Japan is moving at a dizzying pace. Keeping up with events and trends is important: Japan Close-Up brings you right to the heart of Japan. Each month it highlights issues that move Japan and make this dynamic country what it is today, and what it will be in the future. It provides analysis of major trends, insights on Japan’s movers and shakers and articles on aspects of Japanese culture.

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Please note that the availability of this offer is on a first-come basis.

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Paragons of Culture: The Soft Power of the Japanese Emperors – Ben-Ami Shillony, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and honorary president of the Israeli Association of Japanese Studies with the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts & Cultures

Monday 16 July 2012 6.45pm
Khalili Lecture Theatre
The School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG

And

Thursday 19 July 2012 6.00pm
Norwich Cathedral Hostry (Weston Room)
Norwich NR1 4EH

In this third annual Carmen Blacker Lecture Series, Professor Ben-Ami Shillony will examine the role of the imperial family in Japan. The emperors of Japan, for at least the last twelve hundred years, lacked political, military, economic and judicial power. Nevertheless, their dynasty has never been toppled or challenged. The enormous prestige of the imperial family derived not only from the belief that the emperors were descendants of the Sun Goddess, but also from the soft power which they wielded as paragons of culture. Detached from the hard power of other heads of state, they engaged in performing religious rites, composing poetry, compiling anthologies and pursuing arts. The imperial court played a crucial role in the cultural development of Japan. It preserved Shinto, patronized Buddhism, advanced Chinese civilization, promoted Confucianism, and championed Western culture. The Shōwa emperor started a new tradition of imperial family members engaging in science. During the period between 1894 and 1945, when the emperors were used to sanction Japan’s wars of aggression, their cultural activities continued unabated. Today the imperial family of Japan excels in science and poetry more than any other royal family in the world.

The Carmen Blacker Lecture Series honours the memory and scholarship of Carmen Blacker (1924-2009). Each year a senior scholar will lecture on a theme related to Japanese religion or folklore. Professor Ben-Ami Shillony was twice awarded the Michael Milken Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2000 the Emperor of Japan, through the Japanese ambassador to Israel, bestowed on him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver star (Kun-nitō Zuihōshō). In October 2010 he received the Japan Foundation Award and was granted an audience with the emperor and empress. The Japan Society and Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures are pleased to have the opportunity to present Professor Ben-Ami Shillony as part of this series.

Admission is free and all are welcome. Booking is recommended and seats will be provided on a first come first serve basis. For the London lecture, please contact the Japan Society office on tel: 020 7828 6330, email events@japansociety.org.uk or submit the online booking form. For the Norwich lecture, please contact the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures on tel: 01603 624349 or email sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org. The lecture in Norwich will be given in conjunction with the Third Thursday Lecture Series.

The lectures are generously supported through a bequest from Carmen Blacker and executors of her estate.

Co-organized by:

Kabuki Prints for sale from Frederic Aranda’s hit exhibition!

Thanks to Shochiku Co. Ltd and photographer, Frederic Aranda, a series of  stunning limited edition prints of some of kabuki’s best loved actors in performance and back stage have been donated to the Japan Society for sale on behalf of its Tohoku Earthquake Relief Fund. They were first shown at an exhibition at the Hospital Club, London in March 2012 and feature actors such as Ichikawa Ebizo XI, Ichikawa Kamejiro II, Nakamura Tokizo V and Onoe Kikunosuke V, offering a glimpse into a closed and rarefied world.

Each of the 28 images is available in editions of 100 at 16 x 20 ins (£350 each) and 100 at 20 x 24 ins (£750 each) prints. All proceeds go directly to support projects for the long term recovery of communities in Tohoku.

For details of all images available please follow this link.

On Saturday 14 April, Dr Peter Matanle, Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Sheffield, gave an insightful talk on the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake in Tohoku. The lecture focused on whether the disaster presents a new opportunity to revitalise rural society in Japan, which has been in decline for decades.

Dr Matanle addressed a full house, delving into the Japanese Government’s vision for a reconstructed Tohoku. Following the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, inseparable questions surrounding the energy industry and its own, much debated, future were also examined.

All who attended came away with a broader understanding of rural Japan and the issues at stake in its immediate and long-term future.

