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.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) is by far the best-known Japanese artist, sometimes mentioned with Rembrandt and Picasso as one of the few artists to have created art with a truly global reach. The power of his work has long been apparent. He captivated the Japanese public in his lifetime, quickly caught the eye of Euro-American artists, and has continued to fascinate a global audience ever since. His Great Wave (c. 1831) is by some estimates now the most reproduced image in the world. Hokusai remains a puzzle, however, and the full scope of his work little known. Among the public, he is often seen as the archetypal representative of the ukiyo-e ('floating world') school, although this fails to capture the full range of his work. Among specialists, he is usually isolated as an 'eccentric', outside the conventional categories of Japanese art, even though there is a lack of consensus about the authentic body of his work. Neither perspective grasps the original, enduring, and universal power of Hokusai's pictorial imagination. To do so, this project will focus on his last three decades. The prints of Mount Fuji were not only evidence of his mastery of a startling range of styles, forms, and formats. They inaugurated an extraordinary series of images, some from the last months of his life, in which Hokusai continued to refine his communion with human, natural, and unseen worlds. In order to understand the power of this work, we will be asking: 1. How was Hokusai's art animated by his thought, notably his belief that painting and drawing were a means of transcending the limitations of the self? 2. How does Hokusai's mature style synthesize and redefine the artistic vocabularies of Japan, China, and Europe, which he had studied earlier in his career? 3. How can we identify Hokusai's own painted work, given the lack of consensus about criteria with which to establish authenticity? 4. How was Hokusai's work enabled by the social networks that linked him to collaborators and craftsmen, printers and publishers, pupils, patrons, and the public? These questions will provide the foundation for the next generation of scholarship and a transformed appreciation of Hokusai among the public. The results of the research will be disseminated through: a major exhibition and monograph at the British Museum in 2017, which will then travel to Japan; an international conference and edited research volume; and a pilot online resource, providing a space within which researchers and the public can explore and further our understanding of Hokusai's achievement. The project is lead by Timothy Clark of the British Museum, a specialist in Edo-period visual arts. He will be assisted by Angus Lockyer, a Japanese historian at SOAS, University of London, and Alfred Haft and Ryoko Matsuba, two specialists in Edo-period art at the British Museum and SOAS. The core project team will be advised by Roger Keyes, the leading specialist on Hokusai working in English, and ASANO Shugo, a Hokusai specialist and Director of Abeno Harukas Museum, Osaka, where the exhibition will travel after London. The Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, the leading database of ukiyo-e imagery in the world, will furnish digital support for the project. The project relies on international collaboration and will draw on a range of researchers in order to explore the interdisciplinary questions at its heart. Key institutional partners are Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Freer-Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée Guimet in Paris, and over ten leading museums in Japan, including the Tokyo National Museum. Among the key contributors to the project will be an advisory committee comprising Professors Henry Smith (Columbia University), Peter Kornicki (Cambridge), Robert Campbell (Tokyo) and KOBAYASHI Tadashi (Tokyo), Dr John Carpenter (Metropolitan Museum) and NAGATA Seiji (Tsuwano Katsushika Hokusai Museum).

Covid-19 has upset development progress and paradigms in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. Yet the pandemic also has created new opportunities to innovate, evaluate and redirect policy and practice across rural communities and customary livelihoods in these steppe nations. To address post-Covid-19 challenges, experienced Japanese and UK researchers will combine their expertise, shared experience and insights to explore, evaluate and inform inclusive and sustainable policy responses in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. As lower-middle income countries, the pandemic intersects with complex environmental and socio-economic factors impacting traditional rural mobile pastoralists and agro-pastoralist livelihoods which are centers for food production and cultural heritage. The project brings together eight Japanese universities with the University of Oxford, building on over 77 years of combined experience working in Mongolia and Central Asia. Original field research will center on rural livelihoods, governance and community engagement to understand the multi-scalar socio-economic and geographic dimensions of Covid-19 responses in rural areas. Challenges include citizen engagement and participation in decision-making, local government capacity, trade and markets, access and availability of information and public services, including health, restrictions on movement and financial support prioritising sustainable economic activity. By advancing a collaborative research agenda, our project aims to advance civic engagement, democratic participation, social well-being and an inclusive Covid recovery through evidence-based, collaborative and multi-stakeholder approaches and will empower researchers at every stage of their career through a comprehensive capacity building and skills development programme. Joint research will identify post-pandemic opportunities to address key issues, transition and improve rural livelihoods, governance and support services. Through fieldwork-based evidence and engagement activities, the project will seek to empower rural communities as they transition into post-Covid response. Strengthened communication (ICT) and markets, sustainable lives and movement and more resilient and equitable systems will be emphasised. This includes opportunities for women, respect for herding and farming, viable education and lifestyle opportunities to build inclusive and enduring rural societies.

