With the increase in cross-border educational contacts thanks to the Internet, the importance of obtaining objective, rather than stereotypical, ideas about foreign countries and their citizens by young people increases.

One of the several contributory reasons of choosing university students as a target group for our research is the fact that education is closely tied to a nation’s growth and development, which strengthens social cohesion and the active civic participation of the youth. Also, the reason for focusing on students is that it is presumed that university students (future university graduates) would, perhaps inevitably, have firsthand connection or experience with political matters in the future, and so they will influence their country’s future politics and international relations in the Asia Pacific Region.

The main aim of this study was to examine the changes in public perceptions and attitude of Japanese and Russian students towards the other country from 2007 to 2021. This study does not concentrate on political developments, but assesses changes and variations in students’ perceptions, images, and attitudes towards Russia and Japan over the 15-year period, seeking to identify the key events that inspired the identified perceptions and reactions. The surveys of Japanese and Russian university students conducted from 2007 to 2021 serve as the empirical basis for this study.

In recent decades, images of countries have attracted close attention of scholars from around the world. When we launched the study, to the best of our knowledge, there were no other long-term studies that investigated these topics among this target group. This paper aims to fill this scholarly gap in literature by exploring and discussing the above-mentioned topics.

The article is devoted to the history of exhibitions of Japanese children’s drawings in the Soviet Union in 1920s – 1980s, as well as to the critical interpretation and perception by the Soviet audience of the artistic works of Japanese children. The importance of such events can be seen not only in the artistic value of the exposition material, but also in the influence of the expositions on the image of Japan in mass consciousness.

The material is devoted to key exhibition projects related to the presentation of Japanese children’s art, in particular, the “Exhibition of Children’s Books and Children’s Art of Japan” in 1928, as well as a series of international exhibitions “I See the World,” held in the USSR since the late 1960s. The greatest attention is paid to the peculiarities of Soviet art criticism towards Japanese children’s drawing in the pre-war and post-war period, as well as the influence of Soviet ideology on the interpretation of children’s art from Japan.

The author comes to the conclusion that the approach to the exhibitions was characterized by ideological indoctrination, as well as certain stereotypes about Japan, which created a request for exoticization of the creative products of the Japanese children. During the initial period of the Russian-Japanese cultural ties, despite the controversial nature of the Soviet art criticism of Japanese children’s drawings, the exhibition had substantial importance for the cultural ties of the two countries. In the post-war period, not only mono- national exhibitions, but also large projects involving multiple countries drew attention to various creative works of Japanese children. Since the early 1990s, the past importance of such exhibitions as an important element of cultural exchange receded, which is also true for the present times, despite the episodic exhibition projects of this sort in various regions of Russia. The “propaganda” component of children’s drawings faded. It is, however, regrettable that such exhibitions stopped attracting public attention due to the lack of interest of the media to these initiatives, as well as of systematic study of the works of Japanese children from the point of view of art studies and psychology.

The article is based on documents, many of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, from the following archives: the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg.

Life expectancy is the most important indicator of the state of society and the quality of life of the people who live in it. It depends on many factors that affect mortality: nutrition, physical activity, epidemic and other diseases, natural, social and anthropogenic disasters, the level of public anxiety, the state of the environment, healthcare, hygiene, etc.

In Japan during the Tokugawa period, the body did not belong to the person himself. His mission was to “serve” – to the overlord and parents. This was possible only if the person was healthy for as long as possible. During the Tokugawa era, the Japanese were taught that only a healthy person could fulfill his duty. Healthcare was entrusted to the person himself, there was no public health system. Despite the huge differences in natural conditions, lifestyle, nutritional diet, scientific and medical ideas, in terms of life expectancy, Japan was approximately on the same level as major European countries.

After the Meiji revolution, the concept of “service” did not disappear, but now the main object of service became the state represented by the emperor. The state made serious efforts in the field of healthcare, but the negative consequences of modernization for a long time did not allow to increase life expectancy. Its slow but steady growth begins only in the second half of the 1920s. However, before the Second World War, Japan lagged significantly behind the developed countries of the West in terms of life expectancy. The expansionist policy of Japan demanded to increase the number of Japanese people. Since increasing life expectancy is a time-consuming task, the choice was made in favor of a policy of increasing the birth rate.

The article analyzes the features of the financial crises in Japan in the context of using theoretical and practical approaches to financial contagion. A brief overview of the three significant financial crises observed in the period 1990–2009 is made with the identification of their causes, nature, and consequences. A strong impact on the Japanese economy was exerted by the banking crisis of 1997–2001, which became one of the most noticeable events of the “lost decade”. Its lessons allowed the Japanese government to overcome with minimal losses the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, which negatively affected not so much the credit and stock markets as the real sector of the Japanese economy and its foreign trade.

It is productive to consider the spread of crises from the standpoint of the theory and methodology of financial contagion. It is a process of transmission of negative shocks that can lead to the disruption of fundamental links between countries and markets, thereby contributing to the growth of crises and instability. The article shows that Japan can act as both a transmitter and a recipient of infection. Examples of studies that examine the channels and direction of financial contagion in Japan are given. Its important feature is that the main channel for the transmission of shocks in a given country are trade relations, and not the financial ones. Taking this circumstance into account explains the effectiveness of the policy of supporting the real sector of the economy pursued by the Japanese government during the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

In order to illustrate the methodology of financial contagion, the article conducted an empirical study of the country and cross-industry effects of infection in the Japanese economy during the COVID-19 period. A specific infection detection tool (statistical tests) and an extensive empirical database were used. As a result, the country effects were confirmed only partially – Japan was the recipient of the financial contagion that came from China, but only weakly transferred it to other countries. Cross-industry infection spread more actively (it was recorded by more than a half of the tests). At the same time, uneven transmission of shocks between sectors was detected; possible causes of high or low susceptibility to infection in different sectors were discussed.