To download a PDF of Dr Matanle’s presentation please click here.

On Monday 16 April, snow drifts did not block the square at Stratford Place and the Oriental Club doors were mercifully free from sea ice. Inside the Garden Room however, the temperature soon dropped, as Hilary Shibata recounted the harrowing tale of Lt. Nobu Shirase, Japan’s first polar pioneer, to a packed house.

Hilary, with her daughter Lara Dagnell, have recently completed an eighteen-year project, translating the century old official account of Shirase’s 1910 – 12 Japanese Antarctic expedition into English. Hilary began by likening the South Pole in 1910 to the moon in 1960; a final frontier and the absolute limit of what people believed to be humanly possible.

Hilary Shibata with the crew of the Kainan Maru

In planning the venture, Nobu Shirase was motivated by dual desires; his own love of adventure and an ambition to bring Japan greater recognition on the international stage. The audience were amazed to learn that the Japanese expedition boat, the Kainan Maru, was a ‘drop in the ocean’ compared to the dreadnought icebreakers employed by Amundsen and Scott’s famous parallel ventures. At just over 200 tons and propelled by a staggeringly small 18hp engine, this minnow of Antarctic exploration actually penetrated as far South and further East around the continent than its competitors. In spite of the ship’s diminutive size her captain maneuvered her through sea ice that other vessels had found impenetrable. As well as a virgin landing on King Edward VII Land’s jagged coastline, the Japanese vessel managed to sail several kilometers further East than Scott’s expedition had charted, following narrow channels in the interlocking ice until the open water dwindled to nothing.

Apart from the indomitable figure of expedition leader Shirase, another character central to Hilary’s account was the seemingly superhuman Captain Naokichi Nomura. Most of the audience had developed a case of posthumous hero worship for the Kainan Maru’s captain by the end of the evening. Aside from his world-beating navigational skills, Nomura was a proficient draughtsman and many records of the voyage exist through his paintings and drawings, and the black and white paintings of one of the young sailors, Yukihiko Miyake. Art from the expedition ranges from the amusing, a landscape of sea ice painted to resemble Japanese mochi, to the terrifying, the ship’s prow disappearing in the vast waves of the infamous ‘Roaring Forties.’ The full awe of the expedition’s first encounters with towering ice shelves and bottomless icebergs is also revealed in these records. Hilary observed that accurate scale was often abandoned to give a more emotive impression of  how insignificant the crew felt in this new and endless southern wilderness.

There were many other highlights of the talk, from learning of the expedition’s ‘flat-pack’ hut abandoned on the shores of Sydney harbour to the spartan regime of the young Shirase and his boyhood ambitions. The Japanese expedition did not achieve the international acclaim it had sought but, in spite of being under-provisioned and badly timed, the ‘shoestring’ venture set many new records, not least of which was the longest Antarctic distance achieved in a day’s dog sledging, a feat which smashed previous records set in the frozen continent.

Hilary Shibata and her daughter have done a great service to the history of Antarctic exploration by painstakingly resurrecting Shirase and his men from obscurity, both in Japan and abroad. These explorers clearly deserve their place in the pantheon of ambitious and obsessive men and women who have ventured to the edge of the known world.

The English translation is likely to find as big an audience in Japan; the original account has been out of print for many years, and is written in an antiquated style, which makes it exceptionally hard for the modern Japanese reader to decipher.

The book, which includes rare expedition photographs of ice-locked decks and Ainu huskies as well as many of the crew’s own sketches and diary extracts, is now available to buy from the following sources:

The Museum Shop
Scott Polar Research Institute
University of Cambridge
Lensfield Road
Cambridge CB2 1ER
Telephone: 01223 336548
E-mail: shop@spri.cam.ac.uk

The Erskine Press Ltd.
The White House
Sandfield Lane
Eccles
Norwich NR16 2PB
Telephone: 01953 887277
E-mail: books@erskine-press.com

Bluntisham Books
Oak House
East Street, Bluntisham
Huntingdon
Cambridge PE28 3LS
Telephone: 01487 840449
Email: contact@bluntishambooks.co.uk

‘And now, dear reader, permit us to transport you without further ado to the wonderful realm of Antarctica, where the wild ice of mountains towers high into the sky and the rising sun now shines in splendour by both night and day, and shall never set.’ – from the prologue to The Japanese South Polar Expedition 1910 – 12: A Record of Antarctica, Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, 2011.

