The article is dedictated to the problem of changes in the interpretation of the concept of ukiyo (a ‘floating world’), as exemplified by “Ukiyo-monogatari” (1665). Ukiyo is an important aesthetic category of the culture of Edo Japan. It was expressed in literature, theater, and visual arts. The idea of a ‘floating world’ full of joy and delight marked the life of theater and pleasure districts in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka. It became the reflection of a new urban culture. This interpretation became widespread with the beginning of the Edo period, when political and economic stability came after a prolonged period of internal conflicts. Before Edo, ukiyo was mostly known as a changing “world full of sorrow”. The exact understanding of ukiyo depends on the way the word is written. This article examines the notion of ukiyo from the perspective of its structure, nature, and development. The two main interpretations, a ‘sorrowful world’ and a ‘floating world’, are discussed. “Ukiyo monogatari” by Asai Ryoi (1612-1691) is used as an example. In the first chapter, Asai Ryoi states the two different ways of perceiving ukiyo : as a ‘sorrowful world’ and as a ‘floating world’. This part of the text is followed by the story of the book’s main character’s life. Hyotaro (Ukiyo-bo as a monk) seems to be a careless idler who enjoys gambling and spending time and money in pleasure districts - a very common picture of ukiyo life. However, suddenly the nature of the text changes and Hyotaro starts to sermonize as a Confucian scholar. This article mostly examines the early joyful adventures of Hyotaro through the opening chapters of “Ukiyo monogatari”. It concludes with the selected parts of “Ukiyo-monogatari” translated into Russian.

1860 saw the first Japanese ambassadorial visit to America. The main purpose was to deliver The Treaty of Amity and Commerce ratifications to the US government. In addition, members of the Japanese delegation showed an active interest in various aspects of life in America and visited several important enterprises, including a shipyard and the U.S. Mint. A study related to the manner of monetary circulation was the responsibility of Oguri Kozukenosuke, who was one of the three leaders of the delegation. Thus, this interest in the work of the Mint was not merely a personal curiosity but was rather related to the serious problems with the adaptation of the exchange rates of the Japanese coins and the Mexican dollar, which at that time served as an international means of payment. In the period after the “opening” of Japan and the beginning of foreign trade, acute difficulties arose in carrying out exchange operations, which caused significant problems such as inflation and risky speculation. Therefore, an additional purpose of the Japanese group was to obtain information about the American monetary system and to assess the character of Japanese coins. The results obtained by this delegation provide a great deal of important objective data that will have great value for future historians and require careful analysis. The purpose of this paper is to create a basis for the study of this rich source of historical material. The article analyzes the basic data from this first Japanese diplomatic delegation to America, the importance of which has largely been ignored, primarily as a result of the issuing of the Man'en coin, which occurred before the embassy returned to Japan. Therefore, it is clear that the reforms of the monetary system in Japan were carried out without due regard for the information received by the ambassadorial group. An important reason for this was the increase in expenditures of the government, which was forced to replenish the treasury by means of massive minting of money, which in turn led to a decrease in the content of precious metals in Japanese coins. In general, the results of the broader study of the problem of adapting exchange rates after the “opening” of Japan are important for understanding the process of adaptation of monetary systems based on metallic money circulation and use of coins with different contents of precious metals to world trade.

Okinawa occupies a special place in the scholarly activities of the famous ethnologist Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962). Incorporated into Japan only in 1872, Okinawa was perceived there as the uncultured outskirts of the empire. Despite the fact that Japan was building a “nation state”, the residents of Okinawa fell into the category of “barbarians” who were yet to become really “civilized” people. The Japanese described Okinawa as “external land” ( gaichi ), believing that they themselves live on “internal land” ( naichi ). Yanagita Kunio played a very significant role in the integration of Okinawans into Japanese life. Having visited Okinawa only once (in 1921) and closely communicating with Iha Fuyu (1876-1947), an Okinawa native, for the rest of his life he was of the opinion that the Okinawans were the ancestors of the Japanese. At first, this idea was not very popular. However, after the end of World War II, when Okinawa came under the control of the American military administration, a widespread movement was launched in Japan to return Okinawa to Japanese jurisdiction. At this time, Yanagita became a scholar recognized by the state and enjoyed its support. Yanagita rehabilitated the concept of an "island country" ( shimaguni ) and gave it a positive meaning. Against the background of heated discussion about the ethnogenesis of the Japanese people, the last book by Yanagita, “Kaijo-no Michi” (“Sea Route”, 1961), which justified his hypothesis about Okinawa as the ancestral home of the Japanese, became widely known among non-professionals (for instance, it was highly praised by Oe Kenzaburo) primarily for political and emotional reasons, although the scientific basis of this work has always caused serious objections in the academic world. The popularity of the book declined after Okinawa was returned to Japan. Nevertheless, the role of this book in the history of social and political thought in Japan is hard to overestimate.

