2025

January  • February • March
Japanese textile
Below is a listing of JASA-sponsored events, including webinars, in-person lectures and tours. If you like, you can print out this schedule using the print function of your browser. You may also refer to the Newsletter’s listing of JASA events. If you wish to receive reminders by E mail, please contact our Membership Coordinator.  For all regional events, we would appreciate advance notice of attendance. Please contact the Membership Coordinator.

March

Friday, March 14, 5 p.m. ET

Japan Society
333 E. 47th St.
New York, NY

Annual meeting, with lecture

Preceding  our JASA members’ annual meeting, Dr. Matthew McKelway, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Art History and Archeology at Columbia University will give a talk on “Birds, Diplomacy and Painting in 16th-Century Japan.” This event requires sign-up in advance. Please click here to register if you are attending in person: March 14 Annual Meeting in person registration. Please click here to register if you will be attending via Zoom: March 14 Annual Meeting via Zoom.

February

Monday, February 24, 5 p.m. ET

Live Zoom Webinar

Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre Through Foreign Eyes

Samuel Leiter, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theater at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of CUNY, will speak on his latest book, Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes. This publication is an annotated collection of English-language documents by foreigners writing about Japan’s kabuki theater in the half-century after the country was opened to the West in 1853. Using memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters and reference books, Meiji Kabuki contains all significant writing about kabuki by foreigners—resident or transient—during the Meiji period (1868–1912), well before the first substantial non-Japanese book on the subject was published.

Meiji Kabuki provides insights into how Western visitors—missionaries, scholars, diplomats, military officers, adventurers, globetrotters and even a precocious teenage girl—responded to a theater that had been almost entirely hidden from the world at large for over two centuries. The book reveals prejudices and misunderstandings, but also demonstrates the power of great theater to bring together people of differing cultural backgrounds despite the barriers of language, artistic convention and the very practice of theater-going.

Professor Leiter has published 31 books on Japanese theater, New York theater, Shakespeare and the great stage directors. Meiji Kabuki: Japanese Theatre through Foreign Eyes (2022) was selected as a Choice Reviews Academic Book of the Year. His most recent book is Brooklyn Takes the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Theater in the City of Churches (2024). He served as editor-in-chief of Asian Theatre Journal from 1992 to 2004. Among his many books on Japanese theater are Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre (2014); Kabuki at the Crossroads: Years of Crisis, 1952-1965 (2013); Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theatre in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (2009); and the four-volume Kabuki Plays on Stag.

Click here to register for the Zoom event: February 24 webinar. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

January

Monday, January 20, 5 p.m. EST

Live Zoom Webinar

Striking Objects: Contemporary Japanese Metalwork from the Shirley Z. Johnson Collection

Contemporary Japanese metalworking breathes life into traditional methods that have been passed down and practiced over generations. The history of Japanese metalworking evolved over two millennia, through cross-cultural exchange and internal innovation. Techniques unique to Japan flourished as metalworkers created armaments, Buddhist ornaments, and vessels used in Japanese tea practice.

In this talk, Dr. Sol Jung will examine examples of contemporary Japanese metalwork currently on view in the exhibition Striking Objects: Contemporary Japanese Metalwork. The exhibition (on view until January 11, 2026) focuses on the technique of tankin (鍛金; hammering) through metalworks that came to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art as part of the bequest of the late Shirley Z. Johnson (1940–2021), a distinguished lawyer, philanthropist, and former board member of the NMAA. Shirley Z. Johnson’s passion for contemporary Japanese metalwork and her visionary gift have made the National Museum of Asian Art home to the largest collection of such works in the United States.

Sol Jung joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in 2021 as the inaugural Shirley Z. Johnson assistant curator of Japanese art. She oversees the museum’s collection of prehistoric to contemporary Japanese ceramics, lacquerware, metalwork and textiles. Jung received her B.A. with distinction in History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University.

Click here to register for the Zoom event: January 20 webinar. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

Past JASA programs