Views of Russia in Japan in the Late 20th Century

Kaminaga, Eisuke (2023) Views of Russia in Japan in the Late 20th Century. RUSSIANSTUDIES.HU, 5 (2). pp. 11-32. ISSN 2677-0660

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Abstract

Japanese people have repeatedly constructed collective memories of Russia on the basis of their experiences and imagination regarding “Siberia.” After their experiences of World War Two most Japanese people shared feelings of one-sided victimhood toward the Soviet Union. At the same time, some of them loved Soviet culture, respected Soviet science, or idolized the Soviet Union as the great leader of the leftist movement. Lack of concrete information on the Soviet Union sometimes even caused some people to excessively idealize it. Mikhail Gorbachev greatly improved Japanese people’s feelings of closeness to the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. However, these trends disappeared rapidly with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Japanese people who witnessed political and economic turmoil in Russia from the early to the late 1990s again came to have a negative attitude toward Russia.

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