£50  per head for members of the Japan Society and JCCI

Booking deadline – Friday 6 July

An old friend of the Japan Society, Glen S Fukushima will talk about recent developments in Corporate Japan. He is well qualified to do so, as his CV shows.

Mr. Fukushima was appointed Chairman and Director, Airbus K.K. on 1 July 2010 before which he served as President of the Japan operations of NCR Corporation, Cadence Design Systems Inc., and Arthur D. Little Inc.  Until 1998, he was Vice President of the Japan operations of AT&T Corporation.  Before embarking on his business career in 1990, Glen S. Fukushima, who is a US citizen and who attended Stanford and Harvard Universities, was based in Washington, D.C. as Director for Japanese Affairs (1985-1988) and Deputy Assistant United States Trade Representative for Japan and China (1988-1990) at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Executive Office of the President.  He began his career as an attorney at a prominent Los Angeles law firm.

Glen S Fukushima served two terms as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ), 1998-1999, and Vice President, 1993-1997.  He has served on numerous corporate boards and government advisory councils in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Following a two-course lunch, Glen S Fukushima will speak for about 20 minutes, after which there will be time for questions until 2.30pm.

To reserve your place, please call the Japan Society office on 020 7828 6330 or email events@japansociety.org.uk or submit the online booking form.

To download a PDF description of this event, click here.

In association with:

Click here to download the JCCI’s Spring 2012 Review and keep up to date on Japanese business in the UK,  the Japanese economic forecast and future JCCI activities.

Sunday 22 April 2012                                  11.00am

(Visitors are encouraged to arrive from 10.00 am)

The Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery
238 Kariba-cho
Hodogaya-ku
Yokohama-shi
Kanagawa-ken

Phone – 045 731 4208
Transport – Train to JR Hodogaya station, then 4 kilometres by bus or taxi

On 22 April a memorial event will be held at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Yokohama for Len Harrop, the former Supervisor of Commonwealth War Graves in Japan, who died in 2011 aged 95.

Len Harrop devoted many years of his life to making the Hodogaya Cemetery into a beautiful resting-place for the war dead of all the countries of the Commonwealth and a unique showcase for trees and plants from around the world. He escorted the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Diana and many other distinguished figures on visits to the cemetery. He had many friends and associates from the worlds of horticulture and business, and contributed much to the postwar reconciliation and friendship between the peoples of Japan and the UK.

Further details and a map of the location can be found here.

Get four volumes of the outstanding reference series, Britain & Japan: Biographical Portraits, at £35 (including p&p) for a limited time only.

This series covers the biographies of hundreds of British and Japanese personalities, whose lives and achievements are worthy of record.

From great collectors to poets, journalists, scholars and diplomats, these four volumes contain a great depth of research and some wonderful insights into the daily lives of these extraordinary men and women.

Many fascinating personal stories,  missing from general histories of Anglo-Japanese dealings, are published here for the first time.

Save £9 on RRP and receive a free pack of greetings cards if you buy all four volumes today!

Students from Orikasa Elementary School in Iwate exchanged gifts with pupils from Seafield Primary School in Elgin following a ceremony at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew on 2 April.

The two schools had exchanged letters in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011 and had an opportunity to meet face to face when students, Anri Minato and Taichi Kon,  visited London to present to the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew seeds native to the Tohoku region. The ceremony, which was led by Professor Stephen Hopper, Director of Kew Gardens, also included an address by the Japanese Ambassador, who joined the students in planting two young zelkova serrata trees next to the Japanese gateway.

The children at Seafield Primary School sent their messages and cards for children in Tohoku through the Japan Society’s Messages for Japan project. In all, some 6000 messages were translated by our team of volunteers and forwarded to schools throughout the affected region. The messages from Seafield were sent to Orikasa Elementary School in Yamada-cho, Iwate.  Hazel McLauchlan, teacher at Seafield Primary School, is keen for the two schools to stay in touch.

To read a Japanese article written before the children left for London, follow this link.