At this vulgar level of analysis, Japan is presented as intriguing because it has a rich history of “Eastern” traditions and an oddly “Western” present: modernity and the West being difficult for the audience (or for the BBC) to disentangle.


The concept of the modern seems to share the Enlightenment project’s faith in progress and its aspirations towards the universalism of its maxims. However, it is important to remember that there is a difference between observing the historical origins of this cluster of ideas in Europe and claiming that the ideas themselves are somehow essentially European possessions. Indeed, to make such a claim would run rather counter to the universal spirit of the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, both advocates and opponents of the global spread of modernity, within Europe and outside, have often affected this confusion.


Like it or not, most commentators tend to fall back on the legacy of the European Enlightenment as the prototype, and at that moment we run back into the danger of imperialism.


The letter contained a series of demands for more open trade with Japan, and Perry left Uraga with the ominous promise to return the next year with a more substantial naval force, ready to force compliance if it was not forthcoming.


The Treaty of Kanagawa opened the floodgates, and the European imperial powers quickly secured similar deals: France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia all signed new treaties in the wake of Perry’s return.

By 1858, the so-called Unequal Treaties regime was firmly in place: without a shot being fired, Japan found itself in a similar position to China after the Opium Wars (with the notable exception of that the Western powers agreed to prohibit opium trade with Japan). Japan had lost control of its tariffs, had opened its borders to trade and commerce with the West, and had even granted the privilege of extra-territoriality to the Western powers (which meant that foreign nationals were exempt from Japanese law even on Japanese soil). Rather than being justified by military defeat, however, these measures were imposed on Japan on the basis that it was not an equal member of international society — it was not a modern, industrial, constitutional polity. This humiliation was itself a powerful force fueling the development of a strong sense of nationalism in late 19th-century Japan, as well as a key factor driving the revolution to come. At all costs, Japan sought to end the Unequal Treaties.


It is a testament to the astonishing impact of industrial technology that this toy train was far more intimidating than the primal power of sumo wrestling.


Orientalism was rife; the romance of the “mystical East” colored most accounts.


In an unprecedented step, Nobunaga rejected the title of shogun, which had traditionally been bestowed by the emperor since Minamoto Yoritomo received the title in 1192, inaugurating the Kamakura bakufu. By making this stand, Nobunaga wished to demonstrate that he was not subordinate to the emperor in Kyoto, but rather that he was related directly to the land of Japan (or tenka — the domain under heaven) without the need for mediation by the imperial household. In other words, Nobunaga wanted Japan to acknowledge his right to rule based on a kind of realpolitik (that is, his power to rule should itself be sufficient to legitimize his rule), rather than on any religious or mystical endorsement by the relatively powerless imperial court. Very quickly, however, this radical possibility was closed down by Nobunaga’s successors: Tokugawa Ieyasu accepted the title of shogun from the emperor in 1603 as a way to stabilize and legitimize his new regime.


Hideyoshi was engaged in the complicated and delicate politics of power versus authority that had existed between the military leaders of Japan and the imperial court for many centuries.


Hideyoshi’s abortive invasions underline the tendency for emerging states to redirect domestic discontent to overseas adventures.


While it would be an overstatement to say that sakoku completely isolated Tokugawa Japan from the outside world, it drastically reduced Japan’s knowledge of Europe at precisely the moment when the Enlightenment movement began, kick-starting the development of modern science and philosophy.


He implemented the system of “alternate attendance,” which obliged every daimyo in Japan to maintain residences in Edo as well as in their home domains. Furthermore, daimyo were actually required to reside in Edo every other year, and their immediate family had to stay there permanently. Although their conditions were good, the family of daimyo were effectively hostages in Edo.


Fueled by a new social stability (and the end of constant warfare), increasing domestic trade, increasing literacy, and advances in farming techniques, Japan’s population actually doubled during the 17th century, reaching approximately 33M by the turn of the 18th century. By comparison, at that time the population of Britain was about 5M, and it would not reach 30M until the 2nd half of the 19th century.


Tokugawa patronage of Buddhism was, perhaps unintentionally, a way of off-setting the sacred position of the emperor in the religion of Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, according to which the emperor is a direct descendant of the Sun-Goddess, and hence should be revered as a living god. From the point of view of the social order, however, Buddhism had another role to play: principles of stoicism and non-discrimination promoted stability and discouraged dissent and resistance within the shi-no-ko-sho system.


