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This paper analyzes intercultural issues in marriages between Japanese men and women from former Soviet Union countries. Focusing on the differences in meanings and assumptions that guide couples in their marriages and the historical-cultural roots of these differences, the paper argues that spouses adapt, negotiate, and change their expectations to each other in response to the cultural encounters that deviate from their familiar cultural patterns. The data for the research was collected by the author between 2006 and 2014 in urban areas of Japan. It consists in-depth interviews with Russian-speaking women (48) and Japanese men (20), participant observation in couples' homes, women's gatherings, and communication in an online Russian-language community. The analysis reveals the effects of cultural differences on relationships between spouses in international marriages in Japan, discusses the fluidity and change of cultural notions over time, and explains how spouses justify these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Japan surrendered in 1945, more than 6 million Japanese were stranded in various parts of what had been the imperial domain. From 1945 to 1956, thousands of Japanese found themselves in the USSR and mainland China, unable or unwilling to return. Drawing on Soviet, Chinese, Japanese, and Western archives, this article compares Soviet and Communist Chinese policies toward the stranded Japanese. The distinct pathways adopted by the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties during the Chinese Civil War led to significant differences in their approaches to the day-to-day lives of the Japanese, the methods and messages of propaganda they adopted, and their means of handling the repatriation issue. Soviet and Chinese policies toward the Japanese during this uncertain and unsettled decade were shaped less by Cold War ideological and geopolitical alignments than by the legacies of East Asia's recent wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]