Over the past decades, the world economy experienced several global crises, but none of them changed our lives as rapidly as COVID-19. The coronavirus pandemic is destroying communication and production chains at an incredible speed, forcing states to close their borders and rebuild key public institutions, while educational formats are rapidly switching to distance learning. International research companies have included public opinion responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in their regular monitoring reports. The latest results analyzed by the author (May, 2020) show that this problem certainly causes the greatest concern throughout the world and stands on the top positions of all survey ratings, while Japan turned to be one of the most worried countries. After the lockdown decrees announced by the government in April 2020, Japan, possessing strong corporate culture and decades-long traditions, faced an unexpectedly difficult problem of switching to telework. The same problem faced the Japanese education system - in spite of all efforts, a substantial number of Japanese secondary schools were obviously not even ready for even a partial transition to distance learning, while many parents showed distrust of the new format of teaching. In turn, universities, already having some experience in distance education, have shown greater adaptability to online learning. The problems of higher education were manifested primarily in the inability of foreign students, whom the Japanese government had actively attracted to the country, to continue their education in the normal mode.

Over the first post-war decades, the education system has become an important tool for equalizing the social landscape of Japanese society and transforming it into a “middle-class society”. Of course, the division of society into classes and layers did not disappear, but the degree of social inequality and the rigidity of horizontal partitions softened significantly. Comparing the situation of the 1960-1980s with the current one, many Japanese experts conclude that the educational system is increasingly losing its function of ensuring social mobility, and that current youth have much fewer chances to achieve life success through persistence in study than previous generations. At the same time, the thesis about the transformation of Japanese society into a “divided” one (kakusa shakai, or “gap society”) became commonplace. In this article, the author attempts to analyze the changes taking place both in the education system and in the labor market in order to answer the questions of how radical these changes are, and have they really undermined the function of the education system of equalizing the starting opportunities of young people. Using the statistics and the materials of various surveys, the author shows that, in terms of both access to education and employment opportunities for young people, current situation is even more favorable than in the period of the formation of the “middle class society”, and that there is no reason to characterize current Japanese society as “divided”, with deepening inequalities in education, and therefore in terms of starting opportunities for young Japanese. At the same time, the author emphasizes that the current system of education and employment of Japanese youth reproduces social inequality. As before, so now, its main feature is the hierarchical structure where the chances of obtaining a good education, and hence a good job, are distributed not so much according to the abilities of young people as to the financial capabilities and social position of their families.

The article reveals the role of Taiwan as an integral part of Japanese companies’ foreign economic strategy in East Asia. Starting with characteristic features of the whole region and its separate economies, the author shows how the Taiwanese economy has been developing after the war and explains why this island took a special position among Japan’s economic partners. The first part of the article examines the main stages of Taiwan’s economic development after the war, revealing the factors of its successful modernization, and explains historical reasons for shaping favorable conditions for its turning into the object of expansion of Japanese companies. In the second part of the article, the author analyzes the process of the consistently increasing economic activity of Japanese companies in East Asia and shows the details of Taiwan’s entry into the existing system of division of labor in the region. A special emphasis is made on the characteristics of the economic cooperation model between the countries of the region, changes in the industrial structure of FDI, and specific forms of partnership between Japanese and Taiwanese companies. In the third part, the author draws attention to the economic and political factors which may lead to instability of economic ties and influence international capital flows. The author comes to the conclusion that Taiwan played an indispensable role in the expansion of the Japanese companies’ economic strategy and occupies now a strong position in the high-end segment of Japan’s foreign production base. Despite the destabilizing factors, Taiwan will evidently keep its exceptional position in the economic interests of Japanese companies in East Asia.

The integration processes can alleviate a variety of challenges and risks of globalization. They help countries to consolidate their economies for jointly confronting the economic and financial crises and to join forces for solving global problems that are practically unsolvable alone, even for the largest and most economically powerful states. Integration processes contribute to the liberalization of trade and economic relations between states, to the removal of protectionist barriers, and to the facilitation of free trade. Japan, with its traditionally closed markets compared to other economically developed countries, has continuously treated the issue of participation in integration processes with great caution. Possessing a wide spectrum of well-established international economic relations, the country was in no hurry to abandon some protectionist measures. However, in the 21st century, a new trend is becoming more evident, that is, Japan’s more active participation in various formats of integration processes in the East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of “the new generation” integration agreements in the region (Trans-Pacific Partnership and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which evolved from ASEAN + 6, a multilateral format of interaction between Japan and ASEAN), and the role of Japan in the process of their formation. The article analyzes the degree of Japan’s involvement in these heterogenic formats of regional cooperation, and its main motives for participation. The author attempts to ascertain whether Japan’s growing activities could be attributed to its interest in supporting regionalism or to its aspiration to self-involvement in the integration processes. The article examines the process of development of the RCEP project in recent years and Japan’s attitude to this issue. The author tries to characterize the role played by Japan in maintaining the TPP after the US withdrawal from the Partnership and to analyze trade and investment cooperation of Japan with the TPP member countries in 2017-2019.

