Iskra is Polish for a spark: the small flash that starts something.
Poland has many of those. Chopin shines brightest – but I want to show you the ones that are talked about less.
At the end of this journey I'll make you a concrete offer: Polish sensibility for your product on its way to the European market.
He was born in Żelazowa Wola in Mazovia and grew up in Warsaw. Every five years that city hosts the International Chopin Piano Competition – and Japanese pianists have reached its podium in two competitions running.
Tokyo to Warsaw is a direct flight. The rest of the way we can walk together.
It isn't always obvious they were made in Poland. Three examples, each with a video from an official channel.
The tower block in the background stands on Piotrkowska Street in Łódź and dates from the 1970s. Since 2021 Geralt has been looking down from it – a mural by Jakub Rebelka.
The saga of Geralt of Rivia, a monster hunter, grew out of Andrzej Sapkowski's short stories. The Warsaw studio CD PROJEKT RED turned it into a game played all over the world.
A ten-episode anime set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. The Polish studio made it together with Japan's Studio Trigger, and Netflix released it in 2022.
Kraków's Bloober Team rebuilt Konami's classic horror game from 2001. Akira Yamaoka composed the music once again.
Iskra is not affiliated with CD PROJEKT RED, Studio Trigger, Netflix, Bloober Team or Konami. The frames come from official videos on YouTube and illustrate the text about each title. Names and rights belong to their owners.
Half a world apart – and sharing more than you would expect.
Japan recognises independent Poland. Our diplomatic relations are counted from that year.
The Japanese Red Cross takes in 765 Polish children from Siberia and helps them get home. Poland still remembers it.
Manggha opens in Kraków – a centre of Japanese art built from Andrzej Wajda's Kyoto Prize, donations from thousands of Japanese people and a design by Arata Isozaki. The same year, under an agreement between our governments, a school opens in Warsaw that today is the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology.
After the Kobe earthquake Poles invite groups of 30 affected children. In 1996 they are welcomed by the former Siberian children.
Poland and Japan become comprehensive strategic partners.
Around 1900 Poland had Young Poland: fog, night and landscape. In 2025 Kyoto hosted its first large exhibition in Japan. After the war something entirely different arrives – concrete, cables and neon. I put them side by side, because the way I design grows out of that tension.
A landscape in fog and a clear structure.
Iskra grows out of that tension.
We admire the form of these post-war buildings – not the political system that produced them.
Most of Poland lives in small towns and villages: at stations where the train stops for a minute, in the fields, in the morning fog above a river. That is where I am from – Iskra works from just outside Skierniewice.
The Polish countryside reached the screen as well – in oil paintings.
The most famous novel about the Polish countryside is “The Peasants” by Władysław Reymont – it won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924. In 2023 the makers of “Loving Vincent” turned it into a hand-painted film. The video plays “Miłosny opętaniec”, the music from the scene where Antek and Jagna dance.
Iskra is not affiliated with the film's or the music's creators. All rights belong to their owners.
All of this can work for you. I design and build websites that take Japanese companies into the European market – from scratch, without templates.
A Japanese website is made for a Japanese reader: complete, precise, ready to be compared. That is a different route to simplicity, not the absence of it.
A reader in Europe looks for one thought first and the details afterwards. So I don't correct your site – I rebuild it for a new reader while keeping what matters most in it.
The same company, two websites. On the left a layout that works for a reader in Japan, on the right one rebuilt for a reader in Europe.
My name is Przemysław Wojenka and I run Iskra. I design and build every site myself – from the first sketch to launch.
I studied philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Warsaw. Cognitive science taught me where people look and where they get lost. Philosophy taught me that every thing needs the word that fits it. I also taught philosophy and logic at the secondary school in Skierniewice that I attended myself.
I know the games world from the stage side. For several years I commentated League of Legends matches for ESL and hosted exhibitor stages at Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice, Poznań Game Arena and Warsaw Games Week.
For almost four years I was a developer at the Warsaw agency Cape Morris, working on projects for brands such as Wiśniowski, Tefal, Krups, Magnum, Tullamore and Bayer. Today I work directly with companies. The person you talk to is the person who builds your site.
In September 2026 I came to Tokyo with the economic mission of the Łódź region. I want this to be the beginning of a long collaboration, not a one-off visit.
“Give the right word to the right thing.”
Public-domain paintings and freely licensed photographs from Wikimedia Commons. For architecture and neons we also credit their creators.
Frames from official videos on YouTube appear only next to the text about that work, as a quotation. The videos play from YouTube.
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