a range of research materials, and CJS is grateful to both Professor Nish and Professor Hook for helping us to continue this mission.

CJS at AAS

2022 also saw the return to an in-person event for the Association for Asian Studies annual conference, with this year’s event hosted in Honolulu. As we adapt to a post-pandemic world, many of the sessions were held in a hybrid format or online with speakers joining from across the world.

This year’s event saw excellent representation from members of CJS across a range of panels and topics. CJS colleagues that took part included:

• Seeking a Universal Tongue: Esperanto and Politics in East Asia – Nadine Willems (discussant)

• Japan Foundation's 50th Year Anniversary Plenary: Strengthening Human Capital Pipelines for Area Studies – A Global Perspective – Simon Kaner (discussant)

• The Ruins of the Imperial Japanese Military and its Aftermath – Sherzod Muminov (paper presenter)

• Japanese Literature - Hannah L. Osborne (paper presenter)

• Memory in Space: Creatively Imagining and Living Japanese Landscapes – Ryoko Matsuba (organiser & paper presenter)

• Decentering "Japanese Art History": Rethinking Periodization, Geography, and Historiography - Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (organiser & paper presenter) and Simon Kaner (chair)

TERUYA Yuken – Artist Talk and Workshop

Organised by Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (CJS) and Dr Daniel Rycroft (UEA), CJS also had the pleasure of hosting a workshop and talk by Okinawa-born artist Teruya Yuken on Monday 17th October. A workshop held in the afternoon explored the topic of Artistic Perspectives on Decolonisation, which was later followed by an artist’s talk by Yuken in which he talked through his artistic practice and the ideas, concepts and frameworks that underpinned his works.

Over 70 people attended the talk, held at the Sainsbury Centre, and it was encouraging to see such an appetite for both Japanese studies and a return to more frequent in-person events.

TOMIYASU Hayahisa – On Memory, Time and Place

October was a busy month for CJS, with a roundtable discussion with photographer Tomiyasu Hayahisa taking place on Wednesday 19th October, in conversation with Acting Director Sherzod Muminov. Arranged by CJS in collaboration with the National Centre for Writing and as part of a multi-city residency for the photographer, the talk explored Hayahisa’s work and how, having returned to his native Chigasaki, his work has reconnected with the memories and places of his homeland after spending ten years documenting urban spaces in Europe.

CJS Colleagues

Publications and Updates

Over the last year, the diverse specialists that make up CJS have continued to produce impressive outputs across conferences, journals and lectures alongside their teaching – a testament to the expertise and breadth of research that our staff continually bring to the field of Japanese studies.

Dr Sherzod Muminov, Associate Professor in Japanese History, published his latest title Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of the New Japan, 1945-1956 in January 2022, which aims to explore the real people taken as prisoners of war by the Soviet Union from the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and the colony of Southern Sakhalin, numbering over 600,000 Japanese soldiers. Creating a portrait of life in Siberia and later in Japan, the study also sheds new light on our understanding of the Cold War front. Sherzod was also in Japan on a research fellowship at Tohoku University Center for Northeast Asian Studies (CNEAS) earlier this year and gave a lecture at Ritsumeikan University on the topic of the Siberian internment of the Japanese Army. Sherzod has since taken over as Acting Director of CJS for this academic year and continues to teach the Japan special subject, a yearlong, third-year undergraduate module titled “Japan’s First Modern Century, 1868-1968”

Professor Simon Kaner, who is on study leave for this year, has been busy with arrangements for the exhibition Circles of Stone: Stonehenge and Prehistoric Japan, currently on show at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre until August

2023. Featuring some objects which have never before been shown outside of Japan, the opening was held on Thursday 29th September, and attended by his Excellency Mr Hajime Hayashi, Ambassador of Japan to the UK. The exhibition has received significant coverage in the media and Simon has also taken part in podcasts for both English Heritage and The PastCast, alongside articles in Current World Archaeology and the English Heritage Magazine.

Dr Eugenia Bogdanova-Kummer, Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage and course director for the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies, published Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde, an exploration of The Bokujinkai or ‘People of the Ink’ a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers. Through their work, this group rerouted the course of global abstract art, bringing calligraphic visualities and narratives to international audiences. You can hear more about Eugenia’s work on Avant-garde calligraphy in this Beyond Japan podcast episode. Eugenia has also become Acting Director of the Sainsbury Institute for this academic year and has been busy with tasks related to the running of the institute as well as being course director for the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies programme.

