Events category: Book launch

6 July 2026

Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces

Through subjects as diverse as old apartment blocks, human scars, kimono fabrics, personal belongings of the deceased and even her own water-damaged prints, Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) captures time, atmosphere and memory in photographic form. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces charts the course of her practice over fifty years and identifies themes that resurface throughout her work, including her relationship with place, the passage of time and the bodies and possessions of people, always with an emphasis on ephemerality. In this book launch, co-editor Lena Fritsch introduced the book and discussed Ishiuchi’s work with the artist.

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24 February 2026

Commercializing Fusion Energy

Fusion energy has now emerged as one of the most disruptive technology opportunities attracting the attention of risk-tolerant investors and large amounts of private capital. The new and much revised second edition of ‘Commercializing Fusion Energy’ considers the emergence of nuclear fusion technology as a commercial proposition grounded in technological opportunities and high-technology business development. It has been developed, with a new publisher, as an editorial collaboration between British and Japanese experts. As such it gives weight to developments in those two countries at the forefront of fusion innovation. The book presents chapters from a wide range of specialists and key stakeholders.

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29 January 2026

From Postwar Butoh to a Contemporary ‘Rebellion of the Body’

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee presented her book ‘Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer’ (Routledge, 2024), the outcome of a five-year embodied research project carried out in Japan. During this period, Bonarjee studied with first- and second-generation Butoh dancers and artists, as well as contemporary practitioners engaging with Butoh today. In her writing, she seeks to convey the sensitive somatics of these encounters. In this talk, Bonarjee reflected on how Butoh continues to inform her multidisciplinary artistic practice and introduce Butoh Mutations, an ongoing research project through which she develops new methodologies and pedagogies for imagining a contemporary and planetary ‘rebellion of the body’, inspired by the visceral activism at the heart of Butoh’s postwar emergence.

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16 April 2026

Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General

In this talk, based on his new book ‘Tojo’, Peter Mauch gave us a nuanced look at the life and leadership of General Tojo and his role in the rise and fall of Japanese militarism. This is the first English-language biography of the controversial leader since 1961, and Peter draws on the new archival sources that have since become available, including Tojo’s own writings and the diaries of his secretaries and numerous military sources. We follow Tojo’s career as he successfully launched himself into the highest echelons of political power and negotiated fractious military rivalries.

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26 November 2025

Six Months of Dreaming – Fact and Fiction

In her most recent novel, ‘Six Months of Dreaming’, Cory was inspired by the chance find of fourteen necktie designs enclosed with a letter sent by Yutaka Kajikawa (an unknown young Japanese artist from Suita outside Osaka) to Lady Grace Drummond-Hay, who was visiting Japan on the first round-the-world Zeppelin flight in 1929. He hoped she would promote his ‘modern’ designs in the West. Although she did nothing for the young artist, Cory set out to imagine the story of what became of him. She also took his designs and reworked them into wallpapers, fabrics and scarves so that, ninety-six years on, he was granted the prestigious exhibition in central London he had so hoped for. In October 2025, Cory brought the book and exhibition back to Osaka as part of the Royal Society of Arts off-expo events at the British Pavilion, performing a one-woman show in a theatre in central Osaka entitled ‘Homecoming – the Triumphal Return of Yutaka Kajikawa’. During this book launch, Charlotte Cory will read extracts from her book and provide more insight into the project.

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16 September 2025

Peacetime Anglo–Japanese Military Relations: Old Friends, New Partners

For over a decade, Japan and the UK have identified one another as their most important security partners in Asia and Europe respectively. The two countries currently enjoy a high in bilateral military partnership that has been referred to as a ‘quasi alliance’. Looking back, however, there have been ups and downs since the days of the bilateral alliance over a century ago. We joined the authors of a new book that explores how peacetime military relations between Japan and the UK have played out from Bakumatsu to Brexit.

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19 June 2025

Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan

Professor James D.J. Brown presented his new book on the history of Russian espionage against Japan. Cracking the Crab tells the extraordinary full story of Russian intrigue targeting Japan, from first encounters in the eighteenth century to the Soviet declaration of war in August 1945. Colourful episodes include Gojong, King of Korea, being smuggled into the Russian legation dressed as a woman in 1896; the 1927 ‘Tanaka Memorial’, an infamous forgery purporting to be Japan’s hidden plan for world domination; and the secret intelligence of ‘Nero’, a Soviet agent supplying invaluable insight into Japanese strategy during the Second World War. From Russians murdered in broad daylight in Meiji Tokyo to Soviet honey traps and ‘white magic’ at the Battle of Nomonhan, this is a landmark history of the covert struggle between two great powers of the modern age.

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6 March 2025

Okinawa: Great Power Competition and the Keystone of the Pacific

Okinawa is a tiny island of huge geopolitical importance. Located between the tip of Japan’s mainland and Taiwan, it hosts key US military bases, which have played a contested and controversial role on the island. In addition, the sovereignty of some of Okinawa’s outlying territory is disputed by China and its future is tied closely to the competing strategies over Taiwan. It is also a potential target for North Korean missiles aimed at American military assets on the islands. In discussion of this compact and revealing book, Ra Mason explored why and how this island paradise and the waters around it could trigger great power conflict.

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5 March 2025

Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West

Why do Japanese people love tango? Starting with this question, which the author, Dr Yuiko Asaba, frequently received while working as a tango violinist in Argentina, “Tango in Japan: Cosmopolitanism Beyond the West” reveals tango’s history in Japan dating back to the 1910s and its vibrant contemporary dynamics, embedded in the modern transformations of Japan and Argentina. While initially brought to Yokohama by North American tango dancers, tango’s immediate popularity in Japan quickly compelled many Japanese performers and writers to travel to Argentina in search of tango’s “origin” beginning in the 1920s. The first comprehensive work on the Japan-Argentina musical relationship, this book illuminates how Japanese musicians, dancers, aficionados, and the wider public have approached, and continue to engage with, tango as an important vehicle of expression, entertainment, and academic pursuit that take their imaginations beyond the West.

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29 January 2025

British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children’s books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children’s literature. In British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture, the first comprehensive study to explore this engagement, Catherine Butler considers its many manifestations in print, on the screen, in tourist locations and throughout Japanese popular culture.

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