place

Japan

also: Япония, Японии, Japanese

Named here as the source of the Buddha figure and ivory Japanese figurine Chekhov jokingly promises Sumbatov; his 1890 route to Sakhalin was to pass near Japan, though illness in the end kept him from landing there, so the promised souvenirs were never actually brought back.

Reading notes

To A. I. Sumbatov, 10–11 March 1890. Moscow. §5 I'll bring you back a Buddha from Japan, and a naked Japanese woman carved in ivory
A mock-lavish compensation for standing Sumbatov up at dinner. Chekhov's 1890 journey to Sakhalin took him east through Siberia with an eventual sea passage that was to pass near Japan, but illness kept him from disembarking there -- so this promised pair of souvenirs, offered here in jest, was in fact never delivered.
To I. L. Leontyev, 16 March 1890. Moscow. §6 we shall catch ourselves a Japanese woman
Honest note on a genuine gap in the source: after "в Японии схватим японский" the Russian text itself breaks off before the expected feminine noun (something like "женщину" or "жену"), cut off before the comma in this edition's transcription. This is not a translator's omission or a redaction -- it is the source document that is textually incomplete at this point. The sense is nonetheless unambiguous from context (a joking, characteristically period aside about acquiring a Japanese mistress or wife somewhere along the Japan leg of the trip, of a piece with the era's travelers'-banter register), and the translation renders it by evident sense as "we shall catch ourselves a Japanese woman" rather than leaving a visible lacuna in the English. Per the corpus's no-softening policy this is translated at full force as coarse period travel humor, not smoothed over.
To N. A. Leikin, 10 December 1890. Moscow. §4 avoiding cholera-stricken Japan, I called at Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo in Ceylon, Port Said
Chekhov's return route by sea, given here as a bare list of ports, is elsewhere in the corpus explained as a deliberate detour: the fifth global cholera pandemic had a serious Far Eastern resurgence through 1890, and Japan in particular was under active outbreak conditions that autumn, forcing his homeward steamer to bypass it entirely (compare to Suvorin, 9 December 1890: "We bypassed Japan, since cholera is there; so I bought you nothing Japanese"). The four ports named here -- Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo (Ceylon), Port Said -- match the route Chekhov had projected even before leaving Sakhalin and are each given fuller individual treatment in's much longer travel report to Suvorin: Hong Kong's harbor and colonial infrastructure, the rough crossing and two burials at sea before Singapore, and Ceylon as the place "where paradise was." Here, to Leikin, the same itinerary is compressed to a single clause of proper nouns -- the difference in scale between the two letters (both dated within a day of each other, 9 and 10 December 1890) is itself characteristic: Suvorin gets the confessional travelogue, Leikin the punchline.