ABSTRACT
The Russian discovery of Japan was part of a much broader expansion of Russian contact with other civilisations that followed the consolidation of Muscovy as the predominant east Slav state at the end of the fifteenth century. The first Japanese person encountered by Russians appears to have been a Christian lay brother known as Nicolaus de St Augustino, who accompanied the Portuguese Augustinian priest Nicolaus Melo on a journey from the Philippines to Rome in 1599 or 1600. Overall, Russian attempts to establish Japanese language education in the eighteenth century had mixed success. The Japanese seafarers provided input to numerous reports which evidently circulated among scholars and often informed broader published works. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian accounts of Japan are an attempt to open a window on to a largely unknown and closed world. They are driven primarily by a commercially and scientifically inspired curiosity.
