JFNY NEWSLETTER | January 5th, 2024 🎊 

Happy New Year from us here at the Japan Foundation New York! We're wishing you the best for the new year. We had a lot of great events in 2023 and we're excited to keep promoting and supporting great events, opportunities, online content, and more this year. Looking forward to some of our biggest events of the year, we have two of them in March: a Japanese horror film series here in NYC, and the opening ceremony in the National Cherry Blossom Festival on March 23rd. This January the Tetsuya Yamada exhibition is opening in Minneapolis. We're kicking off the year with plenty to get involved in. Read on!

From Our Grantees

2024 US-Japan-Korea Trilateral Forum and Symposium

January 2 - 8: Washington, DC/Online

Noticing the need to create a space for multilateral dialogue, International Student Conferences (ISC) launched the US-Japan-Korea Trilateral Forum in 2013 to increase cooperation and enhance communication between the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The 8th Trilateral Forum will enhance understanding between American and Japanese future leaders and help our nations lay the groundwork to continue addressing shared challenges from a place of mutual understanding.

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Yasuke: African Samurai

January 9: Online

Professor Thomas Lockley will tell the amazing story of Yasuke, a man from Africa who served and fought beside Japan’s infamous warlord Oda Nobunaga, in the 1580s. Yasuke, a mercenary in the service of Jesuit missionaries, met Nobunaga when his employer Alessandro Valignano was granted an audience.



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Hamlet | Toilet

January 10-13: Japan Society, NYC

Get ready for a night of laughs and literary mashups as Theater Company Kaimaku Pennant Race (KPR) returns to Japan Society with their latest production, Hamlet | Toilet. Led by the acclaimed playwright and director Yu Murai, KPR has become known for its nonsensical yet profound style that sensationally weaves Japanese pop culture into reimagined scenes from Shakespearean plays.

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Japanese Arts Intensive with Visiting Artist, Kihachiro Nishiura

January 15 - 17: Eustis, Florida

Arching Oaks welcomes award-winning, visiting artist Kihachiro Nishiura for three days of Japanese arts instruction and demonstrations including Kodo incense ceremony, Shodo calligraphy and Ikebana. Participants who complete all three days of workshops will receive a certificate of completion signed by the artist.

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Tetsuya Yamada: Listening

1/18 - 7/7: Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)

Since World War II, women have made influential contributions to the ceramics field in Japan that have not been adequately recognized. This exhibition focuses on the explosion of innovative and technically ambitious compositions by such artists since 1970—a body of work which they developed in parallel with, but often separately from, traditional, male-dominated Japanese practice and its countermovements.

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Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Reunites With Longtime Partner Nobuyuki Tsujii Throughout The US

January 20 - 27: West Palm Beach, Clemson, Tallahassee, New York City

Of the multitude of outstanding artists with whom Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is proud to call a collaborator, pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii stands out as one of the longest and most fruitful artistic relationships in the orchestra’s rich 51-year history. Having first appeared on stage with Tsujii in 2014 on a 16-city tour, Orpheus and the pianist will embark on a domestic tour, reaching audiences in New York, Florida, and South Carolina.

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Okinawa and New York Youth for Global Plastic Pollution Action YouTube Series

January - April: Online

This series is a document of over 18 months of Cafeteria Culture’s global exchange program between students in PS/MS 188 in NYC and students in one of the southernmost islands in Japan called Iriomote Island. It will showcase how those students from very different parts of the globe inspire each other to take action on plastic pollution. The first episode will be released on the first week of January 2024.

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From Our Friends

Japan Society's Junior Fellows Leadership Program

Deadline: February 9, 2024

Japan Society is now accepting applications for their 2024 Junior Fellows Leadership Program. The Junior Fellows Leadership Program is a culturally immersive learning experience for high school students who possess the potential for strong leadership and demonstrate the skills necessary to be future leaders.

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Report

Foundation for Advancement in Conservation's Collotype Printmaking Workshop (Report)

The Collotype Printing workshops allowed 24 participants to learn from a collotype master printer from the world’s only remaining commercial producer of color collotypes. Registration for the workshops quickly filled to capacity and were a huge success, thanks in part to the Japan Foundation’s generous grant.

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Leading by Design: Asian Lessons for Monitoring Global Financial Stability (Report)

“Leading by Design: Asian Lessons for Monitoring Global Financial Stability” presents the first comprehensive study of economic surveillance by the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), outlining the benefits of its regional surveillance activities and drawing lessons for other Regional Financial Arrangements (RFAs). At recent events in Tokyo and Kanazawa, Japan, members of the Task Force, including Dr. William Grimes (Boston University) and Dr. William Kring (Boston University) presented the report and their findings. 

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For inquiries, please contact: [email protected]

Image credits (from top):

2024 US-Japan-Korea Trilateral Image Credit: International Student Conferences

Hamlet | Toilet Image Credit: © Design by Kazunobu Uozumi, Illustration by Kotobuki Shiriagari, Photo by Takashi Ikemura

Japanese Intensive Arts Kihachiro Nishura Image Credit: Arching Oaks

Tetsuya Image Credit: Walker Art Center

Orpheus Image Credit: University of Hong Kong (HKU)