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| Abstract |
This paper makes us rethink the way Japanese-language education actually began in Russia. The history of teaching Japanese in this country dates as far back as the end of the 17th century, when a ship...wrecked Japanese sailor named Denbei drifted ashore the east coast of Russia. This event in turn laid the foundations for Russian Japanese language education, which carried on developing into the early 19th century. This paper is a reassessment of the role the shipwrecked Japanese played and it is completely based on the historical background of Russia at that time. We know there were Japanese people who were unfortunately shipwrecked at sea and luckily drifted ashore to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands. Some of those Japanese, who found themselves stranded in a strange land, were then forced to teach Japanese. Russia made full use of these accidental souls. It came to take an interest in Japan at the end of the 17th century, a time when it had expanded its territory further east and almost reached the Far East, which of course included Japan. As Peter I, the Russian emperor, carried out a variety of reforms in different fields, many kinds of specialists needed to be trained. For this purpose, an Academy of Sciences was founded, and in that academy the organization for the study of Japanese was set up. Thus the shipwrecked came to play a three-fold role : （1） they became informants that brought very valuable information about Japan to Russia, （2） they also provided information about Russia to Japan,（3） their work has become a very important material in the study of Japanese dialects. These 3 points further reinforce our need to rethink the importance of these unlucky Japanese in establishing links in language and culture between Russia and Japan.show more
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