On June 3, the Josai University Educational Corporation formed an academic exchange agreement with the University of Warsaw in Poland.

As part of Josai’s Mid-term Target of strengthening international exchange to cultivate global human resources, our university has formed academic exchange programs with a number of institutions worldwide, with a particular emphasis on universities in Central Europe and other parts of Asia. Josai has in fact already formed exchange agreements with the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology and the University of Lodz. Katsuhiko Namikawa, director of the Management Planning Office, and Maria Shiguemi Ichiyama, director of the Center for Language Education at Josai International University, visited the University of Warsaw on Chancellor Noriko Mizuta’s behalf to finalize the exchange agreement. With this visit, the representatives met with vice-president of research and exchange, Alojzy Z. Nowak and they completed the academic exchange agreement, with both parties pledging to devote full attention for the success of the partnership.

The University of Warsaw is a multi-disciplinary university founded in 1816 and counts the composer Frédéric François Chopin as one of its graduates. At present, the university offers over 100 courses in fields from social science to natural science and has a total enrollment of 61,300. While Poland is known as the first European nation to engage in research of Japanese language and culture, the University of Warsaw served as a central institution in establishing this field by offering the first course on the Japanese language in 1919. Even today, their department of Japanese and Korean studies in the East Asian Studies Center stands at the center of the Japanese research field in Europe.

With this academic exchange agreement in place, Josai is planning to accept foreign students at University of Warsaw. In addition, the two universities will discuss cooperative projects in a variety of areas, including joint education and research programs and faculty and student exchange.