Tsarist Russia Russian interest in Japan dated back to the early 17th century, when Flemish cartographer
Gerardus Mercator's descriptions of Japan were translated into Russian. (The Russian ambassador to China at the time,
Nikolai Spathari, also tried to gather information about Japan.) However, the first real knowledge of the Japanese language would come from
Dembei, a shipwrecked native of Japan who had become stranded on the
Kamchatka Peninsula. Despite repeated protests and an expressed desire to return to Japan, Dembei was taken to
Moscow by
Vladimir Atlasov in December 1701 or January 1702 and ordered by
Peter the Great to teach
Japanese to a small group of young
Russian men. Japanese education in Russia continued throughout the 18th century, using as teachers Japanese fishermen who, like Dembei, drifted ashore in the
Russian Far East and, due to the
sakoku policy of the
Tokugawa Shogunate, found themselves unable to return to Japan. However, Japanese studies were not included in the official programmes of Russian universities until the 1898 establishment of the Department of Japanese Philology at
Saint Petersburg University. Soon afterwards,
Serge Elisséeff would become the first Russian to undergo higher education in Japan, graduating from
Tokyo Imperial University in 1912; however, he did not return to Russia, but instead remained overseas, taking up a post at the
Sorbonne in 1917. and Nikolai Nevskii, who specialised in
Okinawan studies. With only 835 people claiming Japanese ethnicity (nationality) in that census, Japanese is thus one of only two
East Asian languages in Russia for which the population of speakers outnumbers the population of the ethnic group to which the language belongs. The other such language is
Chinese, which has 59,235 speakers in Russia and is the 44th-most known language, Also, despite the
dispute between Russia and Japan over the
Kuril Islands, increasing numbers of Russian people in the southernmost islands, such as
Shikotan and
Kunashiri, are studying Japanese for purposes of daily communication with Japanese, with whom they come into frequent contact.
Russophone learners of Japanese make both phonological and grammatical errors when speaking the language, due to
cross-linguistic interference from Russian. ==Standardised testing==