Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, which has a number of advantages related to its geographical location, abundance of natural resources, openness to foreign capital, and dynamic development due to the market reforms carried out in the 1990s. This determines the interest in the country from China and Japan and the inclusion of Mongolia among the platforms of global competition between these largest Asian economies.

Development of Japan-Mongolia and China-Mongolia political and economic relations in the second half of the 20th century and Mongolia’s economic progress in the recent decades have coincided with increasing competition between Japan and China on the world stage. At present, both countries are important trading partners for Mongolia and sources of capital needed to build its infrastructure and integrate it into global supply and production chains. The study of Sino-Japanese interaction in Mongolia may help us understand how Japan and China compete with each other on the world stage and to specify their areas of specialization and rivalry.

The objective of this research is to show, taking infrastructure projects as an example, how the global competition between Japan and China unfolds in Mongolia. In order to evaluate the current state of economic relations between Mongolia and each of the countries, in the first part, the author traces the history of Japan-Mongolia and China-Mongolia relations from the establishment of diplomatic relations till the present time, paying special attention to infrastructure projects. The second part analyzes the interaction between Japan and China in Mongolia in the context of their growing economic competition. The study sheds light on particular areas of rivalry, while demonstrating that Japanese and Chinese projects not only compete but also complement each other.

The article deals with the issue of the level and quality of life of the Japanese. Data from two sources of information are analyzed and compared – official statistical data and opinion polls conducted by private and public organizations. The statistics show that, according to a number of indicators (the level of per capita income, household provision of housing and durable goods, life expectancy, distribution of income and wealth among the population, etc.), Japan is among the highly developed nations, providing the absolute majority of its citizens with a high level of material well-being.

Although, in general, the data of sociological surveys, which represent subjective assessments by the Japanese of their financial situation, do not refute this thesis, in some aspects they significantly correct it, showing that not all citizens of the country are satisfied with their standard of living and some of its components.

While some of these assessments seem controversial, this does not diminish their importance as a valuable source of information.

These assessments, in particular, show that Japanese society is far from being as homogeneous as it is commonly believed, that it consists of groups that differ not only in income and wealth, but also in lifestyle, in their ideas about the value of work, about the importance of certain aspects of life, about social justice, etc.

In other words, by complementing statistical indicators, these assessments help us to get closer to understanding how diverse and complex the life of contemporary Japanese society is.

The article is devoted to one of the creative branches of the Japanese economy – the anime industry. The creative sector has become one of the promising and fast-growing segments of the global economy, including the economy of Japan. Anime, or Japanese animation, is a specific kind of animation that emerged in Japan as a unique product in the 1960s. Its distinctive visuals have turned anime into an authentic Japanese cultural phenomenon. In recent decades, the anime industry, like other creative businesses, has faced the need for significant transformation due to consequences of technological advancements and growing competition.

There is a trend towards a drop in demand for animation products offered through traditional media, due to the rapid spread of high-speed Internet connection, which enabled consumers to quickly access content in excellent resolution without relying on physical media. Under these conditions, companies are changing their marketing strategies, in particular switching to the production and distribution of anime for online viewing.

Streaming services have become one of the rapidly developing technologies for the anime distribution. There are several major national streaming services in Japan, which, despite being not very popular outside the country, have a wide audience at home.

The transition of the anime business to the digital plane is inevitably associated with the complexity of copyright protection, since it has become possible to copy video materials without loss of quality and binding to physical media. At the same time, such unauthorized distribution serves as free advertising for the copyright holders, so the industry had been tolerant to this phenomenon until recently.

The development of Japanese animation faces the problem of a shortage of animators. Due to growing demand in the 1970s, studios outsourced part of the work to reduce costs, which facilitated the creation of a multi-level subcontracting structure of the anime industry.

Among the current trends in the development of the industry is the transition to a strategy of multiplatform exploitation of intellectual property – the so-called transmedia franchising, when many secondary works are created around the original intellectual product – an animated work.

New technologies make it possible to make anime more accessible to wider audiences, but production structure and license management policies are not fully adapted to the new conditions, which creates new problems.

