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14 - Cultural Interactions between Japan and Russia: The Japanese Perspective
- Edited by Kazuhiko Togo, Shizuoka University, Japan, Dmitry Streltsov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
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- Book:
- Handbook of Japan-Russia Relations
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 02 January 2024, pp 255-268
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- Chapter
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Summary
Towards the end of Shogunate, Russia was recognized by Japanese as the worst threat to the nation and that image remains to this day. This, however, has not prevented Japanese from being strongly attached to, and receiving major inspiration from, Russian culture. The influence of Russian literature has been most remarkable, but the enthusiasm in Russian culture has been multifarious, found in the fields of theater, ballet, music, art, film, and so on. The Japanese admiration for Russian culture has remained active to this day. It never declined even in times of political/military/diplomatic conflicts such as the Russo-Japanese War, World War II, the Cold War, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This admiration has coexisted ambivalently with hostility toward Russia as a nation. The relationship of the Japanese with Russia has been highly ambiguous.
Introduction
Russia was among the Western powers that first attempted to approach Japan, which had been dormant in its isolation policy for two centuries. Commodore Perry’s rather threatening visit to the port town of Uraga in his fleet of kurofune (Black Ships) in 1853 is normally remembered as an incident that made Japan “wake up from the dream of peace,” but by a delay of a mere month Admiral E. Putyatin entered Nagasaki in his Pallada. Famously, I. Goncharov (1812–1891), the author of the 19th-century classic Oblomov was onboard Pallada as the secretary to the admiral. Together with Putiatin he landed on Japanese soil, was received by the bugyō (feudal magistrate) of Nagasaki and the ambassadors from Edo. Later he published Frigate Pallada to record his impressions from the trip which were neither objective nor fair. For instance, in the memoire he complains of the Japanese custom of serving tea without sugar.
Facing threatening visitors from the North, Japanese started to investigate Russia on their part. One of the major sources of information were accounts by castaways (returnees). The earliest recorded case of a castaway is that of Denbei from Osaka, who reached Kamchatka in 1695 and later taught Japanese at the command of Peter the Great in Moscow, never to return home. Another castaway, Gonza helped with the editing of a Russo-Japanese dictionary and a grammar book and taught at the School of Japanese founded in 1736 in St. Petersburg.
Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak
- April Alliston, Elizabeth Ammons, Jean Arnold, Nina Baym, Sandra L. Beckett, Peter G. Beidler, Roger A. Berger, Sandra Bermann, J.J. Wilson, Troy Boone, Alison Booth, Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan, Marie Borroff, Ihab Hassan, Ulrich Weisstein, Zack Bowen, Jill Campbell, Dan Campion, Jay Caplan, Maurice Charney, Beverly Lyon Clark, Robert A. Colby, Thomas C. Coleman III, Nicole Cooley, Richard Dellamora, Morris Dickstein, Terrell Dixon, Emory Elliott, Caryl Emerson, Ann W. Engar, Lars Engle, Kai Hammermeister, N. N. Feltes, Mary Anne Ferguson, Annie Finch, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Jerry Aline Flieger, Norman Friedman, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sandra M. Gilbert, Laurie Grobman, George Guida, Liselotte Gumpel, R. K. Gupta, Florence Howe, Cathy L. Jrade, Richard A. Kaye, Calhoun Winton, Murray Krieger, Robert Langbaum, Richard A. Lanham, Marilee Lindemann, Paul Michael Lützeler, Thomas J. Lynn, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Michelle A. Massé, Irving Massey, Georges May, Christian W. Hallstein, Gita May, Lucy McDiarmid, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Koritha Mitchell, Robin Smiles, Kenyatta Albeny, George Monteiro, Joel Myerson, Alan Nadel, Ashton Nichols, Jeffrey Nishimura, Neal Oxenhandler, David Palumbo-Liu, Vincent P. Pecora, David Porter, Nancy Potter, Ronald C. Rosbottom, Elias L. Rivers, Gerhard F. Strasser, J. L. Styan, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Gary Totten, David van Leer, Asha Varadharajan, Orrin N. C. Wang, Sharon Willis, Louise E. Wright, Donald A. Yates, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Richard E. Zeikowitz, Angelika Bammer, Dale Bauer, Karl Beckson, Betsy A. Bowen, Stacey Donohue, Sheila Emerson, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Jay L. Halio, Karl Kroeber, Terence Hawkes, William B. Hunter, Mary Jambus, Willard F. King, Nancy K. Miller, Jody Norton, Ann Pellegrini, S. P. Rosenbaum, Lorie Roth, Robert Scholes, Joanne Shattock, Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Alfred Bendixen, Alarma Kathleen Brown, Michael J. Kiskis, Debra A. Castillo, Rey Chow, John F. Crossen, Robert F. Fleissner, Regenia Gagnier, Nicholas Howe, M. Thomas Inge, Frank Mehring, Hyungji Park, Jahan Ramazani, Kenneth M. Roemer, Deborah D. Rogers, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Regina M. Schwartz, John T. Shawcross, Brenda R. Silver, Andrew von Hendy, Virginia Wright Wexman, Britta Zangen, A. Owen Aldridge, Paula R. Backscheider, Roland Bartel, E. M. Forster, Milton Birnbaum, Jonathan Bishop, Crystal Downing, Frank H. Ellis, Roberto Forns-Broggi, James R. Giles, Mary E. Giles, Susan Blair Green, Madelyn Gutwirth, Constance B. Hieatt, Titi Adepitan, Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., Emanuel Mussman, Sally Todd Nelson, Robert O. Preyer, David Diego Rodriguez, Guy Stern, James Thorpe, Robert J. Wilson, Rebecca S. Beal, Joyce Simutis, Betsy Bowden, Sara Cooper, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Tarek el Ariss, Richard Jewell, John W. Kronik, Wendy Martin, Stuart Y. McDougal, Hugo Méndez-Ramírez, Ivy Schweitzer, Armand E. Singer, G. Thomas Tanselle, Tom Bishop, Mary Ann Caws, Marcel Gutwirth, Christophe Ippolito, Lawrence D. Kritzman, James Longenbach, Tim McCracken, Wolfe S. Molitor, Diane Quantic, Gregory Rabassa, Ellen M. Tsagaris, Anthony C. Yu, Betty Jean Craige, Wendell V. Harris, J. Hillis Miller, Jesse G. Swan, Helene Zimmer-Loew, Peter Berek, James Chandler, Hanna K. Charney, Philip Cohen, Judith Fetterley, Herbert Lindenberger, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Maximillian E. Novak, Richard Ohmann, Marjorie Perloff, Mark Reynolds, James Sledd, Harriet Turner, Marie Umeh, Flavia Aloya, Regina Barreca, Konrad Bieber, Ellis Hanson, William J. Hyde, Holly A. Laird, David Leverenz, Allen Michie, J. Wesley Miller, Marvin Rosenberg, Daniel R. Schwarz, Elizabeth Welt Trahan, Jean Fagan Yellin
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 115 / Issue 7 / December 2000
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 1986-2078
- Print publication:
- December 2000
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- Article
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