The article is a historiographical review on Russian and English literature of Japanese history. It deals with the appearance of the early data and publications on Japan, first scientific publications on its history. Classics (due to the author’s consideration) are the number of printed materials that appeared in the mid XIX–mid XX centuries. The article reviews the most significant English research papers as well as some biographical remarks concerning such foreign Japanologists like William E. Griffis, Frank Brinkley, James Murdoch, George B. Sansom and Edwin O. Reischauer. Classics of Russian Japanology are historians such as V.Ya. Kostylev, A.A. Nikolaev, N.I. Konrad, K.A. Harnsky and E.M. Zhukov. It’s analyzed their greatest works. In spite of these fundamental works have been rarely used and studied in the last half-century, a lot of prominent data represented in them should be potentially useful even for modern scholars. The article shows the significance of such honored classics, and they should be studied and reprinted.