Kenji Yoshida is the sixth director of the National Museum of Ethnology. He graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Kyoto University and then completed a doctoral program at the Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University, where he obtained a PhD. After working as a teaching assistant at Osaka University and as a lecturer at the National Museum of Ethnology, he was appointed to his current position in April 2017. Along with rituals and masks, especially in Africa, he researches representations of culture in museums. He is the author of several books, including Searching the World of Masks: Back and Forth Between Africa and Museums, The “Discovery” of Culture, and In Search of the Origins of Religion.

Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1978, Masashi Kohara is a filmmaker and curator. His documentary films include The Man Who Became a Camera (2003) about photographer Takuma Nakahira. In 2005, he was awarded the 10th Koen Shigemori Photography Critic Award for A Note on Takuma Nakahira, and in 2016, he received the 24th Photographic Society of Japan’s Scholastic Achievement Award. As a researcher at the Izu Photo Museum, Kohara organized Nobuyoshi Araki Photobook Exhibition: Ararchy, Manabu Miyazaki: The Pencil of Nature, Tazuko Masuyama: Until Everything Becomes a Photograph and Ichiro Kojima: To the North, From the North among others. He is the author or co-author of Suspending Time: Life –Photography– Death, Visions of Fuji: An Incurable Malady of Modern Japan, War and Postwar: Images of Japan As Seen in Hodo Shashin (Reportage Photography) and Detective in the Forest among others.