In the evening of 7 May 2021 (EST), over one hundred scholars around the world–many of them East Asian–gathered in cyberspace to attend the Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture, delivered by Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama of Harvard University, a long-time supporter of EASTS. The theme of the lecture was premodern Edo (now Tokyo) as seen through Japanese prints. Professor Kuriyama’s intellectual charm turned these everyday images into vivid scenes from which emerged a new perspective on everyday life in the nineteenth-century capital, while “happy, ordinary places” such as crowded markets and busy commercial streets were transformed into inspirational tools for a modern audience reflecting on the regular life they had missed so much during the Covid pandemic. As the speaker concluded, “these prints prompt us, ultimately, to reflect anew not only on the imagination of everyday life in late Edo Japan but also on our own horizons of happiness.”