Over the past century and a half, Japan has been debating whether it is a monoethnic nation-state or whether there are representatives of ethnic groups other than the Japanese living in it. In this article, I attempt to consider in a historical perspective the place of the Ainu in the discussion about the Japanese nation, in particular the idea about the common origin of the Japanese and the Ainu.

The formation of Japanese ideas about the world as divided into peoples with a set of distinctive features dates back to the Tokugawa era (1603–1867). At the same time, the concept of “Ezo,” a name for the Ainu at that time, acquires the character of an ethnonym, which in the previous epochs rather meant the inhabitants of the country’s remote periphery, not affected by the beneficial civilizing influence of the emperor. In the earliest descriptions of the Ainu, Japanese authors continued to rely on the Chinese civilizational narrative, presenting the Ainu as the exact opposite of the Japanese and focusing on the differences. At the same time, at the end of the 18^th century, ideas about the common origin of the Japanese and the Ainu were first voiced, based on the similarity of some cultural practices and common vocabulary.

During the Meiji period (1868–1912), attitudes towards the idea of the common origin of the Japanese and the Ainu were ambivalent. In discussions about the Japanese nation, the Ainu could act in a variety of roles: as an indigenous people displaced by the Japanese “invaders,” as the closest relative and therefore a natural object of assimilation, as an integral element of the “mixed” Japanese people, and as a subordinate people at the lowest level of the hierarchy.

The article briefly presents the activity of the Russian Muslim leader Abdurashid Ibragimov as a pan-Islamic mediator in Japan. Largely due to his activities at the beginning of the 20^th century, the idea of cooperation with Muslim peoples was strengthened among the pan-Asian circles of Japanese intellectuals. It is concluded that the Japanese state Muslim policy (kaikyō seisaku), conducted in the 1930s and 1940s, was formed with active cooperation with Muslim intellectuals, including A. Ibragimov.

The present work, consisting of two parts, deals with the little-studied aspects of the Indochina crisis of 1940 in Japanese–French relations – Japan’s claims to control and military presence in French Indochina in the summer and autumn of 1940. During the previous years, ensuring the security and stability of Indochina was at the heart of French policy towards Japan, which was necessarily characterized by a willingness to compromise.

The military defeat of France in June 1940 changed its international status: weakened, but not deprived of the colonies and the Navy. The new authoritarian regime of the French state (the Vichy regime) decided to make concessions to Japan in Indochina, given the inequality of forces in the region and the lack of any outside help.

The second part of the work begins with the principled decision of the French government to make concessions to the demands of Japan, whose expansionist policy acquired a new scope after the formation of the second cabinet of Konoe Fumimaro, and ends with the entry of Japanese troops into Indochina during September 1940.

The author examines the process of the policy of the Vichy regime developing in this direction and the actions of its leaders and main executives: Head of State Marshal Philippe Petain, Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, Ministers of the Colonies Henry Lémery and Charles Platon, Governor-General of Indochina Jean Decoux. The emphasis is on “politicians,” not on “politics.” The work is based on diaries, memoirs, and other testimonies of the actors, insufficiently studied in Russian Japanology, combined with the latest works of historians.

Despite the decades that have passed since the end of World War II, historians and researchers from other academic fields remain interested in the activities of a number of organizations and military units of the Japanese army and navy, engaged, during the pre-war and war periods, in the development of weapons of mass destruction, unique weapons, as well as means of their delivery. At the same time, against the background of the relatively well-studied circumstances of the activities of the infamous Units 731 and 100, which produced and tested bacteriological and other weapons in the territory of Manchuria, the data on the activities of the Army Military Research Institute № 9, located in the Tokyo suburb of Kawasaki, remain almost completely unknown to Russian researchers.

In the Japanese- and English-language historical literature, the unit is known as the “Noborito Laboratory,” deriving the name from the area where the institute was located. For the first time in the Russian-language literature, this work presents the history of the establishment and activities of this top-secret division of the Japanese Imperial Army, a general outline of its structure and activities, which included experiments and attempts to create bacteriological weapons, production of counterfeit money and documents, various weapons of mass destruction, including bacteriological ones as well as weapons based on the use of microwave radiation, secret espionage and electronic equipment, poisons, the historically first intercontinental means of delivering damaging substances, etc.

