Boğaziçi University in Istanbul has the world’s most beautiful campus. In this formerly American University with generous gardens and buildings in New England style at the edge of Europe, you can give lectures looking over the Bosphorus and into Asia. No place can be more symbolic of the 32nd conference of the Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS), in which we try to discuss and question our views on Japanese society from multiple perspectives. With almost hundred participants, the JAWS conference was the first Japan-related conference of this dimension in Turkey, and we are very proud to be given this honour, even more so as most proponents of Japanese Studies in Turkey study language, literature and history, not society.