1st Session
Imperial Princess Akiko of Mikasa
Her Imperial Highness Akiko of Mikasa is the elder daughter of Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, born in 1981. After her education at Gakushuin University (Tokyo), she further studied Japanese art history at Merton College, University of Oxford. In 2010, she was conferred with a D.Phil. degree from the same university for her thesis on the Japanese artworks collected in foreign countries. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto) for its global COE program, Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures, where she presently holds a post of visiting researcher at the Kinugasa Research Organization. She is also an art researcher for the Jisho-ji Temple Workshop in Kyoto. Her current engagements include research on Japanese art collections and history of cultural exchanges, as well as the promotion of Japanese culture among younger generations in Japan through an association Shinyusha, inaugurated by Her Imperial Highness herself.
2nd Session
Masatomo Kawai
Yukio Lippit
Kazumi Murose
Tokugo Uchida
3rd Session
Ryoji Noyori
Born in 1938. Noyori is a chemist, who entered his career in science inspired by a physicist, Professor Hideki Yukawa. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for his study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations. Following his graduation from the Kyoto University, he held academic and research posts at the Nagoya University and Harvard University before becoming a professor at the Nagoya University in 1972. Presently, he remains at the same university as Special Professor. He served as president of RIKEN from 2003 to 2015. At the end of this period, he accepted a post as Director-General at the Center for Research and Development Strategy under Japan Science and Technology Agency, where he has been made an Honorary Director-General since 2024. His accolades include the Japan Academy Prize (1995), Order of Culture (2000), Wolf Prize and Nobel Prize in Chemistry (both 2001).
Seiichi Kondo
Born in 1946. Following his graduation from the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of Tokyo, Kondo joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1972. He served as minister in the Embassy of Japan to the USA, Deputy Director-General of the OECD, and Director-General of the Public Diplomacy Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before being appointed as Ambassador Delegate to UNESCO, Ambassador of Japan to Denmark, and Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Today, he resides as director at the Kondo Institute for Culture and Diplomacy. Kondo also holds offices as President of the Professional Institute of International Fashion, Chief-Director of TAKUMI-Art du Japon, President of the Nihonbuyo Association, and Director-General of the Jin-Bun-Chi Forum. He was awarded the French Legion d’ Honneur (Chevallier) in 2006 and decorated with the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star in 2016. He also received the Japan Academia Award (International category) in 2015 and Information and Culture Award (International arts category) in 2017.
4th Session
Yukio Lippit
Yukio Lippit has been a member of the History of Art and Architecture Department, Harvard University since 2003, having attained his degrees in literature at Harvard in 1993, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 1998 and 2003, respectively. He also affiliated with Centre Parisien d’ Études Critiques between 1993 and 1994, as well as with the University of Tokyo between 1998 and 2000 as a visiting scholar. He spent a year between 2002 and 2003 as Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., followed by a year for the Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2004 to 2005. He has taught as a visiting professor at various universities, including the University of Tokyo, Heidelberg University (Germany), University of Campinas (Brazil), Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), and the University of Melbourne (Australia).
Monika Bincsik
Bincsik is a Diane and Arthur Abbey Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She conducted research on Japanese lacquer art and decorative art history at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where she successfully completed her Ph.D. work at the university’s Art Research Center. Having pursued a postdoctoral fellowship and visiting researcher opportunity at Ritsumeikan, she joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the USA. She curated a number of exhibitions, including “Discovering Japanese Art: American Collectors and the Met” in 2015, “Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection” in 2017, “Kyoto: Capital of Artistic Imagination” in 2019, and “Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection” in 2022. Her outstanding work has garnered her the 2024 Marica Vilcek Prize in Art History. She has written extensively on Japanese decorative art and collections of Japanese art, her most recent publications including Kimono Style: Edo Traditions to Modern Design (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2022) and a chapter on Japanese decorative art in The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2019).