The problem of the post-war fate of the liquidated Research Institute № 9 and the appearance of some of its traces in Japan after 1945 are also touched upon. The research is based on materials declassified in Japan and published by the Defunct Imperial Japanese Army Noborito Laboratory Museum for Education in Peace, as well as on the materials of foreign press.

The article focuses on the Manchurian strategic offensive operation of the Red Army against the Japanese troops in Northeast China in August 1945. Its relevance is due to the fact that, over the past decade, researchers have gained access to documents from Russian and Japanese archives that allow a detailed assessment of the nature of actions of both sides. At the initiative of the Imperial Supreme Headquarters, the main command of the Kwantung Army in September 1944 adopted a new operational plan of military operations against the USSR, which, unlike the previous ones, was defensive in nature.

Upon detecting in March – April 1945 the movement of Soviet troops to the Far East, Transbaikalia, and the MPR, in May, the Kwantung Army began preparations to repel the expected offensive of the Red Army. The intelligence agencies of Japan were able to accurately determine the operational plan of the Soviet command to conduct the Manchurian offensive operation and the number of forces allocated to this, but they were wrong by a month with the timing of the likely offensive of the Red Army.

Despite problems with supplying the troops with equipment, primarily with weapons and armored vehicles, the Kwantung army, due to the mobilization of Japanese reservists living in Manchuria and the replenishment of troops with units and formations from Northern China and Korea, faced the offensive of Soviet troops from three directions in an organized manner. During the fierce fighting, the Japanese troops maintained stable control and, adhering to the pre-war plan, retreated to the previously prepared defense lines. Until the top command of the Kwantung Army ordered its subordinate units to cease hostilities on August 16, 1945, the troops generally retained their combat capability. In this regard, further in-depth research of the strengths and weaknesses of the Manchurian strategic offensive operation is required to use its experience in military pedagogical and historiographical practice.

Among the literary works of the Heian era (late 8^th – 12^th centuries), Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku Monogatarishū, 1120s) is notable for covering a much broader range of characters than kagami historical texts, monogatari tales, early gunki-monogatari, and even other compilations of setsuwa didactic tales. Among the characters, there are numerous laypersons from nearly all provinces of Japan, along with residents of the capital and monks. But Japanese court tradition is represented in Konjaku as well, and not only in Chapter 22, which is devoted to officials of the Fujiwara clan. This tradition can be investigated by comparing Konjaku with texts of the court literature or later setsuwa collections, compilers of which focus on life of the capital aristocracy and include in their works some tales from Konjaku. It is also possible to make a study based on the examination of terms used for the highest state offices and contexts of such terms’ appearance. In this article, we tried to employ both approaches and showed how court stories, adopted from uta-monogatari poem-tales, were transformed and turned into a part of the setsuwa tradition, in which they continue to exist and receive various interpretations in various collections. For instance, we analyzed some tales which are common for Konjaku and Jikkinshō (Collected Admonitions in Ten Sections, 13^th century). Dignitaries in Konjaku make their appearance in a great variety of situations, demonstrate multifarious emotions and possess different talents. Ladies of the court – starting with empresses – also act in this setsuwa collection. Their life may be described in the tales in the manner of refined court prose – or in a much ruder style. The court tradition of Japan itself is compared with the Indian and Chinese ones – as the compiler imagined them. Some tales from Konjaku monogatari-shū in Russian translation are placed in the annex to this article.

The beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912) was marked by the opening of the country and its integration into the architecture of the new world. In this regard, the role and importance of geography and, in general, of understanding what a particular country is like, has become extremely important. Writer, translator, and thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) was one of the most outstanding representatives of the Meiji period. Realizing the urgent need to acquaint the reader with new European knowledge and achievements, he left a great literary heritage in almost every field of science, including geography. An important place in his work is occupied by such works on regional studies as Things Western (1866, 1868, 1870) and All the Countries of the World, for Children Written in Verse (1869), in which he tried to acquaint readers with geography and history, outstanding personalities and scientific achievements of other countries in a simple and understandable form.

