Background:
Akiko Yano studied in Japan for a BA in international relations at Tsuda College, and for a MA and PhD in Japanese art history at Keio University. She specialises in Japanese painting history. She had an opportunity to study in the UK for one year as a visiting PhD student, based at SOAS University of London, thanks to a scholarship provided by the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC). She continued working in the UK, first as a Research Assistant for the SOAS-British Museum (BM) project on Osaka actor prints 'Kabuki Heroes on the Osaka Stage: 1780-1830' (2005), and then as a Research Fellow for the SOAS-BM project on shunga 'Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art' (2013). After joining the BM as a curator in 2015, she has been responsible, with two other colleague curators, for the Japanese collection, which holds over 40,000 objects.

Dr. Yano, thank you very much for your time today. What initially sparked your interest in Japanese art history?

Yano: I was interested in art (mainly painting) and history as a teenager, but I was not particularly looking at the discipline of art history for my BA as I was more interested in international relations through cultural communication. Thinking about my future career, however, I realised that I would feel more of a sense of mission if I could work on the preservation of the cultural heritage of Japan, and hence learnt, belatedly, about a job called a 'curator'. From that point onwards, I switched my specialty to art history with an emphasis on Japanese art history since I was in Japan and thought Japanese art would be easily accessible.

How did your connection with the Art Research Center (ARC) begin?

Yano: I learnt about the ARC's digitisation projects when I was in London as a visiting PhD student at SOAS. Prof. Akama was also based at SOAS on a sabbatical at about the same time. He was then digitising actor prints in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, and I was fortunate enough to have a chance to help with his photography sessions once or twice. It was a revelation. For an art history student in the early 2000s, photographs (using film!) of objects served primarily as my personal records to assist my memory of what I saw in the actual objects. The idea of systematic and end-to-end digital photography of a collection, which would exist online as a digital entity of that collection, available to the widest possible users, impressed me. When I was working as a Research Assistant for the Osaka actor prints project at SOAS, I actively used the ukiyo-e database, which Prof. Akama had created at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum at Waseda University as well as at the ARC. He collaborated with the Osaka project by digitising a large-scale private collection of Osaka actor prints in Germany.

Yano: It has been a long-time ambition within the Japanese curatorial team at the British Museum to make use of the remarkable collection of paintings, prints, and illustrated books from Kyoto and Osaka in the collection, which has been acquired by the Museum over many years since the late 19^th century. The major exhibitions at the BM featuring Kyoto and Osaka artists in the past were 'Japanese Paintings & Prints: The Maruyama/Shijō School' (1976) and 'The Schools of Ganku and Bunchō' (1977) both by the then curator Lawrence Smith, and, more recently, 'Images of Kyoto & Osaka' (1997) by Tim Clark. It has been over a quarter of a century since the last exhibition, and the curators kept/keep acquiring Kamigata materials.

The most direct incentive for me to form the research project was the large-scale acquisition of the Scott Johnson collection of Kamigata surimono (so-called Shijō surimono), consisting of over 1600 items (if we count each sheet of surimono pasted in albums and accompanying surimono wrappers, it comes to be more than 2000) in 2021. It was our predecessor Tim Clark's final major acquisition as a BM curator. Significant in terms of scale and quality, this acquisition hugely enhanced our Kyoto-Osaka collection.

The more I looked into each of the surimono, the clearer it became that artists in Kyoto and Osaka were deeply involved in the world of haikai and kyōka. Not only that, but there are also thousands of individuals in surimono who contributed poems and pictures, who appear under their pen names and are unknown today. Who were they? How did they get involved in these surimono? What was going on, culturally, in late Edo period Japan?

I first encountered Kamigata surimono and the idea of 'salon' in the Osaka actor prints project, led by Prof. Andrew Gerstle of SOAS. The BM Japanese collection curators had been receiving generous advice from the late Prof. Nakatani Nobuo (Kansai University) about our Kyoto-Osaka painting collection. At the same time, Prof. Akama was spearheading the digitisation of the BM Japanese collection and built a system of databases at the ARC. All these threads of ideas, personal connections, academic activities, and advice converged into one as a research project. It is based on long-term working relationships among scholars in the UK and Japan, which has enabled us to embark on this 'salons' project to investigate a wide range of cultural participation of people of the late Edo period, centering in and around Kyoto and Osaka. Our scope at this stage includes any cultural activities that formed a communal space (real or virtual) for those who were interested in joining for pleasure, self-improvement, or whatever the reason, as long as there is evidence available in primary materials. In our project we call such a space a 'salon'. Primary materials are being digitised by the ARC team, and the project members are inputting relevant information - mainly about the persons involved - into the database. Our project is in a field where more traditional humanities study methods and digital technologies meet. Calling it 'digital humanities' might be easier, but our project is keeping an interesting balance between 'humanities' and 'digital.' Both benefit from each other to deepen our knowledge of the phenomenon of Japanese 'salons.'

