Cultural Dialogue Between Japan and Socialist Eurasia in 1960s–1970s: Visits of Novelists Yasushi Inoue and Ryotaro Shiba to the USSR and Mongolia

Abstract

This article explores a narrow aspect of cultural dialogue between Japan and socialist Eurasia (the Central Asian and Siberian regions of the USSR and Mongolian People’s Republic) during Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s, using essays by Japanese writers Yasushi Inoue and Ryotaro Shiba, who visited Soviet Central Asia and the Far East and socialist Mongolia in 1965–1973; trips by Japanese writers; and the image of socialist Eurasia in Japanese public opinion. The sources for the analysis are The Tale of the Western Region by Yasushi Inoue (Seiiki Monogatari, 1968, trans. in English in 1971 as Journey beyond Samarkand and Mongolian Travel Notes by Ryotaro Shiba (Mongoru kiko:, 1974). Yasushi Inoue made two trips to Soviet Central Asia in 1965 and 1968, and Ryotaro Shiba went to Mongolian People’s Republic through the Soviet Far East (Khabarovsk and Irkutsk) in 1973. Researched texts serve as a platform for the author’s dialogue with a wide readership in Japan that helped shape the public image of the Soviet Union in non-central regions. The popularity of Inoue’s and Shiba’s image of socialist Eurasia is confirmed by the fact that Shiba’s travel notes were reprinted for several times by different publishers in Japan, although it was first published in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun in 1973–1974; a novel by Yasushi Inoue also was reprinted in several editions and served as inspiration for the modern writer Ryo Kuroki, who dedicated his novel Runway on the Great Silk Road about Japanese-Kyrgyz relations in the early 2000s.