Daiwa Foundation funds projects ranging from a Japanese festival on the Orkney Islands to scientific research on predatory bacteria and antibiotics

The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation has published details of its Small Grants and Awards awarded to support UK-Japan projects in its latest funding round (September 2019 results, PDF).

The Stills Centre for Photography received a Small Grant to support an exhibition by Miyako Ishiuchi. This will be the first Scottish presentation of her work, and she will travel to the gallery in Edinburgh to give a talk alongside the exhibition. The Coronet Theatre will receive support for its month-long celebration of contemporary Japanese culture in May 2020, with practitioners from across the arts travelling to the UK to take part in its ‘Japan Festival’, which will include music, theatre, dance, and visual art. The Garden of Words Stage Production will use a grant to aid their five-week theatrical stage production The Garden of Words, an adaption of  Makoto Shinkai’s celebrated anime film of the same name. The Foundation will also support the Orkney Japan Association in their running of the inaugural Orkney Japan Festival: spreading Japanese culture across the islands of Orkney in this three week-festival in 2020, the grant will help theatre and calligraphy projects within this new initiative.  Another project being supported is an artist residency in a newly restored wooden 18th-century “社家” or “shake” house (house for families of hereditary Shinto priests) of national importance, adjacent to Kasuga-Taisha shrine in Nara.  The Foundation is also supporting travel to Devon by potters from Mashiko displaying work in A Taste of Japan, an exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Tableware at The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, Riverside Mill in Bovey Tracey.

Among larger institutional collaborations funded by the Foundation is a Daiwa Foundation Award to Tohoku University, which is conducting collaborative research with the University of York with the aim of combatting antimicrobial resistance; scientists from the two institutions will study predatory bacteria, which are harmless to humans, in order to investigate their viability as safe antibiotics against pathogenic microbes . A large scale collaboration and data-sharing project will be undertaken between the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Teaching Hospital, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and Kyoto University: they have received funding to support reciprocal visits of researchers to facilitate data-sharing and transfer learning among these leading institutions, to aid their work on neurological modelling; this will in turn further international research into different neurological conditions including epilepsy, stroke, spinal cord injury and cognitive psychology.

Recently funded projects, website link

 

 

Background information:

 The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is a UK charity, established in 1988 with a generous benefaction from Daiwa Securities Co Ltd. The Foundation’s purpose is to support closer links between Great Britain and Japan. It does this by awarding grants and scholarships, and by organising a year-round programme of events at Daiwa Foundation Japan House in London to increase understanding of Japan in the UK. The Foundation is represented in Japan by its Tokyo office.

Press Enquiries

Susan Meehan
Grants and Scholarships Officer
Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
13/14 Cornwall Terrace
London NW1 4QP

TEL: 020 7486 4348

Email: grants@dajf.org.uk