The article is devoted to the problem of Tokyo megacity’s competitiveness in the global economy, i.e. its attractiveness for hosting and conducting various types of economic activities, and its ability to provide all members of society with favorable living conditions. The article discusses the formation of Tokyo as a megacity, its role in the economy of contemporary Japan, and its position in the international coordinate system. Under review is the city development policy pursued by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which is accessed by its compliance with the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 11. This goal, aimed at creating inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable human settlements, serves as a basis for the development strategies of all modern cities. Permanent migration in-flow processes and an unprecedentedly high pace of urbanization ignited continuous concentration of population and economic resources in Tokyo. This, in turn, led to a rapidly growing role of the city in the national and global economies. In order to assess the attractiveness of the Tokyo megacity, this article applies international ratings based on the Global Power City Index (GPCI) conducted by the Mori Memorial Foundation’s Institute for Urban Strategies and the Safe Cities Index (SCI) released by The Economist Intelligence Unit Research Center. The article discusses two groups of problems that affect Tokyo’s overall competitiveness. The first group is associated with objective reasons related to the overconcentration of population and economic activity, and the second group is associated with changes in the social structure of Tokyo. An analysis of the two latest program documents of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government shows that the priority goals of the urban policy are the creation of a “safe”, “multifunctional”, and “smart” megacity of Tokyo. The author concludes that the new urban policy is fully consistent with the concept of sustainable development and the UN SDG No. 11.

The article is devoted to the problems of the formation and development of military Japanese studies in the early 20th century. Its relevance is related to the fact that current problems of the Russian-Japanese relations are rooted in the political confrontation and numerous wars and armed conflicts between the two countries which erupted in the first half of the 20th century. The military have joined Japanese studies since its establishment in Russian higher education. Officers of the units of the Russian army stationed in the Far East studied Japanese and Japan together with university students - in early 20th century the ratio of military and non-military students was almost 50:50. The first military specialists in Japanese studies either gave priority to research and education over military service, or successfully combined both. Joint training of officers and university students had a great impact on all aspects of life and work of the Oriental Institute, while causing criticism from both senior faculty managers and the high-ranked Russian military. Despite great success in the officers’ training at the Oriental Institute, the initial system of Japanese studies training was reformed, though its principles and traditions were preserved until the 1917 revolution. The article was written on the basis of archival and published documents of the Oriental Institute, with the usage of academic works of the first Russian officers specializing in Japanese studies. The historical experience of the Japanese studies education and research is interesting and relevant for today’s Russian-Japanese relations.

This article was written in commemoration of Serge Elisséeff (18891975) - an outstanding 20th century Japanologist, the world-famous scholar and teacher, the founder of the school of Far Eastern studies in the USA, the organizer of academic Japanology in France, one of the first Russian Japanologists. In the autumn of 1920, he emigrated from the Soviet Russia, and was practically unknown in the USSR for this reason. The recognition of the achievements of Russian emigrants in the fields of academic science, engineering, art, and literature in their motherland, when they became its pride, required a lot of time. The only international conference devoted to Elisséeff’s academic path was held in Moscow in 1999. A series of reports was presented by academicians, journalists, and persons who had known Serge Elisséeff personally. Nevertheless, it became evident that his personal and professional life still needs further profound study. For this purpose, the author collected many new documents in various archives and libraries of the countries somehow linked to Serge Elisséeff’s life. They formed a base for reconstructing the prominent scholar’s academic biography. The author reveals the early period of his life and the reasons for his interest in Japanese studies, and introduces some new details of his study at the Imperial Tokyo University (he graduated in 1912 as the first European graduate). The paper examines the Petrograd period of Elisséeff’s career in 1915-1920, when he was a young scholar and professor, and proves his considerable professional contribution to the French Japanology. Serge Elisséeff’s fundamental contribution as the organizer of Far Eastern studies at Harvard and the U.S. in general was fully confirmed by the American archive documents. His extraordinary administrative abilities were revealed during his tenure as the Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, when he fulfilled a number of activities at Harvard, in China, and in other Asian countries. The paper considers Elisséeff’s cooperation with the U.S. Secret Services during World War II, and shows his role in saving Kyoto, Nara, and Kamakura. The article also introduces Elisséeff’s accomplishments in spreading the Japanological expertise and the knowledge of Japanese mentality in the West. A number of new scholarly archive sources are put in scientific circulation.

