> Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences.
I lived in Japan for some time and this sentence is a gross generalization. Some right-wingers in Japan are attempting to maintain their traditions, but the rest of the population either couldn't care less, or has fully embraced western culture. You don't have to look hard (or at all, really) to see the evidence. Speaking English is (and has been) considered "cool" and you can find popular music artists dropping the occasional English words in songs, in their mangas, anime or in their dramas. A walk around any city with over 20k people and you can see western influence quite literally everywhere. Nobody is rushing to tear it down or even denounce it.
There are a few extreme right-wing nationalists who might, but they're the fringe. They're smaller in size than America's Tea Party and should not be taken seriously.
> Thus, when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity.
No, this is incorrect. At the very least, it's extremely misleading. China and Japan were fighting and both countries attempted to snatch up Korea as part of the first Sino war. It had nothing to do with their "restoration of legitimate arrangement of antiquity". That may have been their reasoning long after but it's not something any historians worth his salt would say was the reason for China and Japan's interest in Korea. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War#Conflic...
> But we rarely think about ethnic imperialism — an empire trying to gobble up neighboring polities because of linguistic and cultural similarity, so that it can be the ruler of a specific cultural sphere. (In fact, the British conquest of Ireland, the Japanese conquest of Korea and China)
Uh no. The Yamato people wanted these countries for land and resources. Japan was never interested in extending their culture, nor proactively assimilating other ethnic groups into their own, with the exception of maybe the Ryukyuan on Okinawa. If this were the case, you’d seen it in Taiwan. They didn’t want to assimilate the Koreans who already in their country for generations, either. I can only presume author is a white person, because the cultural affinity of Japan bifurcated from China a millennial ago. Speaking of which, the other motivation was to prevent and buffer Japan from being controlled and humiliated by a white colonizers, as was the case with China.
> All of the western political ideology (Colonialism, Communism, Fascism, Democracy) that came to Korea (and China) came by way of Japan.
Erm... Westerners were present in China way before they even came to Japan - you seem to forget Japan has an isolationism policy for several hundred years that explicitly restricted foreign influence until the late 1800s.
If anything, China was way more exposed to any Western culture before the ships of Perry even sailed to Japan. British occupation of HK was from 1841.
And let's not forget Singapore, with Raffles as early as the early 1800s.
>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).
> 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.
>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.
> I'm sorry but this is simply incorrect, I mean it's not even close.
It isn't incorrect. It's history. Europeans have been colonizing east asia for a long time. China and most of asia consider what the europeans did to them the "age of humiliation".
> It was, for example, banned at the Beijing Olympics. Please don't try this but if you went outside in many East Asian countries with a big Rising Sun Flag you might not even make it down the street.
I agree. But that's politics rather than history.
> Second, the Japanese Empire was not at all like the British, French or Spanish in East Asia.
You are right. Lots of nationalists in asia credit the japanese for ending european colonization in asia. So it is different.
> Japanese conquest and war is remembered as catastrophic and evil
For political reason, not historical reason.
> Please, ask a Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese what they think.
What makes you think I haven't?
As I said, for political expediency, it is easier for asians to scapegoat the japanese, but many educated asians respect what the japanese did to rid asia of european colonization.
That doesn't mean they don't abhor what the japanese empire did to them. It just means they appreciate that the japanese helped end european/white domination of asia.
After all, the japanese were the first asian nation to defeat a european power. And it's why most of asia ( including china ) model themselves after japan to a degree.
You are mistaking optics political expediency for history and reality.
Well if I look at Japanese history in China in WWII and before , that portrayal might actually be justified. Especially given Japans stance on it, where museums in the country conveniently leave out Japans actions in China at that time. Coming from Germany that attitude seems… dishonest at least.
> I wonder every single time when media is reporting on the war against China and that Japan and Korea are our friends because we have the same values. Neither Korea nor Japan share most of values with us, in my opinion. Japanese and Korean friends agree.
In this context, it just says that Japan and Korea are both in western democracy camp.
> Obviously, as the author notes, it didn't really pan out that way. Some cultural exports of Japan are without much doubt very popular and there are commonalities in culture, but every region and country still has its own way to deal with future changes, and in many cases very different demograhpics. There's no need to reduce it to any generic *-ification.
Very true. I think it’s undeniable that certain subcultures arose due to influence from Japanese cultural exports. But it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “Japanification”.
