ARC-iJAC Activities

The 122nd International ARC Seminar will be held as a webinar on Wednesday, July 26, from 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Speaker: Travis SEIFMAN (Associate Professor & Research Manager, Kinugasa Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University)

Topic: Visual, Material, and Performance Culture Aspects of the Ryukyu Kingdom's Embassies to Edo

Date: Wednesday, July 26, 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (no reservation required)

*This webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are also invited to participate via YouTube.

The Science Council of Japan presents:

Public Symposium: Scientific Knowledge Generation facilitated by Visualization (8): Cross-Disciplinary Digital Perspectives based on Visualization

From the Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, Professor Ryo Akama (Director of the ARC/College of Letters) and Professor Satoshi Tanaka (College of Information Science and Engineering) will deliver presentations in the 2nd part of the program.

Date: July 21 (Fri), 2023, 13:00-17:10 (JST)
Venue: Auditorium, Science Council of Japan
Entry is free of charge (maximum capacity of 200 persons). Advance registration is required.

Please register here >>https://tra-vis08.peatix.com/view

Event outline:
現在、理系／文系を問わず、様々な研究分野で、多種多様なデジタルデータが生成・蓄積され続けている。こうした情況を受けて本シンポジウムシリーズでは、ビッグデータ時代に相応しい、可視化をコアとする分野横断型の研究手法を検討してきた。シリーズ第8回の今回は、これまでの7回の集大成として、科学技術、文化芸術科学、社会科学の３つの分野を中心に、ビッグデータ時代に相応しい「デジタル視考」と、それを可能にする基盤環境について考えます。

Inquiries:
慶應義塾大学理工学部 　　藤代 一成 (ifujishiro@keio.jp)
立命館大学情報理工学部 　田中 覚（stanaka@is.ritsumei.ac.jp）
お茶の水女子大学理学部 　伊藤 貴之 (itot@is.ocha.ac.jp)

Background:
Masami Yamada, leader of the ARC-iJAC project Re-thinking Japonisme: Digitization of the V&A's collection of Japanese illustrated books and researching its formation in the late 19th century, is a Curator in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Asia Department. She has particular responsibility for the collections of Japanese lacquerware, netsuke, ukiyo-e woodblock prints and contemporary craft. Her current area of research is contemporary craft, particularly the work of urushi lacquer artists. In 2022, she received the inaugural Sir Nicholas Goodison Award for Contemporary Craft from the Art Fund to further develop the Museum's internationally renowned Japanese lacquer collection.

Thank you very much for your time today. How did you first connect with the Art Research Center (ARC) or hear about the International Joint Digital Archiving Center for Japanese Art and Culture (ARC-iJAC)?

Yamada: The V&A was the first museum where Professor Ryо̄ Akama from the ARC conducted the digitization of a Japanese art collection in Europe 20 years ago. In this first phase of the partnership project, every single artwork from the Museum's extensive collection of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, numbering over 25,000 in total, was photographed. These images were subsequently uploaded onto the Museum's publicly accessible collection database, Explore the Collections. It was a remarkable achievement in the early 2000s when the digital presence of museums was fairly limited.

Soon after I joined the V&A in 2018, I had a chance to meet with Professor Akama and Dr. Ryо̄ko Matsuba, Lecturer in Digital Japanese Arts and Humanities at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC), in London to discuss the possibility of initiating the second phase of the digitization project. The collections of ukiyo-e prints and illustrated books remain largely uncatalogued and without photographs in the case of the book collection. We agreed that there was much scope to improve the visibility and accessibility of these important collections. So, a collaborative project with the ARC was something I planned to initiate from the very beginning of my time at the V&A.

The Art Research Center (ARC) and Hoosiers Corporation will be holding the Byobu Matsuri, or Folding Screen Festival--a traditional custom of the Gion Matsuri--at the Nagae Family Residence in Kyoto from July 14-16, 2023.

The Nagae Family Residence is a designated tangible cultural property by the City of Kyoto. Themed around 'plants' this year, folding screens and a selection of items from the collection of the Nagae Family Residence will be showcased.

The Nagae family were merchants of the kimono fabric. Their family residence, built between the late Edo period and the Taishō period, served both as a working and living space for many generations.

The ARC has been digital-archiving the collection belonging to the Nagae Family Residence after Ritsumeikan University received it as a donation. Subsequently, the ARC has become involved in planning and managing the Byobu Matsuri held annually at the residence.

This activity is based on an industry-academia collaboration with Hoosiers Corporation, concluded with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on 27 May 2015, to preserve and utilize the Nagae Family Residence for the development and promotion of education and research.

Date: July 14 (10:00 - 20:00 JST), July 15 & 16, 2022 (10:00 - 19:00 JST, last admission 18:30)

Venue: Nagae Family Residence, Kyoto（京都市下京区新町通仏光寺上ル船鉾町394）

Reservations: Not required

Admission fee: 1,000 yen (including a postcard)

Inquiries

Email：nagaeke@hoosiers.co.jp
Tel：075-353-7512（weekdays only）

Official website: http://www.nagaeke.jp/

The 121st International ARC Seminar will be held as a webinar on Wednesday, July 12, from 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Speaker: Takeshi ABEKAWA (Specially Appointed Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo)

Topic: Presentation of digital content in 3D space

Date: Wednesday, July 12, 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (no reservation required)

*This Webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are also invited to participate via YouTube.

