The Department of Japanese Studies Continues Online Seminars with Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

The Department of Japanese Studies continues its unique series of joint online seminars with Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). The latest sessions were held on October 23 and November 6, 2025. The seminars involved 4th-year students of the "Asian and African Studies" bachelors' degree program, specializing in Japanese, as well as Japanese students majoring in Russian studies from TUFS.

The seminar on October 23, 2025 was dedicated to the translation of Japanese manga comics. Working in teams, students analyzed the comic texts and collaborated to translate the dialogue from Japanese into Russian as closely as possible to the original text, without losing the author's initial meaning and intent.

"It turned out to be not so simple," shared students from HSE University-St. Petersburg and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. It was this challenging task that brought the students from the two universities and two countries together, allowing them to work in an atmosphere of absolute trust, without fear of making a mistake or saying something wrong, to present translations of the most interesting yet difficult pages from the manga.

The work was supervised by Faina Demchuk, who oversees the manga translation project at the Department of Japanese Studies of the Institute of Asian and African Studies and is well-versed in all the specifics of working with Japanese comics.

Seminar 23.10.2025

Klimova O.V.

On November 6, 2025 the topic of the online seminar was the peculiarities of Russian and Japanese cuisine. Students shared recipes for Russian and Japanese dishes and learned a lot of new information not only about the cuisine of the country they are studying but also about their own. "I learned a lot about Japanese cuisine and tamagoyaki today," one of the Japanese university students studying Russian remarked at the end of the seminar.

By the end of the session, the students had discovered the difference between "monjayaki" and "okonomiyaki", how to serve sashimi, what "unagi" is and how it is eaten, and other interesting facts about Russian and Japanese cuisine.

The participants are looking forward to the continuation of the seminars. If any of you have long been interested in Japan's popular and traditional culture and would like to deepen your knowledge in a professional context, we would be happy to see you among the students of the Department of Japanese Studies at the Institute of Asian and African Studies in the future.