> It's ingrained in Japanese culture that they often put too much pressure on themselves.
This just sounds like reverse Orientalism. Japanese culture might have a bigger emphasis on civic duties, but on a national level it's clearly a hit and miss: consider that WW2 apologists are still popular in some sector of Japan. (And I'm not trying to blame Japan here, I mean, most countries aren't much better.)
> 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!
>It's not correct to lump all westerners into one group like that.
You're nitpicking. Sweedes, Danes, Russians and really everybody in the Western hemisphere is miles more individualist than the Japanese.
The irony is that you seem to be mistaking me for an American while having no real counterpoint; the fact remains that we're probably missing a cultural element.
> But would Japan be Japan when Japanese culture is replaced by an admixture of foreign cultures?
Is Japan of 1950 also Japan of 2050? Its a sort of ship-of-Theseus issue, but when we recognize that cultures evolve, grow, mix, adapt, and continually become something wonderful, it's less of a concern in my mind.
> Tibetans are better off with the lesser dictatorship of the CCP over the theocracy of a Dalai Lama.
Oof, I doubt this is anywhere close to true given the treatment of minority groups under CCP policy. Sovereignty, forcibly taken, is rarely an improvement and is detrimental both to the people whose sovereignty was taken and to the people who took the sovereignty. Much better to engage in economic trade and diplomacy.
> It is pretty beautiful how such small, centuries-old traditions seem to abound in Japan, where the condition of the west seems to be a state of persistent impermanence.
Orientalism at its finest...
First of all, "the west" is not a single monolithic block, but dozens of countries, each one with its own peculiarities.
Second, Western countries also have plenty of traditions, in the case of Europe going back centuries or even millennia. The thing is that the environment you grew up in doesn't seem fancy to you, it is just normal life.
Third, some Japanese people care about traditions, some do not, same as Western people. Heck, to me it seems like Japan lives in a state of permanent consumerism, always catching the latest popular anime or idol group.
> The irony is that out of all colonized countries the Japanese colonies were the one that net benefited from colonization.
This is a completely inaccurate representation of the various Japanese colonial projects. While some historians might refer to what became Taiwan in these terms, very few would say the same of Korea or the territories in China the Japanese occupied.
In fact, the viciousness and extractive nature of the Japanese colonial projects are what justified to many the corollary anti-colonial violence that eventually escalated into civil war in the Korean peninsula. For example,An Jung-geun, who assassinated the Japanese colonial administrator Ito Hirobumi, is still considered a national hero in both the north and the south.
> All this is clearly against the western values that i often hear quoted when I hear the same people talking about "China". But Japan seems to be ok for them.
I think you're jumping to conclusions here.
Are people in Japan disappeared for criticizing the government? Do they have their organs harvested / altered for believing the wrong religion?
I'm OK with a society with very different defaults than my own. In fact, I prefer it - real diversity doesn't come from mixing (like we do in the West - the mix of all colors is shitty brown), it comes from people being strongly different, yet managing to coexist.
So Japan is OK. It works as a society. Also for the "different" (well... somewhat - there are problems with overworking, herbivore men, low natality etc. but the West has analogous problems). China doesn't work; people aren't free; it's a repressive regime.
> 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.
I lived in Japan for some time and this sentence is a gross generalization. Some right-wingers in Japan are attempting to maintain their traditions, but the rest of the population either couldn't care less, or has fully embraced western culture. You don't have to look hard (or at all, really) to see the evidence. Speaking English is (and has been) considered "cool" and you can find popular music artists dropping the occasional English words in songs, in their mangas, anime or in their dramas. A walk around any city with over 20k people and you can see western influence quite literally everywhere. Nobody is rushing to tear it down or even denounce it.
There are a few extreme right-wing nationalists who might, but they're the fringe. They're smaller in size than America's Tea Party and should not be taken seriously.
> Thus, when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity.
No, this is incorrect. At the very least, it's extremely misleading. China and Japan were fighting and both countries attempted to snatch up Korea as part of the first Sino war. It had nothing to do with their "restoration of legitimate arrangement of antiquity". That may have been their reasoning long after but it's not something any historians worth his salt would say was the reason for China and Japan's interest in Korea. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Sino-Japanese_War#Conflic...
This paper is actually probably one of the best papers I've read on the reasons behind Japan's imperialism during that time: http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/papers/imperialism.htm
It goes over all of the possible reasons. The most likely of which, is that they were straight up emulating the West.
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