This article analyzes the responses of French analysts and journalists to a then new phase of Japanese expansion into China known as the Manchurian Incident and to a new balance of power after the establishment of the puppet-state Manchukuo under the total control of Japan. The League of Nations as well as the governments of almost all Great Powers condemned Japan’s action as aggression and violation of international law, but French analysts, first of all thinking about preserving and strengthening the country’s position in French Indochina, discussed the arguments of both sides according to their own political positions. A former legal advisor to several Chinese national governments Professor Jean Escarra simply ignored Manchukuo’s existence. Legal advisor of the Japanese embassy in Paris, Doctor of Law Jean Ray called Manchukuo “an experience worth being attempted and helped”. Doctor of Law A.R. Tullie viewed Manchukuo’s establishment as fully legal and according to the Nine Powers Treaty of 1922. Known for her critical attitude to militarism and colonialism, the “queen of great reportage” Andree Viollis (1870-1950) in her books Shanghai and China s Destiny (1933) and Japan and Her Empire (1933), written after visiting China and Japan, considered the broadening of the Japanese expansion into China as a manifestation of “fascist” (radical Nationalist and conservative-revolutionary) tendencies inside the country and also gave a sarcastic description of Japanese attempts to look like Europeans in her book Intimate Japan (1934). Journalist Maurice Lachin (1909-1977) visited Japan, Korea, and Manchukuo, talked to well-informed and influential people and was able to produce a full-scale panorama of the current situation with quite objective analysis according to the traditions of the “great reportage” in his book Japan 1934 (1934). Secretary of the Committee for Pacific Problems Study Roger Levy (1887-1975) became highly valued as a good expert on the Far Eastern situation after a series of works with an “equidistant” view of the Sino-Japanese conflict. A study of French opinion and response to the Japanese continental policy will enrich our knowledge of this period and will help us to understand better its political philosophy as well as the working of the propaganda and image-making systems.

Despite differences in specific historical circumstances, any war generates heroes (or kills them). These heroes and their canonical images provide examples for admiration, inspiration, imitation, and sorrow. Since such examples should be provided as soon as possible, heroes appear at the very beginning of the war, regardless of its course. Since Japan was defeated, and the war itself was officially recognized as “unfair”, the names of those people who were admired during the war were forgotten after its end. We analyze the images of heroes who were most glorified during the war. First of all, I keep my eye on the image of the hero, and not his real actions and biography, which are still the subject of discussion in many cases. However, these discussions arose in the post-war period. They remain outside my attention - just like the changes in the interpretation of the image of heroes that occurred in the post-war period. As for the synchronous perception of heroes, it was determined primarily by official versions of events, replicated in newspapers and radio broadcasts, and then picked up by publicists, writers, cinema makers, songwriters, etc. And these versions existed as immutable facts for most Japanese. In many cases, people who committed a certain heroic act were recognized as “heroes” not immediately but after some time had passed. In such cases, the creators of the image of heroes (army leadership, propagandists) had time to think over who should be appointed to this role and what qualities of heroes should be brought to the fore. Thus, the creation of a hero cult was not a spontaneous process, but a controlled one. There is no doubt that, in wartime, there were many candidates for the role of a hero. However, for one reason or another, only a few were recognized as heroes nationwide. I will try to highlight a number of features that could affect the process of selecting a hero from a number of candidates. The contents of this set will help to understand better the nature of what is commonly called “Japanese totalitarianism”.

