Russia has influenced Japan in many ways over the years. The Japanese Communist Party still picks up a larger share of the vote than similar organizations in other OECD nations. Russian explorers were among the first to visit Japan and try to negotiate trade treaties while the Orthodox Church was granted land in Ochanamizu just after the Meiji Restoration. The Russo-Japanese war marked the arrival of a newly-industralized Japan as a serious contender for global power and the end of WWII didn't mark the end of hostilities since an official peace treaty has yet to be signed between the two countries.
One of the biggest periods of influence, however, came when the so-called White Russians left their home country in the years following the revolution. Many fled to Western Europe and the Americas but those in Siberia and the Russian Far East often moved to China and Japan. Japanese troops were ordered to Siberia to assist the White Russian movement against the communists in 1919. The first arrivals settled in Tokyo and Yokohama, however, the 1923 Kanto earthquake forced most to relocate to Kobe and Nagasaki. Many emigres left their mark in Japan and here is one example.
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[/floatr]Michael Kogan has one of the most interesting stories. A Russian Jew, he was born in Odessa in 1920 but his family moved to Harbin, Manchuria to escape the Bolsheviks. Jews had little thanks to offer Tsarist Russia, and some found common cause with the revolutionaries, however more fled along with Kogan's parents. It was in Manchuria that Michael came across Norihiro Yasue of Army secret intelligence. A short digression is necessary here. Yasue and Koreshige Inuzuka of the Navy were the Japanese military's Jewish experts. They placed a good deal of faith in the anti-semitic, and discredited, Protocols of the Elders of Zion which they had both encountered when helping the White Russians in Siberia. It was probably manufactured by the Russian secret police to foment resentment against the Jews. Yasue and Inuzuka accepted the claims of the book that Jews controlled America along with world finance and media and it gave them the inspiration for a plan. The men argued that Manchuria needed to be developed quickly and they thought the supposed financial skills and secret power of the Jews could be of great value to the region. Their plan called for settling Jewish refugees in their territories and allowing them a degree of autonomy. They hoped that this would also win them favour with the United States. For Yasue and Inuzuka, if their plan was executed correctly, it would bring benefits all round. They accepted, though, that dealing with Jews was a high risk business and, if their preparations were wrong, disaster could ensue. There could only be one name for such an enterprise: Plan Fugu.The plan was accepted but hit major obstacles, especially with the outbreak of WWII, and never got off the ground, not least because many doubted the motives of the Japanese. In Harbin, a sizeable group of Jews had fled after the army had kidnapped and tortured key citizens. Michael Kogan's first encounter with Yasue can be dated to when the latter began to visit Jewish leaders in the city from 1937 to convince them that the army had changed its attitude. Kogan would continue to act as the man's escort on later visits. Despite their misgivings, and the practical difficulties that Jews faced travelling in Nazi Europe, there was a small window when Japan's pro-Jewish outlook allowed a number of refugees to escape and find a home in Kobe and Shanghai. In 1939, Kogan took advantage of his new connections to get a place at Tokyo's Waseda School of Economics, sometimes staying with Russian scholar Masao Yonekawa and helping with his translations of Dostoevsky. He was in Japan for most of the war years before moving to Tianjin in 1944.
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[/floatl]Kogan returned to Japan in 1950. A fluent Japanese speaker, he found a number of opportunities. It is said that he was one of the first to import vodka to post-war Japan and he began leasing jukeboxes to the US military. Within a short time, he had set up his own company. A few years into his return to Japan, he received word that Norihiro Yasue, made a colonel during the war, had died in a concentration camp in Siberia. Yasue had been captured by Russian forces at the end of the war - some say he allowed himself to be captured rather than escape - and never saw Japan again. For all that Yasue largely swallowed the anti-semitic propaganda he read, he had actually proved himself in the end to be a friend to the Jewish people. When Plan Fugu fell apart, he was stripped of command but he actively opposed Gestapo Colonel Josef Meisinger in Shanghai who urged that the Jews who had arrived should be exterminated or put to work in the mines. In 1954, Kogan appeared at Yasue's family house and offered his relatives money, on behalf of the Jewish Residents of Japan, to hold a proper memorial service for the Colonel, in memory of all that he had done to help them. Kogan's impact on Japan was not to stop there. His involvement with jukeboxes led him into other forms of game machine. His company introduced an early form of pachisuro machine to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics and it is likely that they were responsible for the first introduction of crane prize games - the forerunner of today's UFO Catcher. In this, Kogan's company mirrored the development of American David Rosen's company who has started out with pinball and also moved into other forms of game machine. Rosen's company went on to become SEGA, a name derived from SErvice GAmes, which was a company he had bought. Kogan chose a more Japanese name for his firm when he started out. 太東貿易, or Taito Trading. Most think that the 太 (tai) must be from 太平洋 (taiheiyo) which is the word for the Pacific Ocean. Others are convinced that it is from 猶太 (yuta) which means Judea or Jew.
As TAITO, Kogan's company came up with a game in 1972 called Space Monsters which would inspire a designer called Toshihiro Nishikado to devise a blockbuster six years later which they would call Space Invaders. The 1979 picture below, showing a cafe full of Space Invader machines, appeared on the No-Sword blog and reminded me of this story.
Kogan didn't get much time to enjoy his breakthrough. He suffered a heart attack while on a business trip to America in 1984 and passed away. He was buried in Israel although some acquaintances believe that he would have preferred Japan. His inheritance was worth over 10 billion yen which was the largest ever recorded for a foreigner at the time and ranked him up with major industrialists like Kajima of the construction dynasty and Otsuka of the pharmaceutical company. Ten years later, his widow was reported to be Japan's second highest taxpayer. After a series of stock transactions. Taito became part of game company Square Enix in 2005. It's not often you can draw a line from Lenin to otaku but you can with the story of Michael Kogan.
I'll pass on the story of the Morozoffs of Kobe some other time.
