The growing popularity of things Japanese in Poland is rooted in a curiosity its people have had about Japan since the late 19th century, when Poland was a divided country ruled by neighboring powers, Polish Ambassador to Japan Maria Rodowicz said in Tokyo this week.

Rodowicz said she would like the Japanese people to know more about Poland and to be able to describe it not as just another "former communist bloc nation" from the Cold War, but as a country with a rich multicultural and multiracial history.

Twenty years after becoming a democracy, Poland today is a member of the European Union with a "new generation of 20-year-old Poles who completely don't have a memory of any other system but the system in which they live now," the ambassador said.