About the Conference

God’s Playground, a book by Norman Davies, first published in 1979, is so far the most popular and extensive monograph on history of Poland published in English. The eponymous playground stands for an agora, a stage, where all kinds of worldly affairs take place, engaging both the actors and the audience.

Celebrating the decennial of Japanese studies in Torun, the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus, the patron of the University, the conference is an attempt to create such playground, a space inspiring intellectual curiosity which yields scholarly cooperation and competition while tackling the subject of Japan’s fictions and reality, following the example of Copernicus’s paradigm shift contribution to development of science.

The organizers invite both Japanologists and researches from other fields working on Japan concerning topics and encourage papers relating to the conference theme: Japan – Fictions and Reality, following the conviction that the image of Japan is blurred by myths and misconceptions, and that their identification is necessary for making this image more clear and closer to reality.