Most structural materials are used as metallic alloys, often multi elemental. This is the case for certain steels or titanium alloys for which the alloying elements are rare and/or available in low concentrations in the Earth crust and sometimes difficult to refine. Indeed, the number of elements that humans can use is merely around one hundred. Moreover, that number is further limited due to scarcity or toxicity. There is a pressing need to open a path to the future with scientific technology, which makes possible to effectively utilize limited elements. This can perhaps be used to create materials for renewable societal infrastructure in severe resource conditions. In this context, structural materials are required to have superior mechanical characteristics while reducing the requirement for rare earth elements. In the framework of the present proposal, owing to the versatility of powder metallurgy (PM) routes, namely spark plasma sintering (SPS) and hot isostatic pressing (HIP), a new concept that combines severe plastic deformation (by high energy milling) and PM routes (SPS and HIP) will be used to develop and design harmonic microstructures. The harmonic structure will have a 3D network structure of continuously connected "shell" with ultrafine grains and a dispersive structure of coarse-grained "core". This makes them special and different compared to heterogeneous “nano-micro” bimodal microstructure usually produced via various metallurgical routes. The targeted materials are Ti-based: pure titanium (Ti), Ti-6-4 (Ti6Al4V) and ß-Ti (Ti-15-3-3 (Ti15V3Cr3Sn3Al) alloys (medical implants, aeronautic applications…). After processing by means of process encompassing PM routes (SPS and HIP) a combination of characterization techniques at both macroscopic (from quasi-static to impact loadings) and mesoscopic/microscopic (X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), in-situ XRD tensile tests and electron microscopy techniques) levels will be carried out to capture the elementary details of the deformation mechanisms and to provide the necessary input parameters into the predictive models for such complex harmonic structures. Indeed, numerical simulations and mechanical modeling will be proposed and will deal with damage nucleation and crack propagation that might result from deformation incompatibility between the fine-grained shell and the coarse-grained core. The models may help to capture the critical parameters and feedback the elaboration to improve the microstructure design. In addition to the full understanding and prediction of the macroscopic mechanical behavior, we intend to answer the following questions by the end of the project: • Are developed materials with harmonic microstructures more efficient in terms of mechanical properties than the same materials with conventional and/or bimodal microstructures? • Are pure Ti harmonic microstructures better than the Ti-6-4 or T-15-3-3 conventional alloys? • Will the expected high strength and high ductility properties allow making practical applications of structures that are light, compact and have superior reliability possible? • … If so, then we can save not only the rare and difficult to refine alloying elements but also costly thermo-mechanical treatments and machining used to transform them. This will contribute at some level to: • Resources and energy savings, • CO2 reduction, • Recyclability, • Uncovering new applications to provide society with the fruit of research results and contribute to the welfare of mankind. The knowledge resulting from this project will be likely to participate in the recent initiatives taken at national level for a renewal of metallurgy, from the point of view of fundamental research, technology transfer as well as the training of young scientists of all levels.

The proposed new network will generate interdisciplinary research collaboration and bring together mechatronics/robotics researches from the UK and Japan, to share experiences and formalise discussions for defining a common strategy for future R&D and collaborations at all level of research, teaching and technology transfer. Such a network is vital if the different communities in Japan and UK are to work together for mutual benefit. The network will also act as a knowledge base from the existing mechatronics/robotics community to create a new research community in human adaptive mechatronics able to address the many common challenges (e.g. Pollution / CO2 issue, Aging population issue, etc) in UK and Japan. In particular, the network will explore a number of key challenges: such as a) Investigating the modelling of a man-machine system that explicitly includes all necessary functions of humans as machine operators with sufficient accuracy; b) Implementation of human adaptive behaviour in autonomous systems; c) Application of human adaptive mechatronics to upgrade UK high-tech products; d) Development of human adaptive mechatronics into biomedical applications; e) Development of mathematics to model and analysis human adaptive mechatronic processes in productions.