Events category: Talk

7 April 2015

The Anime Encyclopedia: A Century of Japanese Animation

This third edition of The Anime Encyclopedia brings the landmark reference work up to date with six additional years of information on Japanese animation, its practitioners and products, as well as incisive thematic entries on anime history and culture. Helen McCarthy summarised the book’s genesis, its main aims, and share some of the stories it has accumulated along the way to its third shelf-shattering edition of over a million words.

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11 February 2015

Masterpieces of Artisanal Japan: Wazuka tea and Ogatsu inkstones

The connection between tea and suzuri (ink-stones for calligraphy) makes itself evident through calligraphy scrolls displayed in a tea house. Timothy d’Offay from Postcard Teas and Teruo Kurosaki, an influential figure in contemporary design, introduced these two examples of artisanal masterpieces from Japan.

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13 October 2014

The Art of Soup- A Taste of Fukushima

Ei Arakawa started the UNITED BROTHERS art collective with his brother Tomoo Arakawa in 2011. Their purpose is a mediation between the reality of Fukushima (where they were born) and the reality of the international art world at large. UNITED BROTHERS created the Green Tea Gallery, and is participating in the new Live Section of this year’s Frieze Art Fair with their new work Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? Arakawa discussed this new performance of giving away soup containing an ingredient grown in Fukushima.

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30 May 2014

Shuji Terayama: No bird exists that can fly higher than the imagination

Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) is known outside Japan mainly as the writer-director of Fellini-esque films such as Death in the Country and Farewell to the Ark. In his own country, it was his poetry that thrust him into the national consciousness at the age of eighteen. His experimental theatre troupe, formed in 1967, cemented his status as a leading figure in the boundary-challenging cultural ferment of the time.

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15 May 2014

Tales from Old Japan

A Thousand Cranes theatre company was founded in 2006 by performer Kumiko Mendl and director Vicky Ireland MBE. Combining Vicky’s lifelong passion for children’s theatre and interest in Japan with Kumiko’s childhood memories of living there, they decided to create a company dedicated to bringing the many fascinating stories, artists and culture of Japan to young audiences in the UK.

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9 October 2013

Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art

In early modern Japan, 1600-1900, thousands of sexually explicit works of art were produced, known as ‘spring pictures’ (‘shunga’). Tim Clark is currently curating a major ‘shunga’ exhibition at the British Museum, which celebrates this often tender, funny and beautiful erotic art-form, produced by some of the great masters of Japanese art such as Utamaro and Hokusai. Showing some key works from the exhibition, Tim explored important questions about what is ‘shunga’, how it circulated and to whom, and why it was produced.

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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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