The EUROCALL 2014 organisers and participants were greatly saddened by the sudden death of EUROCALL participant Professor Kenji Kitao at his Groningen hotel on the evening of Wednesday 20 August 2014. If you have attended a EUROCALL conference in the past, you are familiar with Kenji's face, even if you have never directly spoken to him. He and his wife Kathi were inveterate conference-goers; in fact, they also participated in the AILA conference in Sydney just the week before the EUROCALL conference in Groningen. Together, they were due to present two papers at EUROCALL 2014: Responses to Apologies in English: A Corpus-Based Study and Japanese Speakers’ Apologies in English: A Study Based on a Spoken Corpus.

Kenji first joined Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, in 1978. He was a member of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT), and was program chair from 1979 to 1981, after which he became vice-president. He was a prolific author and a very early adopter of web technology. According to his official website, he published 150 papers and articles after 1990, and there were many before then. His interests were wide: corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, extensive reading, and comparative culture, to name but a few. He also published six textbooks dealing with some of these topics. Kenji made unique contributions to the field, which will continue to be used and appreciated in the future.

Kenji and his contributions will be greatly missed by the CALL community.