今までのイベント

20 September 2013

How Do We Perceive Art-Through Vision or Cognition? Neuro-aesthetics and Tatsuo Miyajima

We were pleased to invite Professor Semir Zeki, an expert on visual cognition and neuro-aesthetics, to speak with Tatsuo Miyajima, one of the most prominent Japanese artists practising today and who has been influenced by cognitive science. Conceptual approaches to art are familiar to contemporary audiences, yet there remain fundamental questions of what art is and where it originates. If science is able to fully explain the experience of art, does it reduce art’s significance?

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17 September 2013

Acting Out of Nothingness: from the APT Collection

This event celebrated the opening of the group exhibition ‘Acting Out of Nothingness’ presented by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the APT Institute and featuring the contemporary Japanese artists Kanako Sasaki, Koki Tanaka, Zon Ito, Goro Murayama, Motohiro Tomii, Masahiro Wada and Lyota Yagi. The exhibition features artworks lent by APT Institute from the Artist Pension Trust® (APT) collection, the largest lending library of artwork by leading and emerging contemporary artists from around the world.

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13 September 2013

Strong in the Rain

Dr David McNeill, one of the authors of ‘Strong in the Rain’ (co-authored with ‘Time’ magazine’s Tokyo correspondent Lucy Birmingham), spoke at the Daiwa Foundation about his book. The book tells the story of the March 11 2011 triple disaster and its aftermath through the eyes of six people Their stories illustrate the extraordinary bravery and heroism of ordinary Japanese people during the nation’s worst post-war disaster, but also some of Japan’s deep-rooted structural problems. Despite the enormous problems facing the country’s northeast, however, the book is ultimately positive and hopeful that the 2011 tragedy offers a new way forward.

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5 September 2013

Sake: Ancient and Modern

British-born Philip Harper went to Japan to teach English in 1988. Fascinated by sake, he went on to become a sake brewer. In over twenty years of brewing, Philip has worked at four different sake breweries. In 2007, he was hired by the Kinoshita Brewery as Master Brewer, and has since led the Tamagawa sake brand to two Gold Medals in the National Sake Awards. He talked about sake’s long history and his own experiences as the only non-Japanese to have become a master sake brewer. There was also an opportunity to taste some of the different sake styles Philip produces.

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10 July 2013

Shifting Values: Nationalism and Identity

For the third seminar in our series ‘The Search for Contentment: Shifting Values in the UK and Japan’, we have invited two speakers from the social sciences, Dr Toshihito Kayano, a Philosopher and Associate Professor of Tsuda College and Professor Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck, University of London, to talk about identity and nationalism in the UK and Japan. Post-industrial societies seem to have reached a new phase in which they are focussing on issues such as community coherence and cosmopolitanism but nationalism is also on the rise in both Japan and the UK.

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8 July 2013

Yuki Ota, Silver Medallist at the London Olympics

Multiple Olympic medallist, foil fencer Yuki Ota, gave a talk about his experiences as a sportsman and his role as an ambassador for sport in Japan and internationally. He discussed his experiences of representing his country at the very top level and talked about the thrill of receiving Olympic medals, which Ota managed in two consecutive Summer Olympic Games: Beijing 2008 and London 2012. He spoke about his formative years and how he is now on a mission to introduce fencing to young people in Japanand increase the profile of his sport. He has recently founded an organisation, Super Fencers, to achieve precisely these aims.

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4 July 2013

Contemporary Japanese Poetry: Word, Image, Film and Translation

This event brought together one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary poets, the multi-award winning Gozo Yoshimasu, and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and translator Forrest Gander. Recently, Gozo Yoshimasu has been working with the medium of film, combining the moving image with his poetry. For this event, he showed some of his film work and gave a poetry reading. Forrest Gander will discuss his translations of the work of Gozo Yoshimasu and other Japanese poets and his relationship with Japanese poetry.

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2 July 2013

Economic Integration with the Neighbours - a Good Thing?

Japan is seeking closer economic relations with its neighbours by signing up to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The UK, by contrast, is heading in the opposite direction, with increasing talk of leaving the EU. So who is right? The EU was founded largely as a way of binding former enemies together through trading links. The same motivations may be a factor in Asia, which suffers a continued legacy of friction and disputed borders. In that sense, is it job done for the EU? What does Japan stand to gain from the TPP? And can Prime Minister Abe push a deal through against the opposition of powerful forces such as the agricultural lobby?

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28 June 2013

Shifting Values: What is the role of religion in the internet age?

Interest in formal religion is low in both the UK and Japan. Most people’s involvement is confined to the marking of major rites of passage or celebrating certain long-standing festivals Certainly the role of the church, shrine or temple as the focal point of a local community has been on the wane for some time, particularly in large cities. Has this role now been transferred to other community gatherings, such as football matches, or even to virtual internet communities in which people with similar interests can gather? And if people no longer take their ethical guidance from religion, what – if anything – have they replaced it with?

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25 June 2013

Cross-Cultural Partnerships and Environmental Engagement by the late Chris Wainwright with Yusaku Imamura

This talk was given by the late Chris Wainwright and Yusaku Imamura, Director, Tokyo Wonder Site. It explored some existing models of cultural co-operation primarily between the UK and Japan and also explored the need to find new models and approaches to some of the pressing issues of our time such as the increasingly urgent need for a creative response to climate change and environmental issues. Within this context, the talk investigated the role of artists and how they can make a positive contribution individually and collectively to our rapidly changing global environment.

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18 June 2013

Long Term Re-designing: Mass Media and Grassroots Activism After 3/11

In this talk, Professor Shin Mizukoshi of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo and Dr Kiyoko Toriumi will outline the challenges of various research projects after 3/11, and will consider the role and perspective of media and communication studies. With their networks of researchers and practitioners from diverse fields such as design, engineering, arts, media and education, they have been involved in rebuilding communities in the disaster area. They will illustrate the challenge facing trans-disciplinary projects in this talk whilst elaborating on some of these projects. This talk will foster a discussion on how media studies could be approached through practical collaboration with other fields.

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13 June 2013

Constitutional Reform

From the 1990s on, most observers thought that Japan was developing in the direction of a UK- or US-style political system based on two main parties. However Democratic Party of Japan was beaten in the December 2012 Lower House election. Is Japan entering into a new period of prolonged LDP dominance? Elements within the LDP sense that the party’s current strength may offer an historic opportunity to revise Japan’s Constitution, which was imposed by the victorious Allies after the end of World War II. Professor Kensuke Takayasu is Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of Law, Seikei University in Tokyo and will discuss the possibility of constitutional change and the possible effects of this for Japan, its neighbours and the wider world.

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