Old Japanese manuscripts do not always contain the name of the author and the date of creation of the text, so the first task for the researcher is to understand when a particular text could have been written. Kara Monogatari Teiyo is a short study that precedes the text of the 1809 publication of Kara Monogatari, and it was the first attempt to analyze the text. Kara Monogatari consists of 27 separate stories written in the literary Japanese language of the Heian period. All stories tell about China, and each episode includes one or more waka poems. The author of the Introduction, a kokugakusha scholar Shimizu Hamaomi (1776-1824), elaborates on the problem of dating the text. Analyzing the style and language of Kara Monogatari, he comes to the conclusion that the text was written around the time when Minamoto no Toshiyori (1055-1129), Saigyo (1118-1190), and Teika (1162-1241) wrote their prose and poetry. Shimizu finds lines from a poem by Fujiwara no Akisuke (1090-1155) cited in the text, which allows him to determine the lower time limit of the creation of the work. He indicates the upper time limit comparing the Kara Monogatari with the poetic anthology Kankonji Wakashu, and comes to the general conclusion that the text of Kara Monogatari dates back to the end of the Heian period. The author of the Introduction also lists Chinese sources of individual stories; writes about the fact that two stories do not have Chinese sources; compares the content of Kara Monogatari and Kankoji Wakashu; discusses the word tachibana in Japanese poetry; explains the difference between Kara Monogatari and Mogyu Waka. Most of the issues raised by Shimizu Hamaomi are also discussed in modern research on Kara Monogatari. As for the text dating, not all Shimizu Hamaomi’s arguments have been adopted by modern philologists. The publication provides translations of the Introduction by Shimizu Hamaomi and examines its main provisions.

The personality of Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-1976), a writer, thinker, poet, playwright, and artist, the ideological inspirer of neo-humanism in Japan in the early 20th century, cannot be ignored in the history of Japanese literature and culture as a whole. In this paper, we aim to explain the fact of such a wide popularity of Mushanokoji and such a strong influence of his personality on his contemporaries. To answer this question, we compiled a description of Mushanokoji, based on the memories of people personally acquainted with him. Having examined the childhood and youth of Mushanokoji as a period of the formation of his character and ideological preferences, the beginning of his career, we turned to the characteristics given by Mushanokoji’s contemporaries: his associates in the Shirakaba group, participants of the New Village project, and literary critics. We found that Mushanokoji did not consider any family member of his to be a role model, preferring to follow the distant ideals of Tolstoy, Rodin, Cezanne, and others. From a young age, Mushanokoji, realizing his unattractiveness and encountering various difficulties in his projects, drew strength from his inherent naive optimism, firm faith in his lucky star, and his uniqueness and sincere sense of humor. These qualities were celebrated by his acquaintances throughout his life. However, Mushanokoji’s popularity is most due to his natural magnetism. As follows from a lot of evidence, Mushanokoji had the ability to attract people in a first meeting, during a conversation or a public speech. His positive energy, which infected and inspired others, allowed some to even see in his figure a religious leader who could direct seekers on the right Creative path. Therefore, we can conclude that the genius of Mushanokoji was not only in his literary ability, but primarily in his becoming an iconic figure of his epoch.

In the history of Russian-Japanese cultural ties, there will be a kind of anniversary at the beginning of 2021: 85 years ago, in February and May 1936, a great Russian bass singer Fyodor Chaliapin was on tour in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka with unprecedented triumph. A little more than half a century had passed since Japan opened up to the world and to the flow of foreign culture after the Meiji revolution. Over the years, in the process of “Europeanization”, Japanese society revealed not only a gravitation towards Western culture, but also a deep understanding of it and a delicate taste. The performances of the “king of vocal”, as Chaliapin was called in the Japanese press of those years, were primarily an event of European opera traditions. However, more than a half of the repertoire of the famous singer consisted of arias, songs, and romances by Russian composers. Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, Borodin were performed in Chaliapin’s original interpretation. The singer’s tremendous success among the Japanese public illustrated the capability of the Japanese audience to organically perceive the best examples of vocal art, an emotional reaction to universal cultural and psychological values, dramatic and tragic collisions, humor of characters and situations, despite all national distinctiveness, and most importantly - an aptitude to give an adequate assessment of performing skill and excellence. The article mentions the reaction in Japan to the tour of the masters of Russian musical art of other genres. In assessing the performances of Russian violinists and pianists, the Japanese media was generous with eulogy. Among them, first of all, were the students of the St. Petersburg Conservatory professor Leopold Auer - Yasha Kheifets, Efrem Zimbalist, and Misha Elman. The article gives an idea of the significant contribution of Russia to the formation of European musical culture in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. A special role in European musical culture in Japan at that time was played by the Russian intelligentsia from the “white emigration”, in particular, in Harbin, once the capital of the Chinese Eastern Railway with a predominant population of Russian emigrants, which became a city of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Japanese musicians and performers visited Harbin to hear the Russian musicians from the local symphony orchestra play. This group also toured Japan.

