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.