| Since its inception, the Japan Foundation, Toronto Library has grown to hold one of the most extensive public collections related to Japan, supporting cultural exchange between Japan and Canada. To commemorate its 10th anniversary, writers James Quandt, Katherine Govier, and Kerri Sakamoto will talk about their research and read from their latest work. A celebratory reception with live music will follow.
Writers' Biographies:
James Quandt is senior programmer at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto, where he has curated a number of touring retrospectives over the last fifteen years. In 2004, he received the International Arts and Culture Award from the Japan Foundation in Tokyo for his curatorial and critical work on Japanese cinema, including editing of comprehensive anthologies of Kon Ichikawa and Shohei Imamura.
Katherine Govier began her career in journalism and is author of eight novels and three short story collections. Her previous book, Creation, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. The latest novel, Three Views of Crystal Water, set in prewar Vancouver and Japan, is about the young Canadian descendent of a family of pearl merchants, who comes of age in an ama fishing village.
Kerri Sakamoto is a Toronto-based writer of novels, screenplays and essays on visual art. She received the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book for her novel, The Electrical Field, which is currently in development for the film adaptation. She is presently the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University College at the University of Toronto.
CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE THEATRE: DRAMATIC READING SERIES
Toronto Tour 2005
A Crow's Theatre Production
Presented by The Japan Foundation
In the garden, two suns
A play by Hisashi Inoue
Original English translation by Roger Pulvers
Adapted by Marjorie Chan with Damien Atkins
Directed by Jim Millan
Thursday, November 3, 6:30 PM
Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse
79A St. George Street
No reservations required
Tuesday, November 8, 7PM
Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre
6 Garamond Court
Reservations required: 416-441-2345
Wednesday, November 9, 11:30 AM
York University, Burton Auditorium
No reservations required
"To die in Hiroshima was the natural thing to do.
To survive here is unnatural."
-from Scene 3
When is being alive not the same as really living? A survivor of Hiroshima's atomic blast struggles to come to life again in a domestic story of a young woman and her dead father, a ghost who shares her small apartment. A play about living after surviving and the rediscovery of the human things that makes a heart do more than beat.
In the garden, two suns premiered in 1994 in Tokyo. Since then it has been produced countless times in Japan and been made into a major motion piicture as The Face of Jizo. This acclaimed, touching and at times humourous play has been adapted by the skillful hands of Canadian playwrights Marjorie Chan and Damien Atkins, and appeared in Toronto (January and August 2005 at the Japan Foundation) and Ottawa (June 2005) to enthusiastic receptions.
Cast:
Mitsue, a young librarian: Marjorie Chan
Takezo, her father: Paul Sung-Hyng Lee
TADANORI YOKOO
Recent Poster Works, 1993- 2005
October 24 - December 15, 2005
Gallery Hours:
Monday - Friday, 11:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Thursday until 7 PM
Closed: November 11
Special Saturday Openings: November 5 & December 3, Noon - 5 PM
"Every work of mine seems to tell a story...It is a natural expression of my liking of the theatre."
- Tadanori Yokoo
From October 24 - December 15, the Japan Foundation is proud to present Tadanori Yokoo, Recent Poster Works, 1993 -2005, featuring over 90 works by this prominent international artist.
Born in Nishiwaki, Hyogo Prefecture in 1936, Yokoo creates brilliant, colourful posters, a bricolage of eclectic imagery appropriated and assembled from traditional and early modern designs. The iconic imagery of his recent posters relate closely to his posters from the 60s in which his anti-modernist aesthetic was compared to Pop Art at that time.
In her essay on Tadanori Yokoo, Fern Bayer describes the themes of his posters: "Interwoven in complex yet readable layers are works featuring subconscious image memory and iconographies, ancient and new, from various cultures - east and west and north and south...his work is a truly pleasurable cacophony of imagery - each a spectacle in itself."
Fern Bayer is an independent writer and curator based in Toronto.
