Authors

Sherzod Muminov¹;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK

Discussion

In the last week of 1945, the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, who had made his name as a war correspondent during WWII, landed in Japan. For five months, he travelled around the war-ravaged nation, noting with a keen eye the destruction of the landscape and the dejection of the people. Every evening upon return to his quarters after a day of visits, he dictated his impressions to his stenographer; his notes on Japan thus reached a thousand pages. It took Simonov three decades to publish them in book form, titled Japan ’46 in 1976. The book contains incisive observations of defeated Japan, a snapshot of a nation in ruins but hopeful for a brighter future. 

This paper focuses on Simonov’s Japan travelogue and mentions other Soviet writers who documented the encounter with Japan in the final weeks of the war and in its immediate aftermath, such as Lev Dëmin’s Sakhalin Diaries. It reveals, through a close reading of the Soviet memoirs and diaries as well as a range of archival materials, an orientalism of a peculiar kind—one of a victorious nation, the USSR, in its attempts to make sense of Japan and its people. Both in Simonov’s razor-sharp analyses of Japan and Dëmin’s observations of the Japanese in southern Sakhalin, one can discern this approach that is cold and hardened by the experiences of the war, but triumphant and condescending in times—observations made by those victorious from a moral high ground that this victory afforded. This human-level view of Japan by the leading Soviet writers provides not only a fascinating account of Japan, but more importantly demonstrates the Soviet image of the country with which the USSR was entering a new form of relationship, the Cold War confrontation.