Events

Time and Location

June 13 at 6:00pm-7:30pm EDT
Online (YouTube)

About

The Japan Foundation, Toronto office organizes an online talk to explore how people in Japan used ceramics during the Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate ruled the archipelago and the samurai held political and military dominance, and the Meiji period, when the emperor was symbolically restored to power and modernization transformed the nation.

Using extant examples of ceramics from a variety of museum collections, the lecture will consider ceramics in plebian, everyday contexts, used for daily offerings at altars, for family meals, or for tea and sake drinking with friends. It will also discuss the use of ceramics in politically and economically significant encounters, such as gifts to a samurai lord, meetings between merchants and customers, tribute offerings to the Tokugawa shoguns, and diplomatic exchanges between the Meiji government and their global counterparts.

About the Speaker
Dr. Morgan Pitelka is the Bernard L. Herman Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with joint appointments in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of History. He is a historian of medieval and early modern Japan who focuses on material culture, environmental history, and urban history. His new project is an environmental and cultural history of early modern Kyoto. His most recent book, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2022) was named one of the ten best humanities books in Asian Studies by the International Convention of Asia Scholars and received the honorable mention for the John Whitney Hall Book Prize in Japanese Studies.

He is a member of the Japan Foundation American Advisory Committee.

This talk is presented to complement our ongoing exhibition titled “From Edo to Meiji: Transformation of Japanese Ceramics”.

YouTube livestream link to be provided at a later date.

For more information about the exhibit, please visit: Japanese Ceramics

This event is organized by The Japan Foundation, Toronto.