This article studies the economic contribution of Japan’s cultural content industry. Based on statistical data, the dynamics of particular industries are considered in detail, and the evaluations of the entire content industry are presented. It is observed that structural changes take place in the industry, driven by technological progress and current demographic processes in the country, while the overall size of the content industry remains approximately the same. Japan’s cultural content exports are also considered. It is noted that Japanese content producers used to be scarcely motivated to advance into foreign markets because of the large size of Japan’s domestic content markets, but nowadays the demographic processes make export revenues more and more important for them. Digitalization, implementation of technical innovations, participation in global value chains - these are the essential conditions to increase Japanese cultural exports in the present era, as the example of collaboration between Japansese animation studios and Netflix demonstrates. In the final section of the article, Japan’s content industry’s spillover effects are considered. First, cultural exports contribute to the attraction of foreign visitors to Japan, who in turn consume various goods and services within the country. Moreover, allocation of numerous cultural productions within a particular city or a territory is supposed to contribute to the creation of a ‘creative milieu’, which attracts creative people and makes positive impact on the region’s economy. We review some examples of Japanese ‘creative cities’, making a conclusion that such cities create socially inclusive environment and improve the population’s well-being. Summarizing the above, cultural enterprises hold a complex significance, which is hardly reducible to a simple numerical value. Furthermore, cultural creativity becomes more and more relevant in traditionally ‘non-creative’ industries; this is an additional reason why cultural assets are now as important as ever.

The subject matter of the paper is the entomological code of Japanese culture. The object of the research are the semantically loaded images of insects and entomosemizms in Japanese phraseology. The goals and objectives of the paper derive from the special attitude of the Japanese to insects and consist in identifying the semantic and motivational peculiarities of Japanese entomological vocabulary, describing the symbolic representation of insect images in Japanese linguoculture. The relevance of the study is due to the importance of studying ways of conceptualizing ideas about the world view embodied in Japanese language. Methodology: in the paper, the linguocultural analysis, viewing the phenomena of culture and language through the prism of mutual influence, semantic, structural, and descriptive methods were used. The study examined the semantics of insect images significant for the Japanese linguoculture: butterflies, dragonflies, cicadas, crickets, and fireflies, revealed their ethnic-cultural specificity, described their representation in literary and folklore sources. Conclusions: the study showed that a person perceives the world through certain symbols that have developed over the centuries in the culture. Using the material of myths and symbols, which act as embodiments of a certain way the Japanese people see objective reality, the authors reveal the inextricable link between language, culture, and cognition. The analysis of the literary sources, rituals and beliefs, the mythopoetic ideas associated with insects, lead to the conclusion that insects are widely represented not only in Japanese language, but also in culture. The research proves that the images of insects are an element of cultural information and an integral part of the national cultural space embedded in myth and archetype, characterized by archaism, structural and semantic peculiarities, the ability to interact with modern cultural context. The authors come to the conclusion that the imaginative thinking of different nations is characterized by semantic and structural originality, which is vividly reflected in the phraseological system. Entomosemisms, being a rich source of various kinds of metaphorical designations, presents a certain difficulty in translation, since they reflect the assessments of the surrounding world which are specific to the Japanese people.

