Creative Collaborations: Salons and Networks in Kyoto and Osaka 1780-1880

This research project has two parallel objectives. One is a collaborative scholarly enterprise among researchers and institutions in Japan and the UK, which aims to analyse the cultural and social impact of art and literary salons and collective creation of art (gassaku) in early modern Japan, in particular of the Kyoto-Osaka region during 1780-1880. The second objective is pragmatic in this era under the profound impact of Covid-19, which is to explore how efficiently and productively we could conduct a Japan-UK research project by keeping physical traveling between the two countries to a bare minimum. In other words, in pursuit of academic research, we will at the same time examine the effectiveness of using digital online technologies for remote collaboration, taking our research project as a case study.

The core team members are from the Art Research Center (ARC) of Ritsumeikan University, Kansai University (KU), the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the British Museum (BM) and SOAS University of London. The group has been formed through previous academic collaborations funded by UK's ESRC Networking Grant (2019) and grants from Ritsumeikan and Kansai Universities.

Based on extant primary materials, it is evident that the collaborative creation of art was common in late Edo-period Japan. Such artworks typically took the forms of paintings, surimono (privately commissioned colour woodblock prints with poems and images) and illustrated books. They were often produced in the context of cultural salons, which were open to people of all social levels, professionals and amateurs, men and women. In contrast to the celebrated artists and authors, however, the identities of most of these individual participants are unacknowledged and remain unknown. Our research will investigate the membership and scale of salon groups and networks through the analysis of a large corpus of over 5,000 primary materials held at the BM, KU and the Paul Berry private collection in Kyoto, the data of which will be input into an ARC database.

The research has three main stages: 1) Digitisation; 2) text transcription and input; and 3) data analysis using manual and digital methods. To enable the team to access the corpus objects remotely, the project will digitise them, and the members will transcribe the texts in the objects. The image and text data on the ARC database will allow the members online access for the analysis stage. To overcome the challenge of the large corpus, the project has assembled a team of core and associate researchers in Japan and the UK, who are committed to data input and analysis. We will hold online workshops and symposia to discuss individual members' research based on the evidence found during the digitisation and transcription process. This data will complement the ARC's existing system of databases on Japanese material culture.

Through analyses and online study workshops, we will prepare for dissemination of our results, consisting of a) a bilingual edited volume with contributions from the project members in line with the project's aims; b) an exhibition at the BM in 2024 and an accompanying catalogue aimed at a wider audience; and c) public launch of the database of the project's corpus objects hosted by the ARC, all of which will form a lasting contribution to Japanese studies worldwide. Finally, d) we will produce a report of our assessment of remote international collaboration strategies.