Andrey Mikhailovich Sokolov was born in 1977 in St.Petersburg. In his school years he began to take painting lessons from Mark Efimovich Tumin, under whose guidance he studied until Tumin’s death in 2013. In 1994, he entered the St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Art at the Faculty of Cultural Studies (Department of Museum and Excursion Science) with a major in Museum Business and Historical and Cultural Monument Protection, and began studying Japanese under the guidance of Professor Irina Isaevna Bass, the head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics. After graduating from the St. Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts in 1999 he was admitted to the postgraduate course and to the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At the present time he is a researcher of the Department of East and South-East Asia. In 2007 he wrote his doctoral thesis. The field of scientific interests is the history of Japan and the culture of the Ainu people. In 2003, Yoshioka Hiroko, a master of playing traditional musical instruments and the head of the Ibuki group, visited St. Petersburg. As a member of a group of seven, he studied the koto under the guidance of Yoshioka Hiroko. From 2003 to 2005 he was a research intern at University of Iwate, Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences. During this period he studied Japanese monochrome painting and calligraphy under the guidance of Kudo Yoshiko. After completing his internship, he taught Japanese painting privately.