These papers explore the debate over new directions in Japanese studies.

I: Literature & Visual Arts; 1: Abe Kobo's Internationalism; 2: Rethinking Soseki's Mon; 3: The Melancholy Flagellant or the Responsibility of Literature: Takahashi Kazumi and his Project for a Revolution; 4: Abe Kobo's 'Ark Sakura'; 5: The Socialization of Literature: The Idea and Prototypes of the Mid-Meiji Social Novel; 6: Japanese Architecture Today; 7: Problems of Attribution in Japanese Art: The Case of Hokusai's Paintings; 8: The Impact of Geographical Conditions on Japanese Creativity; 9: Visions of Japan through Modern Films; 10: Can Japanese Literature be Translated?; 11: A Sense of Tragedy: Attitudes in Europe and Japan; 12: Once More: On Problems of Literary Historiography; 13: The Problem of Time in Japanese Literature; 14: Chaos or Coherence?; 15: Unheeded Voices; Winked-at Lives; 16: Y?gen: Aesthetics and its Implications in Global Communication; 17: Recognizing and Translating Covert Irony in Japanese Literature; 18: The Eccentric Tree: Kami and Gaki in the Botanical Imagination of the Medieval Japanese; 19: A European Eye on Japanese Arts and a Japanese Response to 'Japonisme' (1860-1920) 1; 20: Communitas, Equality, Anti-structure: Reading Buson's Painting and Bash?'s Prose Poem, 'The Broken Hammer'; 21: Japanese Diaries; 22: Towards a Definition of Tama; 23: 'Sleeves' and 'Tears' in Classical Japanese Poetry and Lyrical Prose; 24: From Insularity to Internationalism: Kabuki in the Twenty-first Century; 25: The Shingeki Movement Until 1930: its Experience in Western Approach; II: Linguistics; 26: Rethinking Translation: The Role of Word Systems in the Translatability of Texts into Japanese; 27: The Changing Language in a Changing Society; 28: How to Carry Something on Your Head in Japanese; 29: On the Necessity of Contrastive Analysis of Japanese and Minor Languages of Europe; 30: Japanese Relative Clause Strategies; 31: A Contemporary View of the Japanese Verbal System; 32: Synchronic and Diachronic Approaches to the noda Sentence; 33: Intersection of Tense and Aspect in the Dynamic Predicate in Japanese; 34: On Predicate Nominals in Japanese