Despite being at the top of the status system, they were rapidly losing the affluence required to demonstrate it. In addition, without war to demonstrate their worth (and their alleged stoic values), the samurai were losing the respect of the rest of the population. Because the status of samurai was determined based on heredity (about 6% of the population) rather than merit, resentment about incompetence was increasingly widespread, until “the ability of a samurai” actually became an insulting phrase.


Romantic images of the samurai as stoic, honorable retainers willing to lay down their lives for the sake of their lords become the stuff of popular culture, not only for the consumption of the masses but also for the samurai themselves. But these ideals stood in stark contrast to the actual experience of life in Tokugawa Japan: most samurai had never drawn their blades in combat; vendettas were banned; loyalty was expected to be focused on the shogun and the tenka rather than local lords; urban samurai were increasingly decadent consumers, while rural samurai rapidly lost their status. For many, the samurai were a burden rather than an icon of society.


For the first time in centuries, the bakufu was shown to be militarily inadequate to the task of controlling the realm; its last and most basic claim to legitimacy was destroyed. In the following months, there was an explosion of social unrest and peasant uprisings across the nation, reflecting the crisis of legitimacy that was exacerbated by the sight of the defeated bakufu army marching home, and also by the omen of change represented by the death of Emperor Komei in 1867.


For the insurgents as well as for bakufu loyalists, this Imperial Restoration was dramatic and bloody, and expectations of change in the capital were high. However, for the vast majority of the population of Japan, the Meiji Restoration (if they had noticed it at all) was little more than a samurai rebellion or coup d’etat. Indeed, the people of Japan had very little reason to be optimistic that their living conditions would improve markedly, and they had every right to be skeptical that the drama of the last decades would result simply in another reshuffling of power and privilege amongst the samurai class.


It had made plans for an invasion of Korea as early as 1873; and by 1895, it had already employed its newly modernized military to defeat its giant neighbor, China, in its 1st major war of the modern period, taking Taiwan as part of the spoils.


Meiji’s new shrine would become a central edifice in the emerging state Shinto religion, which the new regime encouraged as a means of legitimizing the Imperial Restoration.


For a number of intellectuals and policymakers, the logic of the international system was governed by the idea that the “strong eat the weak.” This Social Darwinian idea, which Fukuzawa and others drew from the work of Herbert Spencer, became very influential in Japan and drove the nation to ever greater levels of industry and eventually imperialism.


For Fukuzawa and various others in the decades to come, the key to surpassing the West lay in Japan’s ability to assimilate “Western technology” but to retain its own “Easter spirit.” We will see that this kind of logic will feed into the call to “overcome modernity” and indeed to “overcome the West” in the 1930s and 1940s.


It included: a bicameral legislature with an elected lower house and an appointed upper house of peers; it guaranteed a range of rights and duties. But the constitution was formally a gift from the emperor, who retained sovereignty and who resided beyond the terms of the constitution, and the parliament was basically an advisory body.

In reality, it might be better to view the constitution as a strategic move by the genro to prevent popular involvement in politics from getting out of hand. Indeed, the aristocratic genro were deeply distrustful of the political parties and seemed to feel great disdain for the common people of Japan, believing that they were uneducated and incapable of acting for the public good rather than out of self-interest. To them, the party system seemed to indulge self-serving and fragmentary policies, which Japan could ill-afford: Japan needed to be unified if it was going to “catch up” with the West and become strong enough to survive in the volatile international system.


The women’s rights movements of the West were seen as symptoms that Europe had become morally defunct. The constitution granted and constrained popular politics; it provided for a parliament with an elected lower house (with suffrage restricted to about 5% of the male population), and real power remained extra-parliamentary, in the hands of the genro and increasingly in the hands of the military, who each enjoyed direct access to the emperor himself, who remained the locus of sovereignty.


Ironically, the first task of the revolutionaries, who were largely samurai themselves, was to abolish the privileges of their own class. It is a testament to the new regime’s commitment to modernization that they were willing and able to do this. Of course, not all the samurai in Japan were equally visionary about the demands of modernity, and a significant number attempted to preserve their traditional prerogatives. Hence, the revolutionary Meiji regime had to move firmly but carefully lest it provoke a counter-revolution.


The role of the Japanese government here raises interesting questions about the proper role of the state in “late-developing,” or “catching-up” economies.


