Image of Russia in Japanese Media of 2015-2017s

Despite the fact that Russia and Japan have commenced negotiations on a peace agreement after the Second World War in 2015, both countries have enjoyed sustainable political and economical partnership since the end of the 19th century. Nowadays, intercultural communication between two countries is being developed through media. The aim of the study hereto to describe the existing image of the Russian Federation formed by Japanese media in 2015-2017 and to analyze symbols and stereotypes, which are in Japanese media culture about Russia. There are two types of qualitative analysis used in the study hereto: the media text analysis and the semiotic text analysis. The media text analysis includes the linguistic analysis in order to describe the trends in 2 main Japanese online news media and in new media. The automatic methods for this type of analysis will be used for big sources consisted of online media texts. The semiotic analysis identifies the symbols, which represent certain stereotypes in 21th century concerning anime and the most popular types of new media in Japan such as the most important imageboard and social networking site Twitter. The result of this study is that the image of Russia has a strong militaristic trend which dominate other. The study hereto draws the borders of a gap in the academic research of the topic, which is connected with the lack of studies in this field.