It is taken for granted in the studies of Japanese phonology and prosody that standard Tokyo Japanese and other dialects of the language have 'pitch-accent systems.' However, the notion of pitch accent as a typological category is not widely accepted in general linguistics or in typological studies of language. In fact, quite a few phonologists have expressed their concerns about the idea that 'pitch accent' constitutes an independent prosodic category. Challenging this new criticism in phonological studies, this article reports on the output of the ISAT 2010, an international conference that this project organized in 2010, and thereby explores how the prosodic studies of Japanese dialects can shed new light on the development of general linguistics and typological studies of language.