The signing of the Treaty of Shimoda (1855) established diplomatic relations between Russia and Japan. Japan showed interest in Russia, in its development in the 18^th – 19^th centuries. Fukuzawa reflected these trends in his works, presenting Russia as a country not completely modernized, but actively moving along the path of progress. He assigned an important role to the figure of Peter I, whose activities and personal qualities contributed to Russia’s significant domestic and foreign political successes. However, not all his contemporaries adhered to such assessments. For example, a future Minister of Culture of Japan, Mori Arinori (1847–1889), who visited Saint Petersburg at the age of eighteen, believed that the idea of Russia as a powerful state was greatly exaggerated. He expressed his views in the Diary of a Sea Trip to Russia.

Japan Yearbook 2022 featured an article which reflected on the award-winning Japanese film Drive My Car (Doraibu mai-ka), directed by Hamaguchi Ryūsuke. It received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The movie is an authentic and original work, unlike anything being filmed in Japan today. Russian audience is very interested in this particular work, since it seamlessly and unexpectedly combines the work of two completely different writers: A. P. Chekhov and Haruki Murakami.

What is curious about this work is that Hamaguchi is known to be a great admirer of director Andrei Tarkovsky and started his creative career with his own remake of Solaris, later receiving many prestigious awards at international film festivals. Among his works are Happy Hour, Asako I & II, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, etc. This article presents the analysis of these movies and the main stages of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s creative biography.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the Gekkōsō Gallery occupied a significant niche in the exhibition exchange between the USSR and Japan, organizing exhibitions of works from the collections of leading Soviet museums in Japan (the State Russian Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Hermitage, the State Tretyakov Gallery), as well as representing the work of individual artists (D. Nalbandyan, N. Romadin, T. Salakhov, Y. Pimenov, et al.). At the same time, the gallery was actively involved in the process of exporting paintings by Soviet artists, working with the Union of Soviet Artists and socio-political organizations.

The vigorous activity of the gallery director Nakamura Yōko and her chosen promotion strategy demonstrated the complex process of presenting Soviet art to Japanese consumers, associated with an attempt to de-ideologize the artists’ work while at the same time making it attractive for the art market in Japan. The process of commercialization of Soviet artists’ works and the nuances of Nakamura’s relationships with the Soviet Ministry of Culture and related organizations associated with the desire to seek the highest monetary gain and public status eventually led to the demise of Gekkōsō and its subsequent bankruptcy.

This article aims to outline the gallery’s phenomenon against the background of other actors of exhibition exchange between Japan and the USSR, showing the main milestones in the history of the gallery’s cooperation with Soviet institutions. Specific attention is paid to Nakamura Yōko’s image in Soviet periodicals, her business activities and personal contacts in the USSR, as well as her reputation in Japan. Materials for the article include documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), the archive of the State Tretyakov Gallery (GTG), as well as periodical materials from the 1970s and 1980s that mention Nakamura and her gallery’s activities.

The author aims to answer the question of what presently contributes to the preservation of the national uniqueness of the Japanese culture and why one of the characteristic features of the Japanese is their adherence to traditions, and also to point out the importance of considering the mental attitudes of the mass consciousness, which are generated by the traditional understanding of the world and a person’s place in it. Mass consciousness is understood as a depersonalized consciousness of the vast majority of the members of a society. The researchers of mass consciousness believe that it begins to form in ancient times, with many of its components preserved in the collective subconscious of society for a long time.

The formation of the psychology of the Japanese, their religious outlook, and aesthetic ideal also took place in the 4^th – 7^th centuries. In subsequent periods, the previously formed specific features of the Japanese culture were further developing in the same way. This suggests the existence of a conceptual constant in the mass consciousness of the part of society in which the basis of the Japanese culture was formed. Gradually, it spread to all segments of society. The functioning of the mass consciousness manifests itself as universally accepted norms: customs, ideals, ethical and aesthetic values, etc.