In the end, a rapid incremental approach was adopted to phase out the samurai.


When compulsory primary education was enforced, in 1872, some parts of Japan rioted in protest against the requirement to send their children to school rather than to send them out to work. Nonetheless, by the turn of the century nearly 98% of children attended primary education and higher education was beginning to blossom, meaning that the government could reform its own recruitment practices to hire people based on their performance in examinations (rather than based on heredity).


In 1873, the government decided to tax all samurai stipends, and then, in 1874, the government proposed a solution to samurai complains about taxation, and offered to exchange their stipends for government bonds: those samurai who accepted this offer received very favorable returns. However, those who refused the offer found themselves forced to convert their stipends in 1876 (at a much less favorable rate), in which year the Meiji government also withdrew the samurai’s right to wear swords in public, restricting this right to the police and military. At this point, all of the prerogatives of the samurai had been systematically and incrementally revoked: they no longer held a privileged status; they no longer enjoyed an annual stipend; they no longer held the right to wear a sword; and they were no longer even entitled to an exclusive mode of dress or way of wearing their hair. By the time of Saigo’s 1877 “samurai rebellion,” the samurai no longer existed.


It is interesting to reflect, however, that the abolition of the samurai as a social class in Japan did not coincide with discarding the ostensible ideals of this warrior elite. Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of Japan’s engagement with modernity that it would quickly reinvent the image of the honorable and loyal samurai as a national emblem. Rather than representing an oppressive, unproductive, and expensive privileged elite from the feudal past, the samurai became re-imagined as the paragon of Japan’s national values.


Nibote saw bushido as the answer to a problem of modernity: he saw that the Great Powers of Europe all had complex and deep-rooted systems of religious belief and ideology, which gave their nations a coherent sense of identity and moral worth; he worried that Japan lacked such a sense of national identity.


This sense of identity crisis is often considered to be a universal symptom of the growing pains of modernity.


Others author sought to define a distinctly Japanese aesthetic that could be identified in contradistinction to the flashy commercialism of modernity; without being able to identify “Japanese” values, how could they be preserved?


The tremendous changes that engulfed Japan during the 2nd half of the 19th century were initially inspired by a sense of national humiliation and insecurity in the face of the so-called Great Powers of the Western world. However, as Japan successfully adopted the ideas and trappings of modernity and freed itself from the Unequal Treaties that had been imposed on it, national confidence soared.


Intellectuals, writers, artists, and activists looked to the imagined past of Japan for a sense of what the “essence” of Japaneseness might be: for some, this meant a reinvention of bushido as the “soul of Japan,” or Shinto as a national religion and emperor cult; for others, it might have meant the rediscovery of a particular appreciation of a fragile, shadowy beauty that characterized Japan aesthetic. In other words, one of the core challenges of modernity was the way in which it forced Japanese society to be self-reflective about its own identity.


One the other hand, we might identify a more chauvinistic response. From this perspective, the core dilemma was not how to preserve elements of “Japaneseness” admits the radical changes that accompanied modernization, but rather how to confront the process of modernization itself. This position radicalized Japanese traditions (whether invented or not) and asserted their superiority over those of the Western nations, which thus risked polluting and weakening Japan under the false guise of progress. As the confidence and power of Japan grew, this chauvinism held the potential to slip into an aggressive sense of mission: Japan had a moral duty to reassert its own authentic identity, and this duty implied a moral mission to help other Asian nations to overcome the insidious infection of modernity and Westernization. In short, this position provided the conditions of possibility for a paradoxically anti-imperialist imperialism in Asia; Japan’s mission was to free Asia from the grip of Western imperialism.


He argued that Korea was an essential part of Japan’s “zone of advantage” and that its relative weakness (as a less modern society) both made it vulnerable to Japan’s regional ambitions and to the ambitions of the West, which in turn constituted a vulnerability for Japan itself. It was imperative, he argued, that Kora should fall into Japan’s sphere, since it was certain to fall to someone.


In Japan, opinion leaders attempted to reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of Japanese foreign policy through recourse to the rhetoric of Pan-Asianism: Japan was helping Korea to help itself, as an Asian brother helps another under threat from the West.


The Sino-Japanese War was a great success and extremely popular with the people of Japan, who had becoming very dissatisfied with the expense and privilege of the military.


