The article presents an overview of the collective monograph “Japanese Culture in the West” ed. by Katasonova, E. L. and Dolin, A. A (Moscow: Institute of Oriental Studies of RAS, 2024. 544 p. ISBN: 978-5-907846-81-4). The monograph, for the first time in the history of Russian Oriental studies, presents a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the spread and influence of Japanese culture on the countries of Europe and America in the 19th – 21st centuries. The reviewer notes that analyzing the experience of “exporting Japanese culture” makes it possible to develop a methodology for transcultural processes, broaden the concepts of cultural authenticity and identity, and propose an alternative to binary models of cultural interaction.
Bilingual terminology alignment databases represent crucial resources in the field of natural language processing, holding significant value for multilingual applications such as cross-lingual information retrieval and machine translation. Bilingual terminology pairs are typically obtained through manual translation or automatic extraction from bilingual parallel corpora. However, manual translation requires domain-specific expertise and proves time-consuming and labor-intensive, while large-scale bilingual parallel corpora in specific domains remain scarce. To this end, a terminology alignment method based on multi-level feature fusion (TA-MFF) is proposed for Japanese scientific and technological literature terminology translation. First, a multi-engine collaborative generation mechanism is designed to produce target pseudo terminology candidates through parallel translations from heterogeneous machine translation systems, effectively expanding the coverage of potential translations while mitigating single-engine bias. Second, a hybrid feature extraction architecture is constructed by integrating Transformer’s multi-head attention with BiLSTM’s sequential modeling capabilities, where positional encoding is deliberately omitted to leverage BiLSTM’s inherent strength in capturing positional relationships, thereby enhancing context-aware feature representation. Third, an adaptive multi-level fusion strategy is developed through the synergistic combination of soft attention-based global interaction features and cosine similarity-based local interaction features, with trainable weights automatically balancing their respective contributions to achieve comprehensive semantic modeling. These innovations collectively address the critical
challenges of translation ambiguity reduction, cross-lingual feature alignment, and multi-perspective similarity evaluation in Japanese scientific terminology alignment, ultimately improving both precision and robustness compared to conventional approaches.
Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General), Chemical engineering
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 is made with the identification of the causes, nature, and consequences in relation to the three significant financial crises observed in the period 1990– 2009. 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 the global financial crisis of 2007–2009 with minimal losses, which negatively affected not so much the credit and stock markets as the real sector of the Japanese economy and its foreign trade. From a scientific standpoint, the spread of crises is productively considered 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. An important feature has been identified, which is that the main channel for the transmission of shocks in a given country is trade relations, and not 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 base 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 weakly transferred it to other countries. Cross-industry infection spread more actively (it was recorded by more than 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.
Image is a word or a word arrangement that has the effect of clarifying or concretizing what the poet has stated. Images in literary works include many kinds of things related to human senses. This study compares and equates the emphasis on figurative language style in the lyrics of songs with two language translation versions of the same name, Kokoro no Tomo which was set to music by Mayumi Itsuwa in 1980 and popularized in the world. Translated in Indonesian with the title Kokoro no Tomo by the music group Zivilia. The method used by the author in the research is a qualitative method, focusing on comparing the images in the lyrics of the song. The results of visual exploration of similarities and differences in the lyrics of the two songs include (1) sensational images, (2) tactile images, and (3) visual images. an illustration that both versions provide an equivalent statement with sentences from the Japanese and Indonesian versions. With the difference in the use of images, the lyrics of the two songs have adjusted the content to suit the musical needs of the people, especially in this case, the people of Indonesia
The translation activity of the founder of revolutionary Chinese literature, Jiang Guangci, is considered. The novelty of the study is due to the fact that the translations of Russian and Soviet literature by Jiang Guangci are almost not studied in scientific circles. The relevance of the study is due to the importance of building and strengthening Chinese-Russian cultural ties, including in the field of translation of fiction, in which Jiang Guangci was successful in the 20s of the XX century. It has been established that Jiang Guangci’s translations corresponded to his revolutionary ideals, which he embodied in his original works. It is noted that Jiang Guangci's worldview determined his choice of Russian and Soviet works embodying revolutionary ideals for translation. It is shown that his translations received wide support from young people due not only to the content, but also to the simple, understandable language of presentation. The participation of Jiang Guangci in the literary discussion about the translation strategy is presented. Due to his good knowledge of the Russian, he made translations from the original, and not from Japanese translations of Russian works. The authors come to the conclusion that the translation activity of Jiang Guangci has not been sufficiently studied and has prospects for study.
Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
The short-short story was first introduced by Japanese writer Tsuzuki Michio, who in the late 1950s – the early 1960s familiarized the Japanese reader with extra-short stories of American author Fredric W. Brown (1906–1972); his traditions were followed by Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1997), Akagawa Jirō (b. 1948), and other authors experimenting in the new genre of social and psychological science fiction, as well as in the genre of fantasy and detective stories. In American literature, three major specific features of a short-short story were formulated: 1) a fresh idea, 2) an unexpected turn of events, 3) an unpredictable ending. These specific features can be traced in Japanese extra-short stories as well. Since the process of the emergence and development of the extra-short story as a new form of Japanese literature was influenced by American micro fiction, the research examines the elements borrowed from Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s first short-short stories; this includes genres, topics, canons, artistic styles and devices, as well as the treatment of certain social problems. The paper analyzes Hoshi’s and Akagawa’s short-short fiction from a comparative perspective, with an emphasis on intertextuality – shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, in this case, the texts by an American writer. Some literary parallels to Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction can be found in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s first collection of short-short stories «Bokko-chan» (1971), which consists of stories written in 1958–1970, as well as in Akagawa Jirō’s first collection of short-short stories «The Dancing Man» (1986), which consists of stories written in the late 1970s – early 1980s. The succession of plots and philosophical ideas by Brown is examined on the material of seven early short-shorts by Hoshi, where the allusion to the American writer’s micro fiction can be traced; in addition, it is also noted that, in some mystic extra-short stories by Akagawa, it is not the plots which are borrowed, but mostly artistic devices and various techniques, such as psychologism, black humor, wordplay, and metaphorical images. American origins of the Japanese short-short story are investigated for the first time.
A review of the monograph "Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan" by Allison Alexy, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago and London), 2020.
This paper is devoted to the problems of studying and perception of the Japanese military intervention in the Far East and Siberia regions during the Russian Civil War in modern historical literature. The work discusses the relationship of the development of historiography of Russo-Japanese relations with public perceptions and targeted propaganda by political elites and authorities. Due to the peculiarities of Russia's geopolitical position, all the problems of international relations in the Far East region were considered through the lens of the country's territorial integrity. During the Civil War, the Bolsheviks successfully used anti-Japanese phobias to fight political opponents. The political propaganda attitudes formed in the Civil War and subsequent events of the Soviet-Japanese confrontation in the 1930s were transferred to the works on the history of Japanese military intervention. During the Soviet period, rather than studying the events and problems, historians focused on interpreting the official statements and the positions of the party and Soviet leaders. This trend is generally preserved in the post-Soviet historical studies too. The paper details the works of Russian historians and Japanese scholars over the past three years. A number of interesting studies are noted, for example, the works by the Japanese studies scholar K.O. Sarkisov, historians A.G. Teplyakov, F.A. Popov and others. In general, due to the lack of public demand and the inaccessibility of the documents, Russian historians do not tackle the topic even despite there being the occasion of the centenary of the events. The current level of studies of the history of Japanese military intervention in Russia remains at the level reached back in the 1930s. This situation reflects both the problems of Russian historical science and the current situation in Russo-Japanese relations.
The career of novelist Haruki Murakami has conventionally been divided into two periods: detachment and commitment. Murakami’s transition to commitment, in the sense of a social engagement with a defined political sensibility, is generally seen to begin with the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle [1995]. However, the so-called Rat Trilogy (Hear the Wind Sing [1979], Pinball, 1973 [1980] and A Wild Sheep Chase [1982]) sees Murakami address the concept of shutaisei—the question of individual agency and subjectivity at the centre of Japan’s student activist movement in the late 1960s. Examining the trilogy’s central characters through the lens of shutaisei, I argue that a commitment to political and historical awareness can already be found in Murakami’s early works.
Shunji SuzukiDepartment of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Japanese Red Cross Katsushika Maternity Hospital, Tokyo, JapanWe read the recent review article entitled “Prevention of preterm delivery: current challenges and future prospects” by van Zijl et al.1 However, they did not adequately discuss the prevention of preterm delivery in cases with a history of conization, or a cone biopsy of the uterine cervix.2,3 Performing a cervical cerclage has been common in the treatment of pregnant women with cervical insufficiency to prevent preterm delivery, as reported by van Zijl et al.1 However, the effect of prophylactic cerclage in women with a history of conization is little understood, because there are no prospective randomized controlled trials concerning the efficiency and risk of prophylactic cerclage in this subgroup of pregnant women.3–15 Table 1 summarizes the previous examinations concerning the effect of prophylactic cerclage in pregnancy after conization, including four English language articles searched using PubMed (Bethesda, MD, USA) and eight Japanese language articles searched using Igaku Chuo Zasshi® (NPO Japan Medical Abstracts society, Tokyo, Japan), with the key search terms of “cerclage” and “conization”.4–15 In these studies, statistical significances of the categorical variables were tested by Χ2 test (with Yates’s correction) or Fisher’s exact test. As shown in Table 1, there have been some small retrospective population-based cohort studies in this field. In an earlier study,3 cerclage has been recommended in pregnancies following excessive cone biopsy. However, some recent studies have suggested an association between local infection in cases of short cervices related to large cones and preterm labor in women with a history of conization.4–7 In these cases, sutures can act as a foreign body and lead to uterine irritability and contractions after a cerclage procedure.5–7 Moreover, some authors have reported a significant increase in pathologic flora in the vagina and cervix after cerclage leading to chorioamnionitis and preterm labor.16 Thus, prophylactic cerclage is used more sparingly in pregnancies following conization in recent years.5–7 Authors' replyMaud D van Zijl,1 Bouchra Koullali,1 Ben WJ Mol,2 Eva Pajkrt,1 Martijn A Oudijk11Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; 2The Robinson Research Institute, School for Reproductive Health and Pediatrics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, AustraliaWe have read the response by Dr Suzuki with interest, and we agree with Dr Suzuki that our paper does not discuss preventive measures in cases with a history of conization. However, in our opinion, there is currently insufficient evidence of benefit from a cerclage in this specific group.It is known that women with a prior excisional procedure have a higher risk of preterm birth.1–3 As Dr Suzuki already points out, there are no randomized controlled trials that focus on the prevention of preterm birth in these high-risk women. So far, literature on the best strategy to prevent preterm birth after cone biopsy is lacking. Therefore, our paper does not give clear advice on how to treat these cases.View the original paper by van Zijl et al.
