Chiune Sugihara’s reading room in the Centre for Asian Studies is being constantly expanded with the help of various projects financed by East Asia foundations. The most recent project was carried out with a contribution of Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (Taiwan). During the 3 years a huge amount of books, worth approximately 7000 € were bought and added to Chiune Sugihara’s reading room’s collection. This addition greatly contributed to expansion of materials for Chinese and Taiwanese studies. The books from final stage of this project have recently arrived to Ch. Sugihara reading room. They will soon be catalogued and available to all the visitors. At the end of the Autumn the last batch of books should arrive to CAS library and with that the project will be considered completed.










During the summer CAS partners’ network expanded a bit more – the agreement was signed with another partner in Taiwan, I-Shou University (ISU). This adds up to a total of 3 partner universities in Taiwan that VMU has bilateral agreements with.
On the summer of 2014 Aurelijus Zykas,researcher and the head of Centre for Asian Studies , went on an internship in Tokyo that was funded by Japan Foundation. During the internship Dr. Zykas collected newest material related to Japan’s public diplomacy and it’s changes during the last 5 years, analysed strategic documents, interviewed the officials from the Japan’s government. 
On June 27th the summer vacation has started to the academic staff of the Centre for Asian Studies. From that day until July 25th CAS will be open 9:00-16:00. During that time, the library will be available to everyone. From July 25th to August 25th our centre will be completely closed. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
We would like to invite proposals for the upcoming issue of a semi-annual open access blind peer review journal ‘International Journal of Area Studies‘ (IJAS) to be published in March, 2015. This issue will concentrate on East Asia region.
On June 16th, the first official Confucius Institute Teaching Point was opened in VMU. The Director of Confucius Institute prof. Dongui Zhang, VMU Vice-rector Prof. Auksė Balčytienė, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities Prof. Ineta Dabašinskienė, the Head of the Department of Culture Studies and Ethnology Dr. Laimutė Anglickienė and the Head of the Centre for Asian Studies Dr. Aurelijus Zykas were presenting at this important event.






