Welcome
Are you interested in Japan? Its people? Its culture? Its language?
If so, come and join us!
Japan Society North West holds regular Japan-related events in the Manchester / Liverpool / Cheshire / Lancashire region.
Upcoming JSNW Events
Pruning Trees the Japanese Way
Saturday 4 September 2010
Another visit by Professor Masao Fukuhara, who will this time talk about, as well as demonstrate, pruning trees the Japanese Way. This event is meant to be a hands-on workshop where you will have a chance to prune trees yourself! See poster for more details.
Admission: £20 for members of JSNW and Friends of Harthill and Calderstones Park, and £25 for non-members. If you would like to attend this event please contact our Events Co-ordinator.
Venue: Calderstones Park, Liverpool 18
JSNW Social and Japanese Conversation Evening in Manchester
Saturday 25 September 2010 7:00 to 9:00 pm
Let’s have a drink, enjoy food, and meet someone new. Our Newsletter Editor, Yuko Howes, who is also a Japanese tutor, will host this fun event. You don't need to be able to speak Japanese, so you can just relax. It might be a good idea to bring your photos or memorable things that you want to talk about.
If you would like to attend this event please contact our Newsletter Editor.
Venue: New Samsi (downstairs in Izakaya), 36-38 Whitworth Street, Manchester M1 3NR
Japan Day
Sunday 17 October 2010
JSNW is organising its third Japan Day this year. The venue is the prestigious Midland Hotel in Manchester. Put it in your diaries now!
Our last Japan Day in Liverpool was a great success, and there was great enthusiasm amonst the participants to do it all again. See poster for details.
Win a flight to Japan!
The first prize in our Japan Day Raffle will be two air tickets to Japan, donated by Finnair. Fly from Manchester to Tokyo, Nagoya or Osaka. See Terms and Conditions.
Venue: Midland Hotel, Peter Street, Manchester M60 2DS
Japan Day is supported by:
Pictures and Poetry on the Banks of the Sumida: Boating up the River in the Edo Period
Saturday 5 February 2011 2:00 p.m. Venue to be announced
This informative and entertaining talk will be given by Timon Screech, Professor at SOAS, University of 
London.
It will be of interest to History of Art students and those interested in the social history of Japan during the Edo period.
Timon Screech was born in Birmingham, UK, and received a BA (Hons.) in Oriental Studies (Japanese) at Oxford, before completing his Ph.D at Harvard in 1991. He also studied at the universities of Geneva and Gakushuin. He has taught the history of Japanese art at SOAS, University of London, since 1991, and in 2006 was elected to a chair in the History of Art. He is concurrently Permanent Visiting Professor at Tama Art University, Tokyo.
Screech is the author of some ten books on the visual culture of the Edo period. His PhD was published as The Lens Within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (CUP 1996) and is still in print in a second edition (Curzon, 2002). Perhaps his best-known work is Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (Reaktion, 1999; second, expanded edition, 2009). Most recently, he has introduced and edited the writings of two 18th-century travellers to Japan, as Japan Extolled and Decried: Carl Peter Thunberg and the Shogun’s Realm, 1775-1796 (Routledge, 2005), and Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac Titsingh and Japan, 1779-1822 (Routledge, 2006). His writings have been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Romanian.
What's On
London Netsuke Symposium
5 - 8 November 2010
The symposium will be held at Dartmouth House in Charles Street, Mayfair, home of the English Speaking Union. A buffet lunch will be provided daily except Monday by Leith's catering. There will have a full programme of lectures and workshops by familiar and less familiar speakers and hopefully some presentations that will provoke lively discussion and general participation. In the afternoons you will be able to browse the exhibitions of participating UK and international dealers.
Venue: Dartmouth House, 37 Charles Street, London, W1J 5ED
"Joy Change" by Judy Kendall
This is not a book of poems ‘about’ Japan. It is rather a book of poems of, inside, from Japan by an author deeply embedded in and engaged with its cultural complexities. Although Kendall registers her position as gaijin – ‘outside person’ – she does so with a subtle critique that never overstates difference. This allows the book, in its impressive formal variety, to become a dialogue between its Japanese side and its English side. The poems here explore the gamut of quotidian life – ‘perhaps I’ll make a curry today’ – and the networks of relational otherness – ‘my not-yet-friend’ – to reach a distilled spirituality which seems the very essence of Japan, embodied in the haiku sequence that elegantly threads its way through the book: ‘drifting / mountains shoulder the sky / blotches of pine.’ As another haiku points to the ‘many different roads’ of the Japanese character, the same can be said of Kendall’s rich account of a residence filled with both joy and change. Scott Thurston
Published by Cinnamon Press Amazon.co.uk
Film: Departures by Yojiro Takita
Now available on DVD
Departures (Okuribito) follows Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved and who is suddenly left without a job. Spotting a Help Wanted ad featuring the word “departures,” he is excited about the prospect of trying a new career in the travel industry. Daigo is hired on the spot, only later learning exactly what the job entails: the ceremonial “encoffination” of corpses prior to cremation. While his wife and others despise the job, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work, acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, between the departed and the family of the departed. Departures follows Daigo's profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy and meaning of life and living.
Study Tours to Japan
13th-22nd Oct 2010
Visit Akemi's web site for more information.
Japanese Food in Lymm
Japanese Food Specialists TK Trading set up shop in Lymm High School every other Saturday - see their web site for the schedule.
Venue: Lymm High School, Oughtrington Lane, Lymm, Cheshire WA13 0RB
Japan Photos
Explore JapanPhotos.org.uk for a high resolution tour of Japan.
