Love’s Labour’s Lost, or A Russian Priest, Esperantist and Utopist in the Early 20 c. Japan

Abstract

ABSTRACT Japan has always occupied a special place in the Russian mindscape. From the beginning of the first contacts and for the subsequent century and a half, the invariable pattern of reaction to Japan was the oscillation between rapturous expectations and a cold shower of encounters. This article offers an analysis of this paradigm of perception and a deconstruction of certain cultural and psychological traits of Russian visitors to Japan or residents of that country. Under scrutiny are their attitudes when confronted with the radical notion of otherness. Special emphasis is put on what impeded and what facilitated the intercultural dialogue. The article includes a case study which focuses on the voluminous memoirs (based on diaries) of the priest Innokentij Seryšev, who spent two and a half years in Japan in the late Taishō era (1920–1922). The main conclusion is that the invariant pattern of swinging perception of Japan from rhapsodic to threnodic, was influenced by objective causes. One of the principal reasons for this is the underestimation of the level of psychological and cultural differences between the Russians and the Japanese. Many cultural traits that looked agreeable were perceived by Seryšev without due context and a proper understanding of the foreign national and cultural matrix and without realizing his own limits in interpretation. These peculiarities of perception were (and sometimes still are) quite similar for many generations of Russian visitors/residents to/of Japan.