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This article examines the first volume of Roshia Ibun 魯西亜異聞 [Unusual Narrative about Russia], a unique handwritten manuscript which depicts the story of a Japanese guard, Torizō. He was one of four Japanese guards who spent the winter of 1806 on the Sakhalin island monitoring the situation at Kushunkotan settlement. Lieutenant Nikolai Aleksandrovich Khvostov visited this settlement during his first expedition to Sakhalin in 1806. In his logbook he gave it an interesting name “Lyubopytstvo”, which can be translated into English as “Curiosity”. Curiously enough, this was the place where Khvostov and the four Japanese guards met for the first time. It is considered to be the first military clash between the countries and a turning point of Russian-Japanese relations, since Russia subsequently began to be perceived as a dangerous enemy. The first volume of the source gives especially valuable information about these events. It provides a detailed description of the voyage of the four Japanese captives to Kamchatka on board of a Russian ship, contains important information about the events during the second expedition of Khvostov and Davidov to Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands in 1807 and relates the trip of the four Japanese guards back to Japan. The first volume of Roshia Ibun, which has never been translated into Russian nor published yet, gives us answers to the following questions. Who was the guard Torizō? How did he perceive the meeting with the Russians in 1806? Were there any official messages or demands from Russian officers? How did Torizō manage to get back to Japan and did he have a chance to share his story with anyone else along the way?
This article introduces several handwritten materials in Japanese from the personal archive of O. O. Rosenberg (1888–1919) now kept at the Archive of Orientalists, IOM, RAS. These handwritten texts reveal new details about O. O. Rosenberg’s interaction with Japanese Buddhist scholars and publishers before and after the publication of his two dictionaries in 1916 in Japan. In addition to academic activities, O. O. Rosenberg had to deal with financial and legal matters, maintained contacts with printing company staff, discussed various diplomatic procedures. He also had a wide network of contacts in Japan, including other foreigners. Relying on this network and his fluent knowledge of Japanese, handwritten Japanese in particular, O. O. Rosenberg was able to complete his publication projects successfully. This study presents O. O. Rosenberg’s dictionaries as an important component of the project led by Th. I. Stcherbatsky to restore the terminology of Sanskrit philosophical treatises. Future work plans outlined by the young scholar demonstrate his exceptional diligence and competence in matters of Oriental philology. All documents, translated from Japanese by A. Lushchenko, are published for the first time.