Past Events

In If Cats Disappeared from The World, Kawamura tells the story of a postman in his thirties who discovers that his days are numbered because of a brain tumour which will cause his imminent death.

High and Low is a superb crime thriller and a brilliant commentary on the contemporary Japanese society and its moral values.

In this online workshop, led by Rob Jones, participants will be introduced to variety of Sashiko patterns, focusing on Moyozashi Sashiko (pattern sashiko) where the patterns change direction to make a larger one.

Breasts and Eggs follows the story of Midoriko, an adolescent girl who refuses to communicate with her mother except through writing, and her mother Makiko, who moves to Tokyo to receive breast implant surgery.

For our last Film Club of 2020 we want to finish with an unusual and cheerful Christmas tale, the anime film Tokyo Godfathers directed by Kon Satoshi in 2003.

The Tale of the Heike is Japan’s great martial epic: a masterpiece of world literature and the progenitor of all samurai stories, first assembled from scattered oral poems in the early fourteenth century.

Departures (おくりびと, Okuribito, 2008) follows the story of a professional cello player who returns to his hometown and finds work as a nokanshi, a traditional Buddhist ritual mortician.

Kogin embroidery is a type of Sashiko, originating in Aomori prefecture and is a type of counted thread work. It is stitched on an even weave fabric from side to side typically using an uneven number of threads (one, three or five in length) to make up geometric, symmetrical patterns.

With the ethereal tone and aesthetic styling characteristic of Kawabata’s prose, The Old Capital tells the story of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a Kyoto kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife, Shige.

For our first Film Club of the autumn we will return to the classical Japanese cinema to discuss When a Woman Ascends the Stairs directed by Mikio Naruse in 1960. A film which offers a subtle, devastating study of the life of a woman in postwar Japan played by film star Hideko Takamine.