> Japan is, of course, just a place. The people there are ordinary humans. Fetishizing a particular culture is both cringeworthy and genuinely harmful. Their country and society have plenty of problems, just like any other. There is nothing magical about Japan or any other place.
Japan, by your own description, isn’t just a place. It’s the place of a people who share a long and deep culture. If you substituted New Yorkers for Japanese in Tokyo, it wouldn’t be like Tokyo for very long! (Feeling like a “clumsy, nasty barbarian” is certainly an apropos description of how I feel returning to New York after visiting Tokyo.)
Most Japanese wouldn’t describe Japan as “just a place.” A Japanese acquaintance of mine (a law professor) and I were once discussing the issue of government corruption in Asia. My acquaintance dug into some 400 years of Japanese history to explain why it had less problems with corruption than China, next door.
Of course it’s not “magical”—just as there is nothing magical about Apple under Steve Jobs. But it is an achievement—the achievement of a group of people who share a particular culture. When my dad was born in 1951, Japan had a GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) similar to Bangladesh’s today. Within a generation they had become a first world country. You shouldn’t fetishize their culture, but it’s okay to marvel at their achievement!
>The isolation provided by being an hard to reach island has, in my opinion, made their culture quite differentiated and useful to contrast my own culture with.
Not really. Vast portions of pre-modern Japanese culture was borrowed from China. From fashion and art to language, philosophy and religion. Even the "very complete Shinto deity mythos" is not what you claim:
>Even among experts, there are no settled theories on what Shinto is or how far it should be included, and there are no settled theories on where the history of Shinto begins[0]
And true Shintoism has been dead for centuries.
>I learned from the Japanese that children are much more capable than my own culture thinks they are.
It's actualy the opposite. Modern childhood innocence, to the extent that it is a new development*, is a western export that has it's roots in romanticism. It isn't really unique to Japan to not have it to the same extent.
People like Japan because of anime, which does have it's roots in Japanese art, although it has become somewhat overstated and in any event was borrowed from Chinese.
What it is in my opinion is that Japan was the first of the east asian countries to become rich. So people who like east asian culture "found" Japan first, then came up with all this Japanese exceptionalism. Which is really shockingly ignorant being that China was the culture for almost an entire millennium. Chinese silk, jade, tea, and what else, fine china were found in all royal palaces around the world. You can even see it's effect on fashion in some 16-17th century english art.
None of this is to say thag Japan doesn't have a unique culture, but it is heavily overstated in the last two decades. It was also used to explain Japan's economic rise in 1980. Now that Taiwan and Korea have done the same that element has been conveniently forgotten.
*That is, to the extent that it didn't already exist before. High childhood mortality prevented the concept childhood innocence as it exists and is manifested today (such as coddling).
> I think you do know exactly nothing. What you believe you do know may be completely wrong since you have no first hand experience and read things filtered through the cultural biases that exist in each of us
So that applies to you and your view too, right? Or is it only other people's views?
> and when applied to another culture, finds ways to on the one hand exoticize it, on the other to denigrate it and it's people.
That's an extremely presumptuous and arrogant statement to make.
As if that was the only possible kind of response.
And speaking of my case, I have known many Japanese people and have like them a lot, and I like a lot about Japanese culture. I am half Asian and hardly exoticize the place or culture
> Regarding social development, my feeling is that Japan is one or two generations behind Western countries.
There are a great many “western” countries where this is even worse than Japan including the one so often named the primordial “western” country.
I have no idea idea why so often when Japanese culture specifically is discussed the idea is sooner or later proffered that there is some homogeneous “western” culture with common elements that supposedly exists. It certainly doesn't seem to rise when, say, Russian, or Indian culture is discussed.
>Isn't there any room for respect for traditional Japanese culture?
Is culture a blanket excuse for bad behavior? Just because a country has a history of doing something doesn't make it worth respecting. Bad things are bad no matter how long they've been practiced.
Not commenting on your other points, but think you're misguided with this. Culture is not something that stays the same and needs to be preserved; it lives and changes with people. UK today isn't the same it was 30 years ago, and neither is Japan. Trying to set a culture in stone will lead to some quite undesirable undertones.
>Japan also treats non Japanese people differently. Nobody says anything bad about Japan.
What? I see claims of Japanese racism everywhere on the internet. A load of people seem to think it's one of the most racist countries on earth.
Yet in my 5 years here, and as someone visibly foreign, I've never been treated differently from a local. If anything, being treated completely normally put a lot of pressure on me early on since the only thing holding me back was my own lack of language ability.
> If you want to convince Japanese people, you can't use the tactics you used in other cultures. You need to understand Japanese culture and you need to be very careful because if you get it wrong it will backfire spectacularly.
In my experience, these tactics don't really work in any culture.
> Given the data above, it’s obvious that [saying that Japan was a country of “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race”] was an aspirational statement rather than a factual one — a call for Japanese people to think of their country this way. It was a desire to create homogeneity out of diversity, through cultural and linguistic assimilation and through identification with the Japanese nation.
That term is heavily centered on games, anime, manga and nerd culture. None of which I have interest in. I've been to Akihabara once which I'm sure you are familiar with, and I have no interest in going back.
What do you think my obsession is? I'm specifically in Japan for political reasons. Maybe it's obsession with society, rather than culture. I'm in Japan because I care about individual responsibility, and Japan doesn't trigger me.
I actually minored in architectural history. My point of contention is whether it is the architecture, or that this unique architecture which is in Japan?
> is there some reason foreigners can't find it beloved
And yet it only exists in Japan.
Also, just because people have good intentions in loving something doesn't mean it's good. That's what leads to orientalism. Did you know Memoirs of Geisha was written by an old man from Tennessee?
>>>I have absolutely nothing against Japan but it is disappointing how it's the only East Asian country whose culture Americans care to look at.
I think it's a secondary effect of anime & manga creating a bunch of weebs that then proceed to wanna geek out about all things Japanese, all the time. The rest of Asia hasn't managed to produce the same sort of pop-culture inertia.
> Japanese do not place nearly as much emphasis on human-to-human relations as much as the west does
This to me is just an offensive and ignorant comment. Just goes to show you that this Orientalist trope still exists. 2nd gen removed you’re practically foreign.
Disclaimer: I’m not Japanese but I’ve been to an obon festival and an onsen, not pachinko parlors.
>But is there a non-circular way to approach the topic? I think there is, and once you do, you struggle to find evidence that China, Korea, and Japan have all that much in common culturally.
> Japan is undergoing civilizational and cultural collapse.
Certainly doesn't seem this way when you visit Japan. Sure, they haven't experienced wildly growing excessive consumption like some American states in the past couple decades, but their society is far from undergoing any sort of collapse.
Have you been there? I can't imagine anyone who has spent any amount of time in Japan would claim there is no cultural uniqueness.
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