While Edo (Tokyo) has been more comprehensively studied, the cultural history of the Kamigata region (Osaka and Kyoto) has remained relatively niche, at least in English. Did this influence your motivation to initiate this research project?

Yano: The situation is similar in Japanese as well. It was not really the original motivation to leverage the Kamigata profile, but it was and still is true that there was so much artistic material produced in the Kyoto-Osaka region that has as yet remained significantly underexplored.

The research outcomes of this collaborative project are currently being showcased in a one-year Special Display at the British Museum. Could you tell us about the unique appeal and key features of this Special Display?

Yano: The ongoing special display in the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese Galleries at the British Museum (until 30^th March 2025) is one of the outcomes of the project. However, an academic research project and a public display each expect quite different audiences. For the general audience outside Japan who visit the British Museum, we need to start by explaining where Kyoto and Osaka are geographically, how vertically written Japanese text would be read, and so on. In addition, as the display is in the permanent collection gallery, the physical aspects of the space, such as the size and layout of the display cases, are fixed. We adopted a narrative so it would fit the objects nicely into the existing space, which sometimes posed a curatorial challenge. We also published a book to accompany the display, Salon Culture in Japan: Making Art, 1750-1900 (British Museum Press, 2024).

The display showcases in the first room representations of vibrant city life in Kyoto and Osaka, and the artistic currents of the late 18^th to the 19^th centuries mainly through paintings and illustrated books. Major Maruyama-Shijō school and other Kamigata artists' works are on display as well as some collaborative works (gassaku) among them. In the second room, the focus shifts to people's various hobby activities and cultural interests. The concept of 'salons' is introduced here as we feature group activities, such as haikai groups with surimono, sencha (infused tea) gatherings, and anthologies of poems and pictures by multiple authors. All the objects on display are from the British Museum's collection. Visitors are pleasantly surprised to learn about this rich section of our collection.

Given that part of this collaborative project was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, how did the ARC's database system and digital infrastructure support the implementation and realization of this project?

Yano: Covid-19 had a significant impact on our formation of the project. It was a time of no travelling nationally or internationally when we were planning the research grant application. It was a norm, previously, to travel between partner countries when conducting an international project.

The parallel aim of our project is to measure how it is possible to collaborate internationally without physically travelling. The ARC had already been a strong partner to the British Museum Japanese collection team. Building on that, as the core of our project, we set up an online database system, where digital images of relevant primary materials, text from transcriptions, and extracted person information can be accumulated, accessed, and searched for research by the project members from anywhere on earth. Each active member has assigned material to work on and input into the online database. Findings and work in progress can be shared in online meetings and workshops. The active use of online platforms for a meeting is a positive legacy from the era of Covid-19.

Do you have any personal favorites within the Japanese Collection at the British Museum that you would like to share?

Yano: I think that Banka jinmei roku (Who's Who from Myriad Houses, 1813, 1991,1112,0.75.1-5) is one of the key works for the project, and I am never bored by looking at each page. It is a who's who of haikai poets across Japan, complied by the Osaka poet and shipping agent Shime Chōsai (1757-1824). He called for applications from haiku poets in Japan's south and north, east and west, and put together more than 400 individuals' information. Each entry has a standardised format: a portrait of the poet, a haiku of their composition, their pen name, and a short biography. The entry order was, according to the hanrei (note at the beginning of the book), organised on a first-come-first-served basis, rather than based on skill or social status. This approach demonstrates the ethos of 'salon culture'. Based on the poets' biographies provided, we find courtiers, samurai, merchants, farmers, priests, scholars, artists, doctors, men and women, old and young, in one book. It is fascinating.

Is there anything else you would like to comment on or highlight?

Yano: The ARC has digitised almost all the prints and books (both out of copyright) in the British Museum Japanese collection under their international digital humanities scheme. Thanks to their work, an incredible number of images - hundreds of thousands - of prints and pages of books can be viewed through our Collection Online by anyone interested all over the world. This serves specialists and general users alike. The impact of this visual presence is massive; Japanese art objects can be viewed and appreciated, stimulating interest in Japanese culture more broadly. We are most grateful to the ARC, and hope to continue working with the ARC in the future.

Photo courtesy of the British Museum/Dr. Akiko Yano.

(This interview was conducted by Yinzi Emily Li)