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September 4, 2008

Aki Ishigami (Day 2, Reports on Research Results by Young Researchers, Participants of the International Training Program)

Aki Ishigami (Postdoctoral Fellow, Kinugasa Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University)

Survey of Shunga and Ehon in Overseas Collections

As an ITP scholar, I conducted research and taken digital photos of shunga and ehon in the collections of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I set my research base in SOAS, University of London, and conducted a survey in the British Museum, as well.

I especially worked hard for the collections of HAA and MFA that needed to be organized and catalogued. I believe it is important for the future study of shunga to make a comprehensive list of extant material in overseas collections, which is my primary concern at this initial stage of my survey. In this presentation, I would like to discuss the collections of each museum and the setup of a Shunga/Ehon Database based on these research outcomes.

 

September 4, 2008

Satoshi Ōtsuki (Day 2, Reports on Research Results by Young Researchers, Participants of the International Training Program)

Satoshi Ōtsuki (Postdoctoral Fellow, Kinugasa Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University)

How to Preserve and/or Conserve Historical Districts by Residents Themselves?: Case Studies of Thailand

 In case of Southeast Asian countries, it is difficult to conserve and/or preserve historical districts from disasters and overdevelopment by government sectors only, because of limitation of not only their budgets but also legal systems for urban planning and heritage management. Therefore, such preservation and/or conservation need residents’ cooperation.
 This presentation will discuss methods for promoting community-based prevention/conservation of historical districts, with case studies of Ayutthaya World Heritage and royal property districts in Thailand.
 

September 4, 2008

Tetsuo Mizuta (Day 2, Reports on Research Results by Young Researchers, Participants of the International Training Program)

Tetsuo Mizuta (Postdoctoral Fellow, Global Innovation Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University)

World Heritage Site Ayutthaya's Flood Loss Estimation as Risk Management, and Lectures as a Feedback of Research Activities

From June 30th to September 27th of 2008, I was sent to Thammasat University, Thailand from the Research Center for Disaster Mitigation of Urban Cultural Heritage (DMUCH) of Ritsumeikan University. In the first one month, I researched past and present flood damages and flood control plans in Thailand, and also worked as an organizer for a young researchers' workshop. In July and September, I lectured three times at Thammasat University and Chiang Mai University. My lectures' titles are "Japanese City Planning and Urban Planning" and "Japanese Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Plans and its Practices". These are based on my research activities. In August and September, I researched Ayutthaya's value by using questionnaires and the Travel Cost Method. In this research, I tried to reveal residents' and tourists' awareness and preparedness for floods at Ayutthaya.
 

September 4, 2008

Seiya Tsuruta (Day 2, Reports on Research Results by Young Researchers, Participants of the International Training Program)

Seiya Tsuruta (Ph.D. candidate, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University; G-COE Research Assistant)

Extraction of Emotional Information from Music for Virtual Dance Collaboration System

We have been proposing a Virtual Dance Collaboration System. In the proposed system, so far, while a live dancer dances to the music, a virtual dancer does so by selecting motion clips that are stored in a motion database. However, music affects dance greatly. When music changes during a dance collaboration, the virtual dance collaboration system is necessary to change the virtual dancer's motion. In this research, we aim at regenerating a virtual dancer's motion based on emotional information extracted from music.

 

September 4, 2008

Atsuko Ōya (Day 2, Reports on Research Results by Young Researchers, Participants of the International Training Program)

Atsuko Ōya (Ph.D. candidate, Graduate School of Letters, Ritsumeikan University; Research Assistant of Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan GCOE Center)

Handling of Non-film Materials in the Makino Mamoru Collection of C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University

From October to December, 2008, as an intern I arranged the Makino Mamoru Collection with some archivists in C.V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. This collection includes a lot of books, magazines and other non-film materials about Japanese film history from the prewar to the postwar era. In this presentation, I will give an overview of the non-film materials in this collection and propose a plan for their database.
 

September 4, 2008

Shin Ōno (Day 2, Reports on Research Results by Young Researchers, Participants of the International Training Program)

Shin Ōno (Ph.D. candidate, Graduate School of Policy Science, Ritsumeikan University; Research Assistant)

Research of visualized environment for historical events

Our center puts tremendous effort to archive historical events and items as digital data. The work itself is important for saving our culture and history. However, we are still struggling how to open and use the archived data. I believe that such contents can be useful for education. Visualizing such contents can support both researchers and learners. Researchers can analyses new relation, coocurrence and difference of historical events and items. Learners can acquire curiosity of the events and motivate them to learn more.
 In my research, I am developing the visualized environment for historical events, and in the session, I will demonstrate the system.
 