Works of literature and art, research by foreign and Russian Japanologists make it possible to single out worldview components that, being imprinted in the mass consciousness of society, form a “code” for preserving the specifics of the Japanese culture in the broadest sense of the word. The worldview of the Japanese was formed on the basis of the Shinto-Taoist-Buddhist syncretism, the components of this code being: a person’s perception of themselves as an integral part of the Universe; conviction in the universal interconnectedness of things and, as a result, focus on maintaining harmonic interaction of all elements of the world; belief in the spirituality of everything.

This article traces the influence of these components on the formation of value orientations that determined the peculiarities of Japanese culture and have not lost their relevance to this day.

This publication presents the translation into Russian of the essay “K and T” by the Japanese writer Tayama Katai (1871–1930). The essay was published in 1917, first as a stand-alone piece in the magazine Bunshō Sekai, and then as a chapter of the book Thirty Years in Tokyo (Tōkyō no Sanjūnen). The heroes of the essay are Tayama Katai himself (in the text he acts as T) and his friend Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908, in the text he is K). The author speaks about the time in 1897 when the young heroes (both of them are 26 years old) spent a little over a month in a temple in Nikkō. At this time, Tayama Katai and Kunikida Doppo, who soon became famous writers, were just entering literary life.

The essay gives an idea of the thoughts and feelings of the Japanese literary youth at the end of the 19^th century. As twenty years passed since the events described, Tayama Katai manages to see not only his friend, but also himself “from the outside.” The heroes, very different in character, talk about what human life, love, religion, and nature are. They often argue, even quarrel. The conversations about literature give an idea of what the Japanese literary youth of that time were passionate about, which Western writers and poets were especially popular.

From the essay, one can also learn how much the writers earned with their writings. The main purpose of the journey of the young people was writing. It was during his stay in Nikkō that Doppo wrote the short story “Uncle Gen” (“Gen oji”), a work that marked his turn to prose.

Tachihara Michizō (1914–1939) succeeded in refashioning the poetic language of the 1930s, inventing the genre of the “pseudo-sonnet,” which would prove to be the most convincing attempt to adapt the European sonnet to Japanese poetry. Tachihara was fascinated by German romanticism, in particular Friedrich Hölderlin, but he cannot be called a westernizer. Tachihara did not work in traditional Japanese poetic genres, but studied the anthology Shinkokinshū, which had a major influence on his stylistics.

Tachihara’s poems seem to be detached from everyday life: with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the subsequent militarization of society, the themes of his poetry did not change. A close examination of his work reveals that the changes in society were also a concern to Tachihara, a sickly young man who was not subject to conscription. His poems are monotonous: they are either landscape sketches or love poems, the choice of vocabulary or themes varies little from collection to collection. His poetry’s attitude is not one of novelty, but of full disclosure of feeling/emotion/plot.

A separate field of his work is architecture. He graduated from the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Imperial University, then he worked for two years as an architect. This article analyses the main motifs of his work, their stylistic and ideological origins. A translation of his major poetry collections, published during Tachihara’s lifetime, is annexed.

One of the most important features of the documents from the Shōsōin treasury is the opportunity for researchers not only to study the events, institutions, and sources of the Nara era, but also to see the Japanese 8^th century “with a human face.” Among the documents, there is a lot of material that talks about the everyday life and service of the sovereign’s subjects. This is of special interest for the author of the article, who aims to see a person who lived in ancient Japan. To create a basis for future research, the author conducts a source study of the Shōsōin documents as a preparatory stage for their study.

The objectives of the article are to discuss where and why the Shōsōin documents were created; find out how they got into the treasury and how they were stored in it; give their classification, describe the types of documents; find out what happened to them after the conservation of the Shōsōin at the end of the 8^th century, how the documents were rediscovered in the Edo period, how and why they were studied in the 19^th and 20^th centuries; talk about the scholars who were involved in their research, and about the modern study of the Shōsōin documents.

