A JAPANESE Centre was opened at the Pan-European University in Bratislava on September 29 to offer the study of Japanese to students, who will then be able to study at Japanese schools or work at Japanese firms in Slovakia and Japan. It will also provide scope for intercultural education and traditional as well as modern Japanese culture.
To achieve this goal, the Pan-European University signed a contract of cooperation with a university in Niigata, the TASR newswire reported.
Štefan Pecho, a Slovak Japanology tutor and co-founder of the Japanese Centre, said that Slovak universities need to reflect the rising internationalisation of labour markets.
In Japan, he sees one of the longest and most culturally rich national continuities in the world. A stay in the Japanese environment represents the best school of life for a person from western civilisation to develop their own intercultural maturity, he added.
“And if we also take into account the economic and science-technological position of Japan, we start to view the Japanese language in a different light,” Pecho said, as quoted by TASR.
Japanese Ambassador to Slovakia Akio Egawa considers the opening of the centre to be a historical milestone that will contribute to intensifying cooperation between Slovakia and Japan, and to the spread of Japanese education and language.
“We would like to show our great respect to those who enabled the establishment of this institute,” Egawa said, as quoted by TASR.
“Relations between Slovakia and Japan are very good in political and economic terms, and I believe that their quality hinges also on the fact that we feel a mutual need to understand and get to know each other better,” he added.
The Japanese ambassador also praised the fact that the number of students in Slovakia studying Japanese has grown by 40 percent and that 18 cooperation agreements are currently in effect between Slovak and Japanese schools.
