The article is devoted to three acrostic forms of classical Japanese poetry waka : butsumeika ( mono no na ), oriku and kutsukaburi . Japanese waka songs under discussion are represented by its most common form - tanka (short poem). The primary sources of the study date back to 9^th- 15^th centuries.

The article examines the basic features of two major parts of the Japanese social security system - the pension system and medical insurance.. It also brings a short history of their creation and development, describes their present state. Problems that this system is facing as a result of the country’s rapid population aging, and measures undertaken by the government to soften the acuteness of these problems are also examined.

Urban culture of the Edo period gave birth to the new aesthetic ideal. It was called sui in Kyoto, and iki in Edo, but in writing it was the same hieroglyph 粋. Unlike the previous ideals, sui / iki is not an attribute of the era, when it originated. Even today it is widely used as an emotive and evaluative appraisal of everything, that one faces in his everyday life, and is recognized as a new link in the chain of aesthetic categories (mono-no aware - yugen - wabi-sabi) of previous periods.

The article focuses on the general formation principles of Slavic (Glagolitic and Cyrillic), and Japanese writing systems ( iroha ), both based on the idea of creating poetic alphabets. These alphabets were created irrespectively of each other in different parts of the world at the turn of the IX-X centuries. Their symbols reflect a kind of language-infused image of the world of each nation, which corresponds to their subsequent ethnic consciousness, being expressed in terms of moral and ethical standards and eternal truth. It is no mere chance that they are considered to be «basic» and are called «truism»”.

In the context of the subject “M. Gorky and the East” studying Gorky’s attitude to the Land of the Rising Sun, its history, culture and public life can be considered to be a topic of special consideration. Gorky's interest in Japan had many sides, and included reading scientific literature and fiction, maintaining relations with Japanese writers, and collecting objects of Oriental plastic arts ( netsuke, okimono ). The article shows that Gorky's perception of Japan’s modernization and its integration into world cultural environment hasn't been deprived of contradictions. Admiration of the culture and national identity of the Land of the Rising Sun hasn’t prevented Gorky from seeing deep social problems of Japanese society in the beginning of the 20th century.

The article is an attempt to analyze the genesis and development of Japanese kaidan genre («a tale of the extraordinary - of weird and mysterious things») in the last 50 years during the globalization period. The author shows the main trends of the genre, pointing to prominent authors within the above-mentioned period of transformation of classical folklore kaidan to neokaidan or J-horror. The author analyses the reasons of extremely impetuous proliferation of kaidan and its creatures - Yokai - throughout the world, trying to find the reasons of unpredictable interest for kaidan. The reason lies not only in the world globalization and commercialization of the topic of kaidan, horror, or supernatural creatures, and not only in the mythological mentality of the Japanese. The «boom» of Yokai in our days can be explained by people’s fear of the «unknown» in the unpredictable world. That’s why it makes Yokai an extremely important instrument not only for investigating contemporary world culture, but also for understanding the archetypes of the «collective unconscious» of the modern society in the whole.