The article is dedicated to researching the biography and historical memory of the Japanese consul in Lithuania in 1939–1940 and the only Japanese Righteous Among the Nations Sugihara Chiune, who issued 2139 transit visas to Polish and Lithuanian Jews from July to September 1940, which helped them escape the tragedy of the Holocaust in Lithuania after the German attack on the USSR.

For the reader’s convenience, the work is divided into 5 parts. The first focuses on the stages of Sugihara’s career before his appointment as consul in Kaunas: his early biography (1900–1919), his study of Russian in Harbin (1919–1924), his work at the Japanese Consulate General (1925–1932) and the Manchukuo Foreign Ministry (1932–1935), his transfer to the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo (1935–1937), and his departure for a diplomatic mission in Finland (1937–1939). Along with a description of his professional development, an important place in this part is occupied by an analysis of Sugihara’s personal life and the process of shaping his views, which subsequently determined his willingness to act in a way that, at first glance, was not typical of a diplomat of militarist Japan.

The second and third parts describe Sugihara’s activities in Kaunas (1939– 1940). Attention is paid both to his intelligence activities with the support of Polish agents and to his private life, the events of which developed Sugihara’s earlier capacity for sympathy for people of other nationalities. It also details the process of issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees, deliberately carried out in violation of Foreign Ministry instructions, as well as estimates of the number who left Lithuania thanks to Sugihara and describes their further journey.

The fourth part, although small, covers a broad period in the life of the former Japanese consul in Lithuania: his work in Prague (1940–1941), Königsberg (1941), and Bucharest (1941–1944), internment and repatriation to Japan (1944–1947), work in various commercial firms (1947–1975) and the process of recognition as a Righteous (1984).

Finally, the final part of the paper is devoted to the analysis of the historical memory of Sugihara in Israel, Japan, the USA, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, as well as identification of the main differences in its nature and the reasons that determined this heterogeneity.

In the summer of 2023, the textbook The Economy of Japan, prepared by a famous Russian Japanese Studies scholar I. L. Timonina, was published. As the author herself notes, her goal was to write not just a textbook containing material on the Japanese economy, but a “navigator textbook,” which gives the reader the tools to study the modern Japanese economy.

These tools are represented by references to scientific literature, as well as information and statistical sources, methodological materials that provide a methodology for calculating basic economic indicators, definitions of key terms and concepts, and theoretical approaches to the study of various economic processes. Students are encouraged to work independently by using “homework” – the sections “For those who want to learn more…” and “Assignment” are placed at the end of each chapter. Concise Summaries are also a kind of “navigator” that makes it easier for readers to “move” through the content-rich and sizeable textbook material.

As for the content of the textbook, it reflects almost all the most important processes and phenomena of the modern Japanese economy, and, in general, it gives the reader a fairly complete idea of the scale and quality of Japan’s economic potential, the peculiarities of the organization of the country’s economic life, its positions in the world economy, etc. Obviously, writing the textbook The Economy of Japan required a lot of effort from the author. After all, to collect, process, structure, and logically present such a huge amount of material, while focusing on a strictly defined order of presentation is a task that requires not only high professionalism, but also great effort. But this was fully justified.

The textbook prepared by I. L. Timonina is written at a level that allows to characterize it not only as a high-quality educational material, but also as a highly professional scientific work. There is no doubt that it will be in demand not only by students and teachers, but also by researchers studying the problems of modern economy.

The article provides an analysis of the book Japan’s Military Intelligence Against Russia. Opposition of Special Services in the Far East. 1874–1922, published in the early 2023 by the “Tsentrpoligraf” publishing house by a Russian historian, a specialist in the study of the confrontation between the special services of Russia and Japan, Candidate of Historical Sciences A. G. Zorikhin. Of fundamental importance is the author’s unbiased view of the role of the Japanese special services in producing strategic military and political decisions of the Japanese leadership in the period under study.

The book is one of the examples of studies by Russian historians, carried out using not only Russian, but also Japanese archival materials, as well as with the involvement of studies from Russia, Japan, the United States, and Poland. Most of the cited documents are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.