Download Fern Bayer's Essay
NIHONGO ART CONTEST EXHIBITION 2005
Student Award Presentation and Reception:
Saturday, October 1, 2005, 2:00 PM
Event Hall Display:
October 3 - October 21, 2005
Library Display:
October 2005 - June 2006
Gallery Hours:
Monday to Friday, 11:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Thursday, until 7 PM
Closed Saturdays
The Nihongo Art Contest features drawings composed by students between Grades 1 and 12 in Ontario who are learning Japanese. Nihongo Art is a drawing featuring hiragana words (Japanese phonetic characters) and kanji (Chinese characters). Drawings typically feature a picture of the word with the actual Japanese characters incorporated in the designs. This year, the Japan Foundation, Toronto received 165 entries from students.
The reception on October 1 features a brief presentation on the students' art submissions by the chief judge of the contest, painter and Japanese language teacher Mr. Daisuke Takeya. The submissions were on exhibit in the Japan Foundation Event Hall from October 3, and moved several weeks later to the Japan Foundation Library until June, 2006.
For information on borrowing the exhibit for Japanese-language educational purposes, visit the Nihongo Art page.
MONSTROUS VISIONS:
Horror and Destruction in Japanese Films
August 17 - September 28, 2005 (Extended until Saturday, October 1st)
From monster films like Godzilla, apocalyptic animé such as Akira, to recent films as in The Ring, provocative Japanese films about horror and destruction continue to disturb and stimulate our imagination.
Using film posters as a starting point, MONSTROUS VISIONS invites visitors to reflect on the social and environmental destruction of war, disaster, and other dystopic scenarios, as well as horror on a personal, psychological level, as expressed through Japanese film. It also invites the viewer to think metaphorically about 'monsters' and their various cultural symbolic interpretations. The exhibit includes films about people who are monstrous in appearance, things that incites fear or cause trauma, or something atrocious, horrible or nightmarish.
Selected posters span the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, and are from the realms of both animé and dramatic film. Approximately 50 posters are on display.
"VOLUNTARY BLINDNESS"
Professor YOMOTA Inuhiko, Meiji Gaku-in University, Tokyo
Friday, September 9, 2005
6:30 PM
In the Western literary tradition, blindness is a punishment visited by the gods, a representation of human despair. In Asia, however, blindness has often been viewed as a positive act of love, a means through which the self can express its devotion to the beloved. Indeed, an examination of blindness in Japanese literature and film yields a variety of fascinating examples.
TANIZAKI Jun'ichiro's classic novella, Portrait of Shunkin, for instance, tells the story of a young man who voluntarily destroys his own eyesight out of love for the beautiful but blind Shunkin, the gifted musician he devotedly looks after. One of Japan's most beloved modern works, Shunkin has been made into a movie five times. In MASAMURA Yasuzo's film Seisaku's Wife, a woman who fears that her husband will be killed in the war decides to put his eyes out to keep him alive. Through this act, the couple achieves a deeper level of love and mutual understanding. In this fashion, Japanese literature and film often treat blindness in terms of its positive significance, not just as a negative expression of defeat. The theme of self-inflicted blindness, I believe, can provide important insights into the nature of Japanese culture.
-YOMOTA Inuhiko
Biography:
Born in Osaka, YOMOTA Inuhiko is currently Professor of Film Studies and Comparative Literature at Meiji Gaku-in University. YOMOTA is a prolific scholar, having published over 30 books related to film, literature, East Asian Studies and Cultural Studies. He has also published literary translations, a book of poetry, Rupture in My Eyes (1996), and regularly contributes to newspapers and magazines, including Asahi, Mainichi and The New York Times. He has received several prestigious prizes, among them the Suntory Scholar Prize (1998) and the Ito Sei Literary Prize (2000).