While the political parties were critical of the high levels of military spending that Yamagata insisted were necessary for the defense of Japan’s “sphere of advantage,” they were not terribly interested in reallocating budgets to improve the lots of the masses: the rights of factory workers were largely neglected until 1911, when a very weak Factory Act was passed; and women remained banned from political meetings until the 1920s.


As soon as the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki became public, a joint ultimatum was issued by the governments of Russia, France, and Germany, demanding that Japan retrocede the Liaodong peninsula. For Russia in particular, which had its own ideas about a sphere of influence in China, this small but strategic peninsula gave Japan an unacceptable advantage in the region. An embittered Japan, whose public saw this Triple Intervention as Western duplicity, had no choice but to withdraw its troops. The sense of resentment only grew when Russia itself occupied the peninsula shortly afterwards, and other European powers took advantage of a weakened China to seize other city-ports. To many in Japan, the Triple Intervention and the events that followed it looked like simple racism: although Japan had met all the criteria of a “modern nation” and had liberated itself from the Unequal Treaties, it was still not taken seriously as an international actor.


At the turn of the century, Japan joined an international coalition that included the British and the Russians to combat the anti-foreign Boxer Uprising in northern China. Subsequently, Japan attempted to gain formal recognition of its claims in Korea from the British and the Russians. In 1902, Japan achieved a great diplomatic coup when it signed an alliance with the British Empire, according to the terms of which Britain would recognize Japan’s claims in Korea and would cooperate with Japan against the expansion of Russian influence in the region.


Japan’s victory sent shockwaves around the international community; it was the 1st time that a European power had been defeated by an Asian power in the modern era. Russia’s military capacity had been devastated, and its prestige severely dented — indeed, the humiliation of the defeat was one of the factors that provided the backdrop for the Russian Revolution of 1917.


For the next decade there were frequent protests and riots in the urban centers about military spending set against the cost of public transport and rice, as well as demonstrations in favor of expanded suffrage.


The image of the Taisho period as a war-free haven is at least partially premised upon the economic boom that Japan experienced during the years of the Great War in Europe. During the war years, Japanese industrial output increased by a factor of 5 as it sought to supply European and domestic demand, and its exports surged (especially textiles).


The key ratio was Britain:USA:Japan, which was set at 5:5:3, meaning that Japan would always be less powerful than the other 2 nations that thwarted its racial equality clause. But, perhaps the last straw for those in Japan who saw a systematic racism at work in the Anglo-American world was the enactment of the 1924 immigration laws in the USA, which specifically prohibited the immigration of East Asians.


Following the collapse of the NY Stock Market in 1929, economic depression swept the globe. Japan took the yen off the gold standard in 1931 and watched its value slump by 50% against the dollar. Unemployment rose dramatically, quickly reaching over 20%. In the urban centers, where the modern life of Taisho had seemed so exciting, the darker underside of the modern condition became readily apparent. Intellectuals started to write about the crisis of capitalism and the angst of modern life. Modernity began to look like an infection that threatened the soul and even the wellbeing of Japan, rather than a material boon.


In Japan, the condemnation of the League merely confirmed the duplicity of the Western powers, and particularly the British who dominated the council. Japan simply withdrew from the League, claiming that it would now “follow its own path in Asia,” implicitly accusing the League of being a regional rather than a universal organization (a charge that was not without justification). A result was that many Japanese felt vindicated in their beliefs that the Western powers were fundamentally racists against Japan and Asia more widely; Japan became increasingly isolated from the international community and hence increasingly reliant on its own military power.

Japan’s “own path in Asia” unravelled quickly in Japan. Within 5 years, the military had appropriated nearly 75% of the national budget, and much of the decision-making about foreign policy and domestic budgets was being made in discussion between factions of the military, the leaders of which enjoyed direct access to the emperor under the principle of the independence of supreme command, enshrined in the Meiji Constitution.


A small number of right-wing revisionists in contemporary Japan argue that the Nanjing Massacre never happened; they claim that it was invented by the victorious Allied Powers after the end of the war as a means to further punish and victimize the Japanese.


The attack killed or wounded nearly 4K Americans. By contrast, the Japanese lost les than 30 aircraft and 65 men.


The planners in Tokyo had planned Pearl Harbor to be so devastating that the American public would lose all stomach for war with Japan and hence surrender quickly. The popular view of “Americanism” in Japan at that time was of an uncultured land of bubblegum, tall buildings, and moral vacuity: it was modernity gone mad.


