Japan

Japan (Nippon, Nihon; Ukrainian: Японія). An Asian country (2020 pop 126,146,099) occupying an archipelago consisting of four main islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku), the Ryukyu, and thousands of minor islands in the northwestern Pacific Ocean; it has an area of 377,975 sq km.

Ukrainian-Japanese relations are a 20th-century phenomenon. The first contacts occurred during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, during which Sen J. Russell of Hawaii (M. Sudzylovsky), a former medical student at Kyiv University, went to Japan and organized relief for captured tsarist troops (many of them Ukrainians) and published a periodical for them. The theatrical troupe of Kostiantyn Karmeliuk-Kamensky, which often toured Ukrainian settlements in the Russian Far East and China, also performed in Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, and Kamakura in 1916. As a result of the efforts of the Russian consul in Japan, the Ukrainian Y. Hashkevych, an Oriental Institute was established in Vladivostok; Japanese was taught there. Ukrainian students at the institute later lived in Japan: B. Vobly was the representative of the government of the Ukrainian National Republic there. Neznaiko, a Ukrainian from the Far East, studied at the Orthodox seminary in Tokyo. An Orthodox mission existed at the Russian consulate in Hakodate and, from 1872, in Tokyo; one of its priests in Tokyo was the Ukrainian S. Hlibov. The kobzar and Esperantist Vasyl Yeroshenko taught in Tokyo (1914–21) and wrote poetry, stories, fairy tales, and plays in Japanese.

In early July 1917 an attaché from the Japanese embassy in Petrograd visited the Central Rada in Kyiv, and in November 1917 Japan opened a military mission there, headed by Gen Takayanachi. A Japanese consulate in Odesa oversaw shipping between Odesa and the Far East. Japan had a representative in the Conference of Ambassadors that recognized Poland’s rule of Galicia in 1923.

The Allied military intervention in the Russian Far East in 1918 involved over 120,000 Japanese troops, who occupied territories with large Ukrainian populations, including the cities of Vladivostok, Nikolsk (Ussuriisk), Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, and Chita. From 1920 to November 1922 these territories constituted the Far Eastern Republic, which was a Japanese protectorate. When the republic was occupied by Soviet forces, some 200 Ukrainian activists were arrested; 24, including P. Horovy, Yurii Hlushko, V. Kyiovych, M. Pyrohiv, and V. Kozak, were tried in Chita in 1923–4 as separatists and Japanese collaborators.

Many Ukrainians in the Far East fled from Soviet rule to Harbin, Manchuria, which was occupied by Japan in 1931. The Ukrainians in Harbin had frequent contacts with the Japanese military authorities, who restored to them the building of the Ukrainian Club that had been confiscated by the Chinese and allowed the newspaper Man'dzhurs'kyi vistnyk (1932–7, ed Ivan Svit) to be published and several Ukrainian community organizations to function. The Japanese liaison officer K. Horie frequently interceded on behalf of the Ukrainians there. In the late 1920s and 1930s, émigrés of the Ukrainian National Republic had contacts with Japanese officials in Europe. In Warsaw, General Volodymyr Salsky influenced the views of the Japanese military attaché, Col Yanagita; the latter was later transferred to Hsinking, where he helped the Ukrainians in Manchukuo in their dealings with the authorities.

In the 1930s, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had political and military contacts with the Japanese, who were interested in furthering anti-Soviet activity in the Far East. In 1934 a few OUN operatives went from Europe via Tokyo to Harbin. There they became active in the Ukrainian community and conducted secret political work in the Soviet Far East. The OUN members B. Markiv, R. Korda-Fedoriv, and M. Mytliuk created the Ukrainian Far Eastern Sich youth organization in Harbin. In 1937 the Japanese authorities sided openly with émigré Russian fascist organizations and circumscribed the activity of most of the Ukrainian organizations, except for the Ukrainian National Colony in Manchukuo. However, they allowed the Ukrainians in Shanghai to publish the newspaper Ukraïns’kyi holos na Dalekomu skhodi (1941–4, ed M. Milko) and to organize a Ukrainian National Committee.

Japanese-Ukrainian cultural contacts have been mainly literary. In Japan the best-known Ukrainian writer has been Taras Shevchenko. The fullest Japanese collection of his poetry (26 poems), translated by T. Shibuya, S. Komatsu, T. Murai, H. Tadzawa, and T. Kinoshita, appeared in Tokyo in 1964. Several articles about him have also appeared. In 1961, an Association for Shevchenko Studies was established, and meetings of Soviet Ukrainian and Japanese writers took place on the 100th anniversary of Shevchenko’s death and the 150th anniversary of his birth. A few works by Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Pavlo Tychyna, and Mykhailo Stelmakh have also been translated into Japanese.

Some Japanese literature has been translated into Ukrainian; eg, Antin Lototsky’s Iapons'ki kazky (Japanese Fairy Tales, 1926), S. Tokunaga’s Street without Sunshine (1932) and Silent Mountains (1954), W. Hosoi’s Kodji the Textile Worker, and T. Kobayashi’s The Crabmeat Factory Ship (1934). Translations of Japanese literature were published in 1961 in an anthology of Oriental literature edited by Andrii Kovalivsky. The émigré Ihor Shankovsky published a collection of 100 13th-century Japanese court poems in Ukrainian translation.

In the 1920s, Japanese language and literature were taught at Kharkiv University, which published F. Pushchenko’s Japanese grammar in 1926. Also in 1926, the All-Ukrainian Learned Association of Oriental Studies (VUNAS) was established in Kharkiv, with branches in Kyiv and Odesa; F. Pushchenko was the director of the Japanese section. Articles in Japanese studies and translations appeared in Biuleten’ VUNAS (1926–8) and in the journal Skhidnii svit (1927–31). In 1931, translations of 26 classical Japanese poems were published in a collection with an introductory essay by O. Kremena.

Outside Ukraine, Stepan Levynsky, who worked at the Polish consulate in Harbin, Peking, and Saigon from 1935 to 1946, published an account of his travels, Z iapons'koho domu (From a Japanese Home, 1932). V. Odynets studied at the Oriental Institute in Harbin and later taught East European history at Hsinking University. He and A. Dibrova, with the help of Levynsky, Ivan Svit, and several Japanese linguists, compiled a Ukrainian-Japanese dictionary (ed Y. Saburo, Harbin 1944). The Council of the Ukrainian National Colony in Harbin published the anthology Dalekyi skhid (The Far East), which included translations of Japanese poetry and articles on Japanese folkways and education.

After the Second World War, notable Soviet Ukrainian Japanese specialists included Ya. Pobilenky and I. Chyrko. In Japan, specialists in Ukrainian literature have been S. Fukuoka at Hokkaido University, K. Komatsu at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Kobe, and S. Kimura at Tokyo University. K. Nakai has written on Ukrainian history. Ukraine has been studied within the framework of Soviet and East European studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Svit, Ivan. Ukraïns'ko-iapons'ki vzaiemyny 1903–1945 (New York 1972)

Arkadii Zhukovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]