The article presents an overview of some of the most general directions of problem statement in comparative research of Heidegger’s and Dogen’s teachings. Proceeding from the attitudes of methodological character common for both thinkers towards the gnoseological and ontological positions, the author pays special attention to the problems of discursive and suggestionistic thinking, subject-object dichotomy, substantiality of existence, true and phenomenal being, nature of time and temporality. Dogen and other Chan/Zen thinkers’ tendency to reject analytical, discursive thinking was accompanied by an active appeal to the suggestive language of artistic images. This attitudinal rejection of conceptual thinking was determined, on the one hand, by the need to overcome the framework of the established Buddhist dogma that impeded the development of living Buddhist thought, and, on the other hand, by the affirmation of the non-substantiality of existence, the identity of phenomenal and absolute being. According to Dogen’s idea, the notion of substance and identity generates a subject-object dichotomy, illusive from the Buddhist point of view, which can only be overcome in the state of satori enlightenment. A similar situation can be found in the methodological guidelines of Martin Heidegger, who, in his project of destruction of ontology, seeks to overcome and rethink the concepts of Western metaphysics that have become rigid and lost their original meaning and, in his later works, refers to the language of suggestive thinking. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the analysis of fundamental structures of human existence in Being and Time is also focused on overcoming the subject-object dichotomy and completely removes the problem of substance. At the same time, both thinkers are characterized by ontological orientation of philosophical thinking: both Heidegger and Dogen are focused on the problem of truth of being and human attitude to it. This ontological installation also reveals a number of substantive parallels, which are expressed in a similar interpretation of existence through the phenomenon of time, as well as the similarity of under-standing of the structural basis of time.

Koreeda Hirokazu is one of the leading film directors of modern Japan, a brilliant representative of the new cinema of this country, whose filmography currently includes 30 works. They are mainly devoted to the problems of family and family relations - a fairly typical theme for the Japanese cinema. However, unlike many of his predecessors, including the generally recognized classics such as Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, etc., who worked in the genre of family drama, Koreeda offers the audience a non-standard and even something shocking look at family problems. The main emphasis in his work is made not on the description of the family per se or the demonstration of the conflict between fathers and children, but on the display and analysis of various kinds of family collisions as well as cardinal changes that this cell of the Japanese society undergoes in modern conditions. One of his latest films created in this genre, that attracted great attention of the cinematic public in Japan and many other countries, is the film “Shoplifters”, which has been awarded the Golden Palm Branch of the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. Koreeda became the first Japanese film director who received this honorary prize in the 21st century.

The purpose of the study is to examine the image of India as “Buddha-land” in Konjaku monogatarishu (1120s). The influence of India, mediated through Korea and China, can be traced in Japan back to antiquity. Buddhism, to a large extent, remained an Indian teaching even in Chinese translations; thanks to it, the Japanese got a fragmented acquaintance with the Indian literature, sculpture and painting, music, and non- Buddhist philosophical teachings. In the late Heian era, although there still were no direct contacts between the Indian and Japanese Buddhists, and the ties of the Japanese Buddhists with the Chinese community were weakening, the information available to the Japanese about India, the homeland of the Buddha, was brought together, and a circle of legends, especially important for the Japanese monks and laity, was constructed. Such an attempt of consolidating information is undertaken in the first three scrolls of the first part of Konjaku. Their plots are taken from sutras widely known in the Buddhist world, from Chinese collections of Buddhist tales and from the diaries of Chinese pilgrims who visited India. All these stories are retold in Japanese, with abbreviations and additions. The stories reflect the main events in the life of Buddha Shakyamuni, which also represent the main milestones of the path that every Buddhist seeks to go, and the deeds of the Buddha’s disciples - the examples of how people can walk the same path in different ways. Other major themes here are the reward of happiness for good deeds and that of grief for evil deeds; and the relativity of any oppositions, such as wealth and poverty, wisdom and stupidity, good and evil. Konjaku does not contain a complete exposition of the Buddha legend. The selection of stories is subordinated to the task of showing the prehistory of the Buddhist community that took shape in Japan by the turn of the 11th - 12th centuries. This task is also pursued by the order of the stories and the method of their presentation, where a special attention is attracted to the motives of the Buddha’s family ties, the participation of deities in his life, the distribution of roles between his disciples, as well as the idea that the main provisions of the Mahayana teachings adopted in Japanese Buddhist schools are rooted in the Buddha epoch.