Dr Ra Mason, Sasakawa Associate Professor of International Relations and Japanese Foreign Policy, has been working primarily on Okinawa and Japan's security. This has included chairing a session on Okinawan activism at the Daiwa Foundation in London, giving an invited talk on security in the East China Sea at the Nissan Institute, University of Oxford, as well as leading a student-staff delegation to an international panel discussion at the European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS) and multiple presentations at EJARN, NAJS, VUB (Kobe/Kent) and other Japan-related international conferences. Ra also completed a chapter for the forthcoming book, Japan's Security Policy (Routledge), as well as on Shuri Castle for the Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan (MHM Press), in addition to a chapter for the edited volume Old Friends, New Partners: New Perspectives on Peacetime Anglo-Japanese Military Relations: 18642022, to be published next year with Brill Publishers as part of a collaborative project with colleagues at Ritsumeikan University and elsewhere. Finally, Ra has just signed a book contract to write Okinawa: Keystone of the Pacific with Agenda Publishing. Along with other colleagues, Ra has also been instrumental in overseeing the completion of an exciting new MoU with the International Relations department of Ritsumeikan University, and will make good on an MoU with Meio University, Okinawa, when he takes up a seat as a visiting scholar from January 2023. He also continues to work with Tohoku University to strengthen CJS’s multi-faculty ties there.

Dr Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, Lecturer in Japanese Language and Culture, has been working on an upcoming online publication, Okinawan Art in its Regional Context: Historical Overview and Contemporary Practice, to be published as part of the Sainsbury Institute Occasional Paper Series. Editing alongside Hiroko Ikegami, Megumi Machida, and Toshio Watanabe, the publication is a culmination of papers from a conference of the same name that took place in October 2019. The conference itself addressed the socio-cultural complexities of Okinawan identity over the course of history, and explore the intersection between art, politics, and identity from an interdisciplinary perspective. We will release full details of the publication via our social media channels once it is published. Eriko also took part in this year’s AAS conference in a panel on the theme of ‘Decentering "Japanese Art History": Rethinking Periodization, Geography, and Historiography’, as well as the British Association for Japanese Studies conference in Manchester in September with a paper titled ‘Neo-Ryukyuan Painting: Contemporary Okinawan Female Nihonga Painters and the Recreation of the Ryukyuan Painting Tradition’.

Dr Nadine Willems, Associate Professor in Japanese History, released her latest book in 2020 which investigates a strand of non-violent anarchism through the eyes and travels of Ishikawa Sanshirō, an activist and intellectual in Modern Japan. Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan identifies a transnational ‘geographical imagination’ that valued ethics of cooperation in the social sphere and a renewed awareness of the man-nature interaction. You can find out more about the publication from a recording of the book launch event at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation here. Nadine also gave a talk entitled ‘Going to War During the Taisho Period: Japan’s Siberian Intervention of 1918-1922 as Illustrated by the Pictorial Diaries of Infantryman Takeuchi Tadao’ at the 101st International ARC seminar this year, a report of which was written by MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies alumna Emma Kiey, available here.

Dr Hannah Osborne, Japan Foundation Lecturer in Japanese Literature, has this year been busy in her post as Chief Editor for Japan Forum. Papers are currently being revised for a forthcoming special issue, guest edited by Nina Cornyetz and Rebecca Copeland, focussing on contemporary women’s fiction, and she is anticipating a number of draft papers coming through for the Decolonising Japanese Studies special issue which she will be guest editing early next year. Hannah has also been involved in arranging a roundtable event for the CJS Research Seminar series with

William Marotti, Emi Foulk Bushelle and Kelly Midory McCormick on their special issue for Japan Forum 'Imagination and the Real' which came out in August this year. She was also closely involved in organising an in-person event with Tomiyasu Hayahisa with the National Centre for Writing. She will be on study leave in the Spring Semester during which time she will be working on a monograph on Kanai Mieko's early writings and engagement with the 1960s Japanese avant-garde scene.

Dr Ryoko Matsuba, Lecturer in Japanese Digital Arts and Humanities, has delivered modules on the MA Interdisciplinary Japanese Studies programme over the past year, with a particular focus on coordinating innovative joint lectures with Ritsumeikan University involving livestreamed workshops between UK and Japan on digitisation practices. The theme of digitisation has continued in Ryoko’s own research, where she has been leading on digitisation initiatives with collections of Japanese artefacts in the UK, as well as capturing traditional woodblock printing technologies with printmakers in Japan. Ryoko also has three upcoming book publications on Hokusai’s work which will be announced via our social media channels once published including a book chapter ‘Facsimile Reproductions (fukusei) of Hokusai’s Prints in the Meiji Era (1868-1912 )‘ for the British Museum Research Volume Late Hokusai: Thought, Technique, Society, which will be published early next year.