The Chinese Diaspora in Japan comprises 677.6 thousand people, not counting Taiwanese migrants. This is 1,1 % of the world Chinese Diaspora, 0,5 % of Japan’s population, and the largest diaspora in Japan. There are “old” and “new” waves of Chinese immigration, depending on the time of their arrival in Japan. As a rule, Chinese migrants in Japan are from the developing northeast and central regions, and the developed Yangtze River Delta, Bohai Economic Rim, as well as southern coastal regions of China. In Japan, they live compactly in 25 of 47 prefectures. They have established about 40 different communities and public organizations for Overseas Chinese ( Huaqiao ). The article estimates the amount of the capital owned by overseas Chinese in Japan. The total value of their businesses is about $22 billion. It is many times higher than the volume of accumulated direct investments of the PRC to Japan as of 2017. Therefore, we can talk about the significant influence of Huaqiao on the development of economic cooperation between China and Japan and on the development of the PRC companies in this country. The author conducts a comparative analysis of the industry structure of companies owned by Huaqiao and the PRC companies in Japan and shows the formers’ deep interest in manufacturing and services. Some Huaqiao companies do business not only in Japan, but also in other countries and regions, and are therefore transnational corporations (TNC). The author gives data on 22 Huaqiao -owned TNC headquartered in Japan. In terms of business the most attractive countries for Huaqiao -owned TNCs are: China, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. The author also considers the issue of education and work of Chinese students and graduates of Japanese universities, who make up about 40 % of foreign students and graduates in Japan. The conclusion emphasizes the important role of Japanese Huaqiao in the development of Sino-Japanese trade and economic relations, scientific and technical cooperation, and in the implementation of the One Belt, One Road Initiative.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Georgiy Georgiyevitch Ksimidov (1877-1910), his biography and his pioneering study of Meiji period Japanese literature. Until now, the history of his life, including even the date of his death, was almost unknown. Exploring the materials of three archives in the Russian Far East and the State Historical Archive of Georgia, we were able to trace the key moments of Ksimidov’s biography and to revive some remarkable episodes of his life. Pontic Greek by origin, born in a Georgian village of Iraga, he became a student of a seminary in Tiflis. After that, he entered the Japanese department of the Eastern Institute in Vladivostok which he graduated from with a gold medal awarded for his thesis on Japanese literature. After graduation, he entered diplomatic service and soon met his early death, not surviving his 33rd birthday. G. Ksimidov’s work on the Japanese literature of his time was almost unknown among specialists until much later. However, a hundred years ago the situation was different, as immediately after it was published in 1909, the work sparked considerable interest. For instance, Maxim Gorky ordered it for his personal library. It must be said that for quite a long time Ksimidov’s book was in fact the only study specifically focusing on the Japanese literature of that period (afterwards, an analytical and systematic account of the history of Meiji literature was prepared by N.I. Conrad in 1934, but it was not published until 1973). The article presents G. Ksimidov’s ideas concerning Japanese literary history, his original views on Meiji literature, his evaluations of Japanese fiction and poetry of the time. Ksimidov spent several months at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages and he uses his personal observations of Japan in his essay. His book also contains many translations from Japanese short stories and a collection of curious literary facts. A modern day reader of Ksimidov’s work cannot but appreciate the breadth of coverage, a lively manner of narrating, and the author’s ardent interest in his chosen theme. As we can easily see now, he managed to catch the most important trends and events of the literary flow of his time and to draw the readers’ attention to the most significant literary figures and phenomena. Many ideas and conclusions presented by the author, as well as the remarkable details he retells, may be of great interest to modern Japanese studies scholars, both philologists and historians.

The eleventh annual conference of Russia’s Association of Japanologists “Japan and Russia in the Era of Great Transformations” was held on December 20-21, 2018 at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University). The topics discussed during the conference included historical development of both countries, Japanese culture and society, social and economic development, politics and foreign policy as well as Russia-Japan relations. Leading experts discussed the key trends of development and critical junctures in the history of both Russia and Japan. In addition to the plenary session, three panels were held: “Politics”, “Economics and society”, “History, literature, and culture”. Russian and Japanese researchers, professors, experts, and diplomats participated in the conference. Representatives of the Japanese Embassy in Russia emphasized the importance of academic exchanges in the context of the Year of Russia in Japan and the Year of Japan in Russia held in 2018-2019.