The Kabuki Theater is a striking element of the Japanese culture. Current work is an annotated translation of the play “Narukami”. Its relevance is determined by the growing cultural exchanges between Russia and Japan. In 2018, the Kabuki Chikamatsu-za troupe came to Russia, which was an event of grandiose scale, since Kabuki’s tours abroad, not to mention Russia, are extremely rare. In Russia, there are numerous publications of academic works on the theaters of Noh, Kabuki, and Joruri. However, the Kabuki Theater has not been given enough attention - most of the available publications date back to the 1960s - 1970s. Since the Russian audience has scarce opportunities to read translations of Kabuki plays, an attempt is made to translate the Kabuki drama known as Narukami (R§#, “The Thunder God”, 1684), which is one of the eighteen classic plays comprising an integral part of the modern repertoire of the Japanese theater. The translation puts in scientific circulation a Japanese dramatic text previously unknown in Russia. There are four characters in the play: Saint Narukami, who is the main character and after whom the play is named; his two misguided students - monks Hakuumbo and Kokuumbo, who are comic characters entertaining the audience in the course of the development of the play; and Princess Kumo no Taema Hime. The plot of the play is shaped around Narukami, who, using magical rites, creates a drought to avenge the imperial court for his grievances. Then his adversaries send him the beautiful Kumo no Taema-hime, who should seduce the saint and learn from him how to destroy spells and bring the rain back. The translation is preceded by an introduction where the author addresses the features of the play and describes the characters and their stage costumes.

The article is devoted to life and activities of Mori Yoshiro, one of the most distinguished and colorful politicians of contemporary Japan. The article addresses Yoshiro’s childhood and youth years, when his interest to sport was revealed, and, first of all, to rugby. This, in many aspects, assisted the formation of his views on relations between people. Considerable attention is devoted to the role of Yoshiro’s father in his education, to the influence of his precepts on his life choice, to the basic guidelines of his political philosophy. For forty-three years Mori, as a Member of Parliament, was in the center of political life in Japan. Fourteen times he was a winner in the election to the highest legislative body of Japan. He occupied the leading posts in the Liberal Democratic party, and once was the head of the Cabinet. He is known as a proponent of active Japan-Russian relations and a supporter of a compromise-based solution of the territorial problem. Upon retirement from political career, he plays a big role in Japan’s public life. Since 2014, he is the Chairman of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2020. The author focuses on the achievements and difficulties in Mori’s life way.

The article attempts to analyze “the diplomacy of apologies” in the foreign policy of postwar Japan from international political and domestic political dimensions. The emphasis is placed on the role and place of “the diplomacy of apologies” in Japan’s relations with the PRC and the Republic of Korea, in which it continues to be the most important tool for regulating the degree of tension in the conditions of high conflict potential. The article shows that “the diplomacy of apologies” played an important role in Tokyo’s postwar policy of reconciliation with East Asian countries. However, this policy was not completely successful, largely due to the partners’ dissatisfaction with the excessively soft forms of apologetic language on the part of Japanese officials as well as, in their opinion, a lack of remorse in their words. Many of them continue to believe that a full-fledged reconciliation with Japan is impossible, since there is no unambiguously negative assessment of the militaristic past at the official level, and the postwar settlement of relations with Japan was carried out without proper material compensation for the victims of Japanese militaristic policies. In Japan, on the contrary, it is believed that the official apologies made in the postwar period are already more than enough, that the postwar generation has nothing to apologize for, since the militaristic leaders were convicted by the Tokyo Tribunal and have already redeemed the fault of the nation, and that constant introduction of the issue of apologies to the diplomatic agenda is based on cynical political calculations and has nothing to do with the search for historical justice. Against this background, the restoration of truly friendly and good-neighborly relations between Japan and its neighboring countries seems unlikely in the historical perspective.

The article was written on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Academician V. M. Alpatov. The authors have known the hero of the day since he was a student and made his first steps in the Japanese studies. From the standpoint of their own professional interest in the Japanese studies, each of them tried to reflect the multifaceted talent of Vladimir M. Alpatov - academician, researcher, chronicler, teacher, and mentor of the people who linked their fate with the study of the Japanese language and Japan.