Umebayasi M. Typological parallels in traditional annual holidays of Ukrainians and Japanese.

The Paper is based on the study of folk calendar ritualism of the Ukrainians and Japanese, in which typological similarities and differences in culture of two geographically distant people are traced. Based on the wide sources of literature and available historiography, the features of evolutionary history of annual events in Ukraine and Japan are described. The reasons of archaic components of folk holidays, which are kept in both cultures, and transformation processes of ritual culture were analyzed. The Paper consists of the introduction, three chapters and conclusions. In the introduction has discussed the need for our research. It is said that in the world nowadays the standardization of culture has advanced by the rapid globalization. It may be seemed that people all over the world are eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, and watching the same movie and are living in the same way. However, in the really world there are many different cultures. For cross-cultural understanding we need not to eliminate the heterogeneity, but we must recognize it. If you look at the annual holidays, there is a mine of interesting cultures. The first chapter is an overview of the history of ethnological studies in Ukraine and Japan. Annual events have inherited by a variety of ways not only in Japan, but also in Ukraine, and the researches about it has been done from the end of the 19-th century. In Japan the mid-20 century was the boom of gathering materials on ethnology handling by Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962). In Ukraine also important ethnological materials are collected until the early centuries of 20-th century. The soviet era was a bit behind on the studies by the ideological constraints, but after in dependence ethnological studies had become active again.