In November of 1943, the leaders of the subjugated nations (or “member states”) were invited to Tokyo to participate in the 1st and only Greater East Asia Conference, at which the delegates were invited to discuss how best to organize the co-prosperity sphere for the mutual benefit of all the members. In reality, Tokyo was finding it increasingly difficult to sustain its expansive empire, and it realized (too late) that it needed to cultivate the good will of its colonies. It also realized (again too late) that some of the other peoples of Asia were also fed up with Western imperialism, and that they might voluntarily join a movement that genuinely sought to throw the West out of Asia: Asia for the Asians. By this time, however, any pretense that Japan’s empire was any way anti-imperialist was horribly and offensively ridiculous.


When asked about the decision to drop the bombs, US Secretary of War Henry Stimson answered simply: “It is seldom sound for the stronger combatant to moderate his blows whenever his opponent shows signs of weakening.”


Despite MacArthur’s significant freedom to maneuver, the chose a tactic of indirect rule in order to maximize his effectiveness. In particular, realizing the symbolic value of the office, he decided immediately that the emperor should be protected and preserved. Indeed, sharing an insight that had been a commonplace throughout Japanese history, he feared that the abolition of the emperor might make the Japanese people ungovernable.


MacArthur’s push for democracy began with measures to decentralize the economy. He affected a series of land reforms that forced landowners to sell all but a single plot of their holdings, thus enabling workers to own the land that they farmed.


After more than 60 ye, the 1947 constitution holds the singular distinction of being the oldest, unamended constitution in the world today.


Above all, the capitalist block should build its defense against the communists with a wall of prosperity: a “crescent of affluence” would contain communist expansion in Asia.


Then, in 1950, PM Yoshida received a “gift from the gods”: the Korean War. The “blessed rain from heaven” came in the form of $2B worth of war procurements; exports tripled, production rose by over 70%, and Japan’s GNP grew at 12% per annum.


In terms of shipping, Japan already had a tradition (it was the world’s 3rd largest manufacturer in 1935) but its resources had been ruined by the war. By 1960, Japan was the world’s largest shipbuilding nation. By 1975, nearly 50% of the world’s new ships were made in Japan.


Many of the giant Japanese car manufacturers started life in this Korean War boom: Nissan, Toyota, and Isuzu all produced vehicles for the US forces, following US designs, but engineered in Japan. Not only did this lead to tremendous growth in the automobile industry, but it also provided Japanese manufacturers with free technology transfer — which would become crucial in the high-growth 1960s. By 1967, Japan was the world’s 2nd largest car manufacturer.


Most commentators attribute this “miracle” to a constellation of very mundane factors: the yen-dollar exchange was fixed at 360:1 by the Dodge Line, and it was held artificially at this level until 1971, hence the yen became increasing undervalued, thus stimulating exports; like the rest of the Western world, Japan benefited from a newly liberal trade regime under Bretton Woods and GATT; unlike the rest of the Western world, Japan did not have to spend much of its budget on its military, since it remained sheltered under the US-Japan Security Treaty; as a latecomer amongst the advanced economies, in a liberal trade regime, Japan could buy in new technologies rather than spend time and money on developing them; rapid population growth was accompanied by a tremendous expansion of the education system.


The average Japanese salaryman worked such long hours that they amounted to the equivalent of a full 12 weeks more per year than his European counterparts. In return for this dedication, the large companies offered their employees “lifetime employment.”


The iconic Shinkansen went into service as early as 1964, between Tokyo and Osaka, linking the 2 major commercial cities with unprecedented ease and speed.


In the 1950s, consumers had talked about the “3 treasures” of domestic living (the TV, the fridge, and the washing machine); by the 1960s, there were 3 new treasures (an air-conditioner, a car, and a color TV).


Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the achievement of a “politics of patience and reconciliation” that unified the Japanese people behind the project of economic growth. Under Ikeda, the question of Japan’s military role was sidelined and society occupied itself with getting rich peacefully.

However, as became apparent in the 1980s, man cannot survive on affluence only, the question of Japan’s national identity was once more on the agenda.


Both called for a return to traditional Japanese values amidst rapid economic development and the creation of a consumer society, but they could not agree on what those values might be.


