Past Events

26 April 2023

Pictorialist Photography: Soichi Sunami and his Issei Contemporaries

David F. Martin discussed the work and international achievements of Issei photographers active in Seattle, Washington, in the early 20th century. He will focus primarily on Soichi Sunami, whose main interest was dance photography, and became the chief photographer for the Museum of Modern Art (New York). The Seattle Camera Club was founded in 1924 and held their first exhibition the following year. The key members were Hiromu Kira, Dr. Kyo Koike, Frank Asakichi Kunishige, and Yukio Morinaga. With the exception of Sunami, the Seattle Issei photographers were interned at the Minidoka relocation centre (concentration camp) which collectively ended their artistic careers.

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3 April 2023

Quiet Exits: Japan as an Emerging Emigration Country

Emigration by Japanese citizens has increased considerably in recent decades. The number of Japanese nationals living overseas exceeded 1.3 million in 2015, and the number of those holding permanent residency in other countries hit a record high of 557,034 in 2022, despite COVID-related mobility restrictions. In this seminar, Dr Nana Oishi discussed the multi-dimensional factors that drive Japanese young people and mid-career professionals to move overseas. Based on quantitative surveys and in-depth interview data, she elucidated the complexity of the contemporary Japanese diaspora. She also advocates for the establishment of policies to facilitate ‘brain circulation’ and ‘human resources circulation’ more broadly.

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22 March 2023

An Evening with Takashi Kikuchi, Viola Player

For this special event, we screened the compelling short documentary about award-winning blind Japanese viola player Takashi Kikuchi, as he overcomes his fear of movement through dance and imagination. This special screening was accompanied by a solo performance on viola by Takashi and the opportunity to ask Takashi and film director Cécile any questions in the Q&A chaired by Jason James, Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Takashi was commissioned by the Baluji Music Foundation, and is part of a triptych of films about blind musicians in the Inner Vision Orchestra.

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21 March 2023

Handbook of the Ainu Language

Handbook of the Ainu Language is the first book in English to describe the Ainu language fully and systematically. It aims to preserve invaluable knowledge about Ainu, a language-isolate previously spoken in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kurils, which is now on the verge of extinction. Ainu was not a written language, but despite the existence of a huge documented stock of oral literature, it is significantly under-described in terms of grammar. It is the only non-Japonic language of Japan and is typologically different not only from Japanese but also from other Northeast Asian languages. In this book launch, the author of the book explained the Ainu Language and its main features.

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16 March 2023

Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media

Film has always been a key technology for producing and disseminating attachments to ‘the social.’ Making Audiences explores the century-old relationships between Japanese media and social subjects, analyzing the connections between cinema audiences and five significant discursive terms: minshu (the people), kokumin (the national populace), toa minzoku (the East Asian race), taishu (the masses), and shimin (citizens). Fujiki narrates the history of Japan’s transmedia ecology, illuminating cinema’s enmeshment with other forms of media, from vaudeville to the internet, so that cinema audiences emerge as simultaneously shaped by and shaping social history.

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9 March 2023

Private View and Artist Talk: AKI INOMATA in conversation with Dr Lena Fritsch

This event provided the opportunity to have a first look at the work of AKI INOMATA and hear her discuss with Dr Lena Fritsch the ideas and inspiration behind her work. The show will centre around one of INOMATA’s most recent projects, Memory of Currency (2018-2021) and introduce her practice, which for many years has involved collaboration with non-human creatures such as hermit crabs, bagworms, octopuses and ammonites. Memory of Currency is a project in which INOMATA collaborated with pearl oysters to create currency ‘fossils’. INOMATA implanted artificial nuclei into the tissues of the pearl oysters, with the shape of each nucleus modelled on the portrait of a figure depicted on one of today’s major currencies.

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16 February 2023

Demarcating Japan

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs. Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan’s geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.

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9 February 2023

Japan’s Economic Security and the Global Competition in Semiconductors

The semiconductor industry – vital for the development of future technologies – is at the centre of rising geopolitical competition between the US and China. Chip production is highly concentrated in East Asia, especially in Taiwan. As China develops its domestic semiconductor industry and geopolitical divides deepen, many countries, including Japan, are attempting to rebuild their semiconductor industry and related supply chains. In this talk, Mariko Togashi explained Japan’s position in the global competition for semiconductors and how it impacts the country’s national economic security strategy. She also discussed some of the greatest challenges lying ahead for Japan’s semiconductor industry and national security, and present recommendations.

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25 January 2023

A History of Popular Culture in Japan

A History of Popular Culture in Japan provides the first historical and analytical overview of popular culture in Japan from its origins in the 17th century to the present day, using it to explore broader themes of conflict, power and meaning in Japanese history. E. Taylor Atkins shows how Japan was one of the earliest sites for the development of mass-produced, market-oriented cultural products consumed by the urban middle and working classes. In this book launch, E. Taylor Atkins presented an overview to help understand four centuries of popular culture in Japan as an arena for struggles over power, resources, identities, nationhood, ideology, political rights, civil liberties and personal autonomy.

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17 January 2023

A British business success in Japan: Wilkinson Tansan Mineral Water

John Clifford Wilkinson left Leeds in 1872, at the age of 20, to work for the trading company Hunter and Co. in Kobe. In 1889, he was hunting in the Takarazuka area when he stumbled on a place where naturally-carbonated mineral water bubbled out of the ground. This was the start of Wilkinson Tansan Mineral Water and its various spin-offs, which eventually grew into one of the largest beverage companies in Japan. Jason visited Takarazuka to find out more, and was impressed to see the water still bubbling up just where Wilkinson first found it. Sadly, not much else tangible remains. Jason retraced the fascinating story of the Wilkinson family business in Japan.

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1 January 2023

Innovation

Recent world events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing war in Ukraine and rising tensions between the US and China have had substantial impacts on society, with consequences felt from the global to the individual level. In many cases, these events have prompted a rethink of strategies to address our most pressing economic, security, supply chain, energy supply and climate change challenges. Innovative ideas and approaches are essential to produce effective responses to these challenges and shape the future of our world. So this year we will focus on ‘innovation’, and present innovative approaches linked to current socio-economic issues. 

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5 December 2022

Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement

Voices from the Contemporary Japanese Feminist Movement introduces six influential activists from Japan’s contemporary feminist movement. The authors, both based in universities in Australia, wrote the book to fill a gap in Australia-based Japanese studies, which has overly focussed on research in cultural studies and linguistics to the exclusion of structural analyses of the status of women in Japan. For this book launch, the authors described Japan’s grassroots feminist movement based on testimonies they gathered, generating insights about some of the most serious problems faced by women and girls in Japan, as well as comparing the approaches of Japanese activists with those of the global feminist movement.

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