The Takeuchi Dokei Collection, held by the Kunitachi College of Music Library, is the world's largest collection of materials related to Edo-period Japanese music. The Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, is pleased to announce the online release of a number of ukiyo-e prints, banzuke theater programs, nagauta lyric booklets (shohon), and gidayu-bushi lyric booklets (shohon) from that collection.

At this time, 2,025 Tokiwazu-bushi lyric booklets (shohon) have been released. You can search for these by entering 常磐津 in the "genre" (ジャンル) search box at the following link:

https://www.dh-jac.net/db1/books/search_kunishohon.php?lang=en

Because Tokiwazu-bushi developed chiefly within the field of Edo kabuki, most of the Tokiwazu-bushi lyric booklets in the Takeuchi Dokei Collection were published in Edo. However, the collection also includes 196 items published in Nagoya.

A commentary on Tokiwazu-bushi lyric booklets by Takeuchi Yuichi (Research Institute for Japanese Traditional Music, Kyoto City University of Arts) can be found under「竹内道敬文庫の世界」→ 「C 資料解説」at the following link: https://www.arc.ritsumei.ac.jp/lib/vm/kunitake/2023/06/C3.html

The 120th International ARC Seminar will be held as a webinar on Wednesday, June 21, from 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Speaker: Akira MATSUDA (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo)

Topic: The interplay between facts and imagination in the (hi)story of Sumadera

Date: Wednesday, June 21, 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (ARC members only; no reservation required)

There will be no YouTube livestream for this seminar.

The 119th International ARC Seminar will be held as a Webinar on Wednesday, June 7, from 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Speaker: Kazuma YOSHIMURA (Vice President, Kyoto Seika University & Commissioner for Media Arts Strategy, Agency for Cultural Affairs)

Topic: Museum/archive/network of MANGA～About an example of Kyoto Seika University

Date: Wednesday, June 7, 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (no reservation required)

*This Webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are also invited to participate via YouTube.

The Art Research Center (ARC), Ritsumeikan University, in collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), is pleased to announce that 4,233 ukiyo-e prints and 74 Japanese old books from ROM's collection are now available in our database.

・Royal Ontario Museum Ukiyo-e Database

*Note: From the ARC Ukiyo-e Portal Database, you can search for this collection by entering 'Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)' in the 'collection'-field.

・Royal Ontario Museum Japanese Old Books Database

*Note: From the ARC Early Japanese Books Portal Database, you can search for this collection by entering 'Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)' in the 'owner'-field.

Located in Toronto, Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) showcases art, culture, and nature from around the world. Canada's largest, most-visited museum, ROM has the most extensive collection of Japanese art in the country, a large part of which are ukiyo-e.

Digital archiving of ROM's collection of ukiyo-e prints began in March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the digitization of all the ukiyo-e prints and some of the early Japanese books.

Since then, the ARC has continued to add to the database to ensure all the works from the collection are available online for the public. Each item in the ARC database is linked to ROM's online collection. (Some links are yet to be adjusted.)

The collection includes ukiyo-e prints from a wide range of periods and genres, from monochrome early ukiyo-e prints of the Genroku period (1688 - 1704), to shin-hanga prints of the Taisho and Showa periods.

At its core is the collection of over 2,000 ukiyo-e prints of Sir Byron Edmund Walker--one of the founders and first chairman of ROM--that was bequested to the Museum in 1926.

Regarding main genres, the collection consists of 1,426 landscape prints (名所絵), 685 prints of beautiful women (美人画), 464 warrior prints (武者絵), 375 actor prints (役者絵), and 361 prints of scenes from stories (物語絵; including duplicates of actor prints). It is also particularly noteworthy that there are 219 war prints (戦争絵), 83 earthquake (地震絵) and catfish prints (鯰絵), 33 prints depicting foreigners, and 201 surimono.

Regarding ukiyo-e artists, the collection includes 750 prints by Hiroshige, 716 prints by Gekko, 300 prints by Hokusai, 125 prints by Toyokuni I, 100 prints by Kunisada, and 117 prints by Utamaro.

In 2009, a donation of 136 warrior prints from the late James King, a professor of English at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, enriched the collection of this genre. Moreover, Balfour Halévy, the former law librarian of York University, Toronto, donated his collection of over 600 works of Ogata Gekko to ROM in 2016. This rare collection is an essential source for research on Gekko.

We hope that access to this database from ROM's extensive collection provides a foundation for further ukiyo-e research and learning.

References:

・James King and Yuriko Iwakiri: Japanese Warrior Prints, 1646-1904. Hotei, 2007.

・Sir Byron Edmund Walker | Royal Ontario Museum (rom.on.ca): https://www.rom.on.ca/en/about-us/rom/founders/sir-byron-edmund-walker

The 118th International ARC Seminar will be held as a Webinar on Wednesday, May 24, from 18:00 JST.

The program is as follows:

Speaker: Chiaki TAKAHASHI (Part-time Lecturer, Faculty of Letters, Doshisha University)

Topic: Prize Contests and Photographs: Communities of Magazines and Readers

Date: Wednesday, May 24, 18:00 - 19:30 JST

Participation: online via Zoom, free of charge (no reservation required)

*This Webinar is open to everyone, and non-ARC members are also invited to participate via YouTube.