Arata Isozaki, winner of the Pritzker Prize in 2019, stated in his acceptance speech that “Change” is his artistic credo. This article discusses the architect’s artistic attitudes in a career that is characterized by a consistent desire to challenge the world with his sophisticated architecture, artistic spirit and wit.

The article is devoted to the world’s first popularizers of the nō theatre outside Japan, with particular emphasis on the pioneering achievements of two Americans, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853–1908) and Ezra Pou nd (1885–1972), as well as the next generation representing various European countries. The latter included, among others, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Jacques Copeau (1879–1949), Charles Dullin (1885–1949), Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–1994), Gabriel Cousin (1918–2010), Edward Gordon Craig ( 1872–1966), Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who, influenced by the fascination with the nō theatre, were the first to reform, in a more or less visible way, the traditional, realistic European theatre.

The aim of this article is to present the relation between Christianity and Japanese culture. The problem here is not the concept of Christianity, but the concept of Japanese culture. In the Japanese thought is hard to distinguish between religion and philosophy. Philosophy, religion and culture are synonyms for “philosophy of life”. The original Japanese philosophy is Shinto and received from China Confucianism, and Buddhism. In the case of Christianity we have to consider Catholic Church and Orthodox Church. Special attention we have to pay to the process of inculturation of the Good news in the Japanese soil.

We talk with Prof. Andrzej Jajszczyk about his encounter with the historic ethnic group of Slovincians, his friendship with film director Andrzej Wajda, and his fascination with Japanese culture.

The current study is dedicated to measuring vowel temporal acoustics (duration, durational difference, and durational ratio) in the medial position of mostly CVCVCV polysyllabic words in Arabic and Japanese, avoiding the asymmetries in vowel position, syllable structure, and coda consonant quantity (singleton versus geminate) observed in previous experiments. Twenty-nine (16 Arabic and 13 Japanese) participants were asked to use a carrier sentence to produce 60 polysyllabic (mainly CVCVCV) items that contrasted in vowel quantity (short versus long) and vowel quality (/a/, /i/, and /u/) at a normal speech rate. The results show that while short and long vowels are durationally distinct within a language, Japanese vowels are clearly longer than Arabic vowels, although the durational difference remains approximately the same between the two languages. The durational ratio of short-to-long vowel presents a new pattern that contrasts with that reported in earlier research. Specifically, Japanese long vowels in the medial position of polysyllabic words are twice as long as their short counterparts, while Arabic long vowels are more than twice as long. This shows that both vowel position and syllable structure must be considered when measuring vowel temporal acoustics or when structuring stimuli for perception experiments.

The Serbian Language as Viewed by the East and the West: Synchrony, Diachrony, and Typology, edited by Ljudmila Popović and Motoki Nomachi is a collection of papers which were originally presented at the symposium on February 5th in 2014 at the Slavic-Euroasian Research Center of Hokkaido University. The authors analyze various examples of language contact and linguistic change in the history of the Serbian language with special attention to the cultural opposition of the East and West. In the last section, the results of contrastive analyses of Serbian and Japanese, Russian as well as other Slavic languages are presented. With regard to the topics discussed and high quality of all the studies (most authors are renowned linguists) the volume has a big value for contemporary Slavic linguistics.

This article tries to answer the question about the way the losses in the Battle of Tsushima, one of the key battles of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) were reported in contemporary Polish press, in particular Warsaw's leading daily newspaper Kurier Warszawski. The analysis, divided into sections, juxtaposes the actual press coverage with the matching accounts in the literature on the subject. As the number of items referring to the Tsuishma story is very large, only some have been included in the study, which concludes with a summary of the research results.