This paper examines the correlation between political thought and poetic expression by introducing the literary work of Ōishi Seinosuke (1867–1911), a Japanese socialist and physician who was executed during the High Treason Incident of 1910/11. It shows that personal opinions regarding society and government do have a strong influence on the individual style of an author, not only in the matter of content, but also concerning the chosen language and the mode of expression. However, Ōishi himself, who studied in the United States from 1892 to 1895, seems to have been aware of several discrepancies between his own political ideals and the reality of literary creation. In fact, he suddenly abandoned his efforts in Japanese short poetry at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and thenceforth conveyed his political message to the audience via the more conservative way of writing essays. This change of medium indicates that Ōishi no longer thought of poems as an appropriate means to fight the injustice of society and the destructive foreign policy of the Japanese authorities.
Language and Literature, Japanese language and literature
This paper analyzes the particular problems concerning Japanese haiku in colonial Taiwan in comparison with haiku during the same period in Korea. Haiku began to be written by the Japanese in Taiwan just after its colonization, and much later by some Taiwanese. While Japanese haiku poets in Taiwan strongly stressed accommodation to particular characteristics of its quasi-tropical weather, asking ardently for a compilation of Taiwanese seasonal words (台湾季語), those in Korea stressed the Korean colors of its local community (朝鮮色). There were meaningful instances of cooperation among Japanese and Korean haiku poets in Korea, while no similar cooperation occurred in Taiwan. This corresponds seemingly with the fact that a larger number of works of Korean poets were accepted by the leading haiku magazine “Hototogisu” (ほととぎす) than those of Taiwanese poets. In this sense, Korean haiku was superior to Taiwanese haiku. The cause of this phenomenon seems to be, at least partly, cultural discrimination among Japanese colonies. For example, Japanese haiku leader Takahama Kyoshi (高浜虚子) visited the Korean haiku circle three times during the colonial era, while he never officially visited the Taiwanese haiku circle. Toward the end of Japanese colonization, the leading Taiwanese haiku poet Ō Hekishō (王碧蕉) criticized Japanese conventional season-consciousness, trying to adapt haiku to Taiwanese traditional culture, but in vain. (197 words)
The term nenkoujoretsu as one characteristic of Japanese culture gives much influence on management system for Japanese companies operating in Indonesia, including promotion system for employee career development. This system is very much different from the promotion system of western companies. Current developments show promotion system in the company does not entirely focus on seniority and age, but focuses on educational background and individual achievement. Thus the implementation of nenkoujoretsu on Japanese companies has changed. Further research related to the implementation of nenkoujoretsu on Japanese companies in Indonesia was conducted by examining working interest in Japanese companies in Indonesia of the Japanese literature students at final semester. The scope of this study was students at final or seventh semester in STBA JIA-Bekasi, Universitas Al Azhar Indonesia-Jakarta, Universitas Darma Persada, STBA LIA-Jakarta, Universitas Bina Nusantara, and Universitas Nasional-Jakarta. This study used questionnaire and literature method. Purpose of this research is readers can understand about student interest in Japanese literature to work in Japanese companies in Indonesia. This study concludes most students of Japanese literature at final or seventh semester are interested in working in Japanese companies. A large part of the reasons for respondents who were interested in working in a foreign company is due to big salary. In addition, performance also plays an important role and determines the position and higher salary than the senior as well as the ability to apply skills in Japanese language and knowledge about Japanese.
The Education System Order (Gakusei) was promulgated in 1872 and remained in effect until 1879. This period is often referred to by specialists as the “translated textbooks period”. An analysis of language textbooks from that period shows that they reflected the ideological and philosophical views dominating the world of education at the beginning of the Meiji era. The major influence at that time was American and Pestalozzian. But the influence of Edo-period textbooks was still palpable in these so-called new publications. The Gakusei period was a unique moment in the history of Japanese education, a situation that would continue for another few years but would never again be repeated.