While the rest of the planet labored under stagflation, recession, and unemployment in the wake of the oil shocks of 1973 and 1978, the Japanese economy continued to grow through the 1980s at about 5% per annum — it had weathered the 1970s through a combination of exploiting the elasticity of its so-called “dual economy,” industrial restructuring (away from heavier industries), energy diversification, and creative off-shoring. At the end of the 1980s, the Tokyo Stockmarket was worth 40% of the world’s market; land prices in Japan were ludicrously high. At one extreme, Japan was represented as a threatening global monster that was intent on forging a massive postwar empire, simply substituting yen for the bullets of the co-prosperity sphere: the phenomenon of “Japan bashing” became commonplace in the USA. At the other extreme, Japan was seen as a mystical and inspiring model for economic development, and a range of populist books were published that claimed to unlock the secret connections between Japanese work ethics, Confucian organization, the spirit of bushido, and business success. The world clamored around the invented image of the salaryman-samurai.


The Nihonjinron industry boomed, as the Japanese population consumed hundreds of treatises that sought to explain the uniqueness of the Japanese people from ethnic, psychological, sociological, and religious perspectives. The new generation came to be called a new species. They were confident and proud of Japan’s affluence, but never having known the hardships of the previous generation, they were complacent about the wealth.


This “new species” of Japanese citizen was not content to quietly and selflessly dedicate its life to Japan’s economic growth, and it complained about the long hours of work and the lack of time to enjoy the spoils of Japan’s affluence. At the same, the previous generations complained that the “new species” had lost all social consciousness and discipline, the characteristics that had defined their postwar identities.


Despite evidence that the moga and the otaku continued to function in their jobs and continued to work longer hours than nearly every other society on the planet (with the exception of South Korea), critics argued that these micro-masses demonstrated the “hollowing out” of Japanese society and culture. The older generations feared for the moral and cultural collapse of their nation.


A popular and emotive example was the claim that Japan, as the 2nd most generous contributor to the UN, should have a permanent seat at the UNSC.


In fact, Japan’s capacity deficit is something of an illusion. Its Self Defense Forces are amongst the most technologically advanced military forces in the world. While Japan maintains a strict “non-nuclear” armaments policy, it has long had the necessary technology to construct such weapons, and also a space program with the necessary delivery technologies. It is true that Japan lacks the capacity to project an invasion force overseas, but its defensive capacities are second to none, and it has a range of “over the horizon” technologies that would facilitate preemptive strikes at the Asian mainland.


The simplest political answer to this question is merely to shift its terms and to suggest that the problem does not lie in Japan at all, but rather in the refusal of Japan’s neighbors to accept Japan penitence and move on.


Leaving aside the slightly troubling implications of the personification of the nation-state in this psychologically informed critique, and also leaving aside the simple repost that “of course Japan’s apologies are political acts because Japan is a state (not a person) and all acts of state are political,” this view of Japanese penitence as a type of “role-playing game” does provide us with some theoretical leverage on the problem.


While this “splintering” solution might have been rational and efficacious (that is, it enabled Japan to prosper under the US umbrella during the Cold War period), the costs for Japan have been huge: postwar Japan has become mentally ill.


Something that becomes very clear about the terms of this debate is that they are phrased in the language of a therapeutic paradigm that pathologies national action. The nation is treated as a sick individual: split by the trauma of its history / memory, Japan retreated into a state of denial, where it paradoxically knows and does not know the horrors of its past.


Many of Japan’s attempts to develop a leadership role in the region have been undermined by the persistent suspicion that its imperial ambitions remain unreconstructed. In general, East Asian has been unable or unwilling to develop the kinds of regional apparatus found in Europe.


The concept of comprehensive security broadens the notion of threat from being simply military to include other factors, such as the environment, poverty, and famine.

The Japanese government has pursued these ideals with various policy mechanisms, including the generous provision of ODA, the vast majority of which has been dispersed to its Asian neighbors.


Implicit in this position is the notion that Japan should attract others to it because of the wealth of its own historical and cultural traditions, rather than relying on its ability to seem familiar to people in the West. Japan should claim its modernity for its own. If there is an “American dream,” then there should be a distinctive “Japanese dream.”


Contemporary Japan is an almost entirely urban society, with only 5% of the population engaged in agriculture and with much of the rest crammed into the approximately 20% of the archipelago that is habitable, with 35M living in Tokyo-Yokohama alone.