On Friday, April 17, 2026, in Room 109 of Building 1 on the Komaba Campus, we held the memorable First Special Lecture in the Society for the Studies of Nation Issues series "Thinking About Ethnic and National Questions": "An Introduction to the Kurdish Question: On an Ignored People and Their Agency." We would like once again to thank everyone who attended and everyone who helped run the event.

Our speaker was Mr. Vakkas Çolak, President of the Japan Kurdish Culture Association and Lecturer at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. From a position that combines the perspective of a researcher with that of a leader of the Kurdish community living in Japan, he spoke from many angles about the past, present, and future of the Kurds.

What was especially striking throughout the lecture and the Q&A was how the discussion kept returning to the very phrase "the Kurdish question." Is it really appropriate to call it a "question" (or "problem") in the first place? By speaking of it as a "problem," do we not make the people directly concerned harder to see? And why do the Kurds place language, rather than a state, at the core of their identity? These questions went beyond the single case of the Kurds and cut straight to the very heart of nationalism.

As the Society for the Studies of Nation Issues, we hope to continue holding special lectures as places to open up such questions and think about them together. We are already preparing the next event, the Second Special Lecture, "Outlaws of the Frontier: Southeast Asia's Scam Zones Today," to be held on Sunday, May 17, as a special event of the 99th May Festival. Please see the lecture page for details.

We sincerely ask for your continued participation and support.