Professor YOMOTA will be giving another lecture entitled "Aesthetics of 'Kawaii'" at York University on Thursday, September 8th, 2:30 - 5:00 p.m. at the Accolade building (between Vari and Burton Auditorium), room ACW 004. In this lecture he will discuss how kawaii (small, reassuring, lovable) as a concept fits within the evolutionary history of Japanese aesthetics and cultural industry (Pokemon, Hello Kitty, etc.), and how it functions as an ideology and a mythology underpinning contemporary Japan.
THE BIRTH OF MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY IN JAPAN
The exhibition is co-presented by The Shibusawa Memorial Museum, Tokyo and The Japan Foundation, Toronto
June 13 to July 29, 2005
Free Admission
Freed from over 260 years of isolation, Japan was suddenly flooded by Western civilization and the Industrial Revolution into every single corner of the nation's lives. In the late 19th century what was most fashionable was anything IMPORTED. A common scene might be a gentleman in Kimono wearing a top hat or elegant Japanese maidens in Victorian dress strolling Ginza Street and its new brick buildings under the radiance of the gaslights. Threatened by the invasion of the Western powers, the Japanese government in haste tried to establish economic and military enhancement of the country. Modernizing, westernizing, being patriotic, democratic, progressive or ambitious; these concepts were all mixed up in the confusion of rapid change. But it was also a time when the country was so youthful and vital. One of the most dynamic encounters of East & West in human history was recorded in the collection of Shibusawa Memorial Museum, Tokyo. In this exhibition there are over 70 UKIYOE items; full-colour prints made from multiple wood-cut blocks, photographed and enlarged up to 103 X 72.8 cm. In these grand snapshots of the time you will discover the trendy urban life of sumptuous chaos.
2005 Documentary Japan
July 14 to 29, 2005
Documentary Japan presents a selection of videos on a wide variety of topics related to Japan. The program includes one special documentary feature and five thematic programs; each film will be screened twice during the 12-day period. For a complete schedule, please click on "2005 DOCUMENTARY JAPAN SCHEDULE (PDF)" below to download.
This year the Feature Documentary is The Portrait of My Mother, a moving story about a displaced Japanese American man's search to find his mother and to understand his past.
In the five thematic programs, two videos are paired together. Creative Innovators introduces six leading architects in Japan: Three Generations of Avant-Garde Architects and a modern koto composer Tadao Sawai and his koto-player widow Kazue in Koto: The Music of Tadao. Tests of the Spirit converses with the Brazilian novelist in Pilgrimages of the Soul: Author Paulo Coelho Walks in Kumano while Kendo's Gruelling Challenge: The 120 Second Test of Spirit follows competitors striving for the 8th Dan, the highest level of Kendo. Embracing Change profiles a Zen Buddhist priest, a survivor of cancer and caregiver for his dying mother in Along the Way: A Year of a Monk, as well as a blind man who has made the difficult decision to part with his Seeing Eye dog in A Time for Goodbye: A Guide Dog Retires. School Life tags along with four new teachers in their daily activities in Learning How to Teach and uncovers some of the problems facing students and teachers at a school for troubled youth in What is School? A Decade of Struggling with Delinquents, Dropouts, and School-Phobic Youth. Endangered Nature records the story of the ibis on Sado island in The Legacy of Ibis: Half a Century of Conservation Efforts and one man's fascination with a rare monkey inThe Last White Monkey.
ADMISSION FREE, RSVP not required
ENVISIONING "CIVILISATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT":
Japanese Prints at the Dawn of the Modern Nation-State
by Dr. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
6:30 - 8:30 PM
Gennifer Weisenfeld is Associate Professor of Art History at Duke University and received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her main field of research is 19th- and 20th-century Japanese visual culture, particularly the impact of Japan's modern sociopolitical transformations on artistic production and practice. Her book Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Dr. Weisenfeld will provide an overview of the prints exhibited in THE BIRTH OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY IN JAPAN on display at the Japan Foundation from June 13 - July 29, 2005. |
