HFF In Conversation With…Rosina Buckland, Curator of the Japanese Collections at the British Museum and Lead Curator of Samurai Exhibition

Japan occupies a central place in Rosina Buckland’s life: “Japan has always been there. Even before I was born, my parents lived in Japan teaching English in the 1960s, and after leaving, my mother kept up extensive correspondence. Growing up, our house was filled with Japanese imagery and objects.” At school, Rosina excelled in languages, studying French, German, Latin, and Spanish for her A-Levels. Keen to have a further challenge, she committed to learning Japanese.

She pursued her new passion and read Japanese Studies at the University of Cambridge, and spent summers and a university term in Japan, immersed in the culture and language. After graduating, Rosina moved to Osaka, where she worked as a translator of machine operation manuals. The work itself was less than challenging at times, but at weekends she was able to develop a new interest: “In my spare time, I took advantage of the rich range of exhibitions and museums around Osaka, did some research on the changing geography of the city, and enjoyed self-guided architectural walking tours.”

Rosina decided to pursue a master’s in Japanese Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. While studying at SOAS, Rosina volunteered in the Japanese section of the British Museum and drew on the collection for her dissertation research. After graduating, she had a chance to work at the museum for a year, where she was greatly inspired by the curator, Tim Clark, who encouraged her to pursue a PhD. She applied and was offered a full scholarship at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), New York University: “The American system is comprehensive. I had to complete four years of classes and exams, followed by my dissertation research. Our courses focused on four geographical areas, so not just Japanese art. The point was to learn different methodological approaches rather than memorising facts.”

Following her time in New York, Rosina received a grant from the Japan Foundation to undertake research at the Tokyo University of the Arts. For two years, she visited museums and private collections across Japan gathering material. In 2006, she was invited to return to the British Museum to work on a project with the Japanese painting collection. “My NYU advisor told me not to take the short-term job, but I said, ‘It’s the British Museum!’” She went on to work with the collection for four years before taking roles at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. However, in April 2020, just as the pandemic began, Tim Clark announced his retirement, and Rosina returned to the British Museum as Curator of the Japanese Collections.

The idea for an exhibition on samurai dates back to her time in Edinburgh. As she explains: “I was developing the idea while at different museums. The word ‘samurai’ is instantly recognisable yet widely misunderstood. I knew the British Museum was the place to realise it because of the strength of its collections and its international reputation.” Rosina frames the core idea of Samurai as: “The balance of literary and military virtues, drawn from a Chinese Neo-Confucian ideal of ‘bun and bu’ where rulers must combine administrative, cultural and martial capacities. Samurai is not what a lot of people think, it is absolutely not just about the armour and the swords.”

When asked to select a favorite exhibit, Rosina selects three. The first is the portrait of a teenaged Christian samurai diplomat painted by Domenico Tintoretto: “The painting is an astonishing image of a young, adventurous samurai in a European ruff that unsettles the standard image of a samurai.” The second is a hanging scroll of a sleeping cat under a peony bush, painted by the wife of a samurai lord around 1800, which she notes: “reflects the cultural lives of samurai during the long Tokugawa peace from 1615 to 1868, when many men worked as administrators and both men and women pursued poetry, painting, and natural history studies.” The third is a commissioned work by contemporary Japanese artist Noguchi Tetsuya: “who has reimagined a samurai figure with a playful nod to the British Museum, taking inspiration from the museum shop’s best-selling rubber ducks, which include a samurai duck.”

Rosina acknowledges that large-scale international exhibitions such as Samurai would not be possible without philanthropic support: “Public institutions in the UK are losing funding, so museums increasingly rely on foundations and corporations to achieve ambitious exhibitions. As a free entry museum, the Museum depends on a careful balance between welcoming millions of visitors at no cost and persuading some of them to pay for special exhibitions that may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, such as seeing Darth Vader’s costume in the Samurai show.”

Samurai at the British Museum is supported by the Huo Family Foundation with a grant of £325,000 and runs from 3 February to 4 May 2026.