From the Editor of the Section

Abstract

The presented section of the "Oriental Institute Journal" is devoted to politics and memory in the Far East. But which Far East is it planned to talk about? We are not just talking about the territory from Baikal to the Bering Strait. First of all, it is planned to speak about the Far East as a system of interrelations (historical, cultural and economic) between a huge part of Russia and the neighboring countries of the East Asia. Mongolia and Japan, as well as North, South Korea and China, are present in the research subjects. And that is why the Portuguese term Extremo Oriental was used in the title of the column. We propose to use it to refer to the region in the broad sense, not strictly within the boundaries of the Far Eastern Federal District of the Russian Federation. The authors have made their own attempts to outline the contours of the research field. The articles presented here are an occasion to start a big conversation about the politics of memory and collective representations of the past in the Far East. We absolutely do not pretend to provide a complete and exhaustive solution to such a complex and ambitious task - to describe the Far East as a memorial space. But each of the authors working in the field of policy studies has provided a text that describes one or another of the problems of politics in relation to the past or memory, either in particular countries and regions or built around a single traumatic narrative of the past.