The article addresses the experience of Fumio Kishida’s first year as Prime Minister of the Japanese government with respect to its economic policy vision and implementation. The latter is presented by comparing it to the policy pursued over the past ten years by PM Kishida’s predecessors in the office, on the one hand, and to the commitments he announced during the 2021 election campaign, on the other. The paper notes that, in its basic moments, the economic policy of the cabinet of the new leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party continues the course previously maintained by the team of then-PM Shinzō Abe, known as Abenomics. This manifests itself in the specifics of the use of basic tools of macroeconomic policy, monetary and tax instruments to be named first, as well as in choosing priorities for the policy stimulating consumption and economic activity. The continuity of the course can be particularly illustrated by loose monetary policy; positive view of the depreciation of Japanese national currency; moderately expansionary fiscal policy relying on domestic borrowing; preference given to the interests of the corporate sector. Legacy inherited from previous administrations also includes the government striving to revitalize private demand; promoting investment in R&D, venture and innovating enterprises with particular stress on regional economies. Kishida’s particular emphasis on invigorating redistributive mechanisms and increasing labor share in national income has not yet led to material decisions and actions by the government. Nor did Kishida make progress with his commitment to expand the ring of beneficiaries of the capitalist market system, as part of his idea of “new capitalism”.

In recent months, the attention of the government and its economic team has been largely focused on overcoming the consequences of the disruption of transnational chain lines in production, trade, and logistics, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and rising geopolitical tensions. In addressing this issue, they prioritized subsidizing businesses and households to partially offset energy and food price hikes; securing diversification or localization of critical links of trade and production chains, as well as the exclusion of politically undesirable or unstable locations from them. At this stage, however, the actions of the government are limited to setting relevant goals and plans to provide finance for programs with effectiveness yet to be proved.

The last years of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s are known as the “era of one-yen books” in the history of Japanese book printing. One-yen books were serial subscription publications, with the price of one yen per volume. The first such publication was the Complete Works of Contemporary Japanese Literature (Kindai Nihon Bungaku Zenshū), launched by Kaizōsha publishing house in 1926. The series was very successful with at least 250,000 subscribers. The “one-yen editions race” was initiated: many publishing houses began releasing their own one-yen series as early as the following year. The most commercially successful among the one-yen books (at least 400,000 copies) was the Complete Works of World Literature (Sekai bungaku zenshū) published by the Shinchōsha publishing house in 1927–1932.

The Complete Works of World Literature consists of 57 volumes in two parts (38 volumes of the first part were published in 1927–1930, and then more 19 volumes were added, composing the second part of the publication). The books of the series had a hard cover and a thought-out design and were supposed to serve not only for reading, but also for the decoration of the house and the demonstration of the owner’s status.

The series represents one of the possible canons of world literature. The time frame of the presented works is from the 14th century (the first volume is Dante’s Divine comedy) to the present (the last volume contains six works, five of them written in the 1920s, while the volume was released in 1929). The series includes prose, drama, and, to a lesser extent, poetry. The volumes of the series have a fairly extensive apparatus (prefaces, comments in some volumes, portraits of authors, monthly attachments tucked into the pages of the volumes). World literature is presented as Western literature. Translations of the works of Western literature played an important role in the formation of national Japanese literature. The success of this series also demonstrated the readers’ great interest in literary translations, especially in the translations of modern literature.

In the second half of 2022, the Japanese political world was shaken by a major scandal: in July 2022, former Prime Minister and a prominent member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party Abe Shinzō was killed at an election rally. The assassin, caught at the crime scene, declared that the murder was a revenge for the victim’s connection with the Unification Church, which, according to the perpetrator’s words, had led his family to financial ruin. Initially, this explanation seemed fantastical, but the investigation that followed revealed that both Abe Shinzō himself and many other Japanese politicians had been maintaining connections with the Unification Church for many years. This caused an uproar in Japanese society, especially given the rather controversial reputation of the Unification Church. On January 26, 2023, the Association of Japanologists and the research laboratory “Center for Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian Studies” of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) held a roundtable “Unification Church in Japan as a Sociocultural and Political Phenomenon”. The participants of the roundtable analyzed the situation around the Unification Church and its role in Japanese politics in detail, studied the specific features of the “new religions” in Japanese society, and considered the factors determining their influence on the political world of Japan.

The article offers a critical review of the Russian edition of the comic novel Footing it Along the Tōkaidō by an outstanding writer of the Tokugawa era (1603–1868) Jippenshya Ikku. Recently published by Saint Petersburg’s Hyperion, the novel was masterfully translated from Japanese by Anastassya Y. Borkina who thoroughly studied this complex observational comedy of manners or humerous book (kokkeibon) and provided the necessary analytical apparatus, including commentaries and a preface. The narrative develops around the adventures of two characters, Yajirobei and Kitahachi, who embark on a journey along the so-called Tōkaidō road, the most important of the routes of Japan, connecting Edo and Kyoto. They meet various personages from a variety of cities and regions as well as from different strata of society, getting themselves into farcical situations and every time finding their way out of comic conundrums. The road itself works as a central axis of the story, propelling the characters forward and offering diverse settings for their escapades. The novel with illustrations by the writer was especially popular in nineteenth century Japan, yet the adventures of Yajirobei and Kitahachi remain well-known up until today, providing inspiration for a trove of literary parodies, manga novels, anime books, and video games.