September 4, 2008

Josef Kreiner (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)

Josef Kreiner (Special Professor, Center for International Japan-Studies and Planning and Strategy Center, Hosei University; Professor Emeritus, University of Bonn)

Japanese Collections in Europe: Their role within the Japanese Studies and their significance for the Formation of the Image of Japan
 
     More than 500.000 items of Japanese arts and crafts including ethnographic material are
kept in national, royal or private European collections today. Lacquerware, screens, armour and porcelain kept in cabinets of curiosities (Kunstkammern) since the 16th century, or kimonos highly esteemed as objects of eveyday life, inspired the imagination of the Europeans and fostered a very positive image of Japan in the past. Often these early collections developed to form the fundamental collections of many national museums in the 19th century. The collection of Engelbert Kaempfer for instance was one such early example of a Japanese collection to join the British Museum. But Japanese studies, when it was established as a "new" academic subject around the mid-19th century, was largely conceptualised as philology. A century later its paradigm finally changed towards a more sociological approach, but the value and benefits these vast collections represent for the Japanese studies, is still being widely ignored.
     This regrettable situation was first highlighted by curators from museums, libraries and
archives from all over Central Europe at an international symposium hosted by the Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Bonn, in 1980. This was the birth hour of the European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (EAJRS) and led to a research project on Ainu and Ryukyu/Okinawan collections conducted by the University of Bonn. As a further step, ca. 60 European museums (excluding Russia and the CIS) participated at an international symposium sponsored by the Toyota Foundation Tokyo in Königswinter/Bonn in 2003, to report on their Japanese collections. It culminated in the two-volume publication of the „Japanese Collections in European Museums“ in 2005 (a third volume is in print) containing the overview of 300 Japan collections that currently exist Europe. At this workshop, a platform of cooperation between European museums including ethnographic collections named „European Network of Japanese Art Collections (ENJAC)“, was established. A second workshop in Prague followed in 2006. Currently the University of Zurich is preparing the third forthcoming symposium, focusing on collections of Japanese Buddhist art.
     This lecture will firstly illustrate the history and present situation of Japanese
collections in Europe. It will then attempt to analyse their importance within the Japanese Studies and touch on the topic of the formation of the European image of Japan.

September 4, 2008

Sarah E. Thompson and Abraham Schroeder (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)

Sarah E. Thompson (Assistant Curator for Japanese Prints, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Abraham Schroeder (Research Assistant for Japanese Prints, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)


The Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)

Joint summary:
The collection of some 50,000 Japanese prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the largest such collection outside Japan and one of the largest in the world; it includes everything from early Buddhist printing to works by living artists but consists primarily of Edo-period ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The enormous size of the collection, much of which was acquired in Japan during the Meiji period, made it difficult to locate individual works within the collection and impossible to publish a conventional hard-copy catalogue. Storage conditions were also often unacceptable by modern archival standards.
To address these problems, in January 2005 the MFA launched a project to photograph, catalogue digitally for website publication, and rehouse the entire collection. The photography, rehousing, and web publication with basic initial cataloguing are expected to be completed during 2010.
The first half of our double presentation will introduce the special problems of the MFA collection and the plans made for dealing with them; the second half will focus on the technical details of the project and the day-to-day workflow for both MFA employees and the MFA volunteers and visiting scholars (from institutions such as Ritsumeikan University) whose help makes the project possible.

September 4, 2008

Helena Honcoopová (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)

Helena Honcoopová (Director of the Collection of Oriental Art, National Gallery in Prague)
 
Collections of Japanese Arts in the Czech Republic and their Digitation
 
I. Czech collections of Japanese arts and crafts - an overview in numbers ( 2 major state collections, 5 regional collections (Brno, Plzeň, Liberec, Olomouc, Opava) -  minor oriental art collections incorporated to the movable property of Czech chateaux and castles).
 
II. Usage of digital means in accessing the public art collections in two major institutions - the National Gallery in Prague (The Collection of Oriental Art), the National Museum (The Asian Art Department of the Náprstek Museum).
 
III. Perspectives of further development of  international cooperation in reasearch through digital means- an attempt of creating a network of European Japanese art collections Enjac - its goals and its limitations.    
 

September 4, 2008

Rosina Buckland (Day 2, Part 1 of the Afternoon)

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Rosina Buckland (Research Assistant (Japanese Paintings), Japanese Section, Dept. of Asia, British Museum)
 
Taking the British Museum to the World: Collections Online

As of December 2008, the Collections Online database of the British Museum has nearly 850,000objects, and more records are being uploaded. Making the collections accessible to a global audience for education and research is one of the central aims of the database. In my presentation I will briefly outline the history of the collections database, and some of its strengths, as well as the process leading to the historic moment of its launch online. I will talk about some of the collaborative projects for digitalization and research, and explain the hopes for development of this essential resource in the future.

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