

Why is Japan so… different? - ValentineC
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/17/why_is_japan_so_different

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Foreign Policy FEATURE Why Is Japan So … Different? A brief history of leaving
China, becoming the other, and turning Japanese.

BY DAVID PILLING MARCH 17, 2014

On March 16, 1885, an editorial entitled "Leaving Asia" was published in the
Japanese newspaper Jiji Shimpo. Now widely believed to have been written by
Yukichi Fukuzawa, the intellectual giant of the 19th-century modernization
movement that culminated in the Meiji Restoration, it argued that Japan could
simply not afford to be held back by "feudalistic" China and Korea, and should
therefore "leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with the
civilized nations of the West."

Japan's break with China, a country it subsequently invaded and humiliated, is
a story of sharp relevance today. Tensions between the two nations are
extremely high. Chinese and Japanese ships and planes circle disputed islands
in the East China Sea, with the ever-present danger of an accident or willful
escalation. Leaders in both countries have started to compare the present with
1914 and 1939, when the world stood on the brink of war.

The principal cause of animosity is Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s and
1940s, an unsuccessful attempt to colonize the Middle Kingdom in which
millions were slaughtered. It can also be clearly traced to 1895, when Japan
fought China in a brief war and annexed Chinese territory, including Taiwan,
and claimed the Senkaku islands (which the Chinese call the Diaoyu), the focus
of today's territorial dispute. More subtly, however, the resentment between
the two countries goes back further still, to Japan's intellectual break with
China, when it threw itself into a headlong effort to modernize and
Europeanize.

China was once considered the fount of all knowledge for Japan, an isolated
archipelago of islands sitting like an apostrophic afterthought off the
eastern edge of the vast Eurasian landmass. Kyoto, founded in the 8th century
and Japan's imperial capital for a thousand years, was a replica of the Tang
Dynasty capital Chang'an. Serious Japanese poets wrote in Chinese. Only women
used the phonetic kana script -- a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court
composed the 11th-century Tale of Genji, considered the world's first novel.
For men, to be learned meant to be learned in Chinese.

But in subsequent centuries, the prestige of Chinese civilization began to
slowly erode; it fell sharply in 1644 when the Ming Dynasty crumpled and the
Han Chinese came under foreign control. This coincided with the early days of
Japan's Tokugawa period (1600-1868), when the ruling shoguns sought to protect
the state, and themselves, from foreign influence, including Chinese. Intent
on preserving its monopoly and wary of competing ideologies, the shogunate
banned the Japanese, on pain of death, from leaving the country and returning.
Traders from China were mostly restricted to a Chinese quarter in the city of
Nagasaki.

For Japan to break with China was a traumatic decision. Most of what it valued
culturally had come from the Chinese landmass: wet rice cultivation, the
written script, concepts of Confucian hierarchy and filial piety, and
techniques in the use of both bronze and iron. The historian George Sansom
wrote that Buddhism, which also arrived in Japan from China (even though it
originated in India) was "a great magic bird, flying on strong pinions across
the ocean, [bringing] to Japan all the elements of a new life -- a new
morality, learning of all kinds, literature, the arts and crafts, and subtle
metaphysics which had no counterpart in the native tradition."

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During the Tokugawa era, scholars of kokugaku, or "country learning,"
endeavored to revive nativist traditions and loosen the hold of Chinese
influence. Helping these ideas take hold was the Opium War of 1839-1842, where
a mere handful of British gunboats brought low the great civilization of the
Middle Kingdom. China was in danger of being "cut up like a melon," as a 19th
century expression had it. If Japan were to avoid a similar fate, it would
have to embrace Western civilization and leave its Asian origins behind.
Kokugaku scholars looked back to a pre-feudal classical Japan, a supposed
golden age of literature and philosophy. They stressed the supposed purity of
Japanese poetry, which, distinct from the classical Chinese forms, was meant
to evoke nature and praise pure emotion.

Even today, such ideas resonate. Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of
Tokyo whose 2012 plan to buy and develop the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu islands
in the East China Sea triggered the current Sino-Japanese standoff, once told
me proudly that Japanese poetry was unique. The novelist Andre Malraux, he
said, had personally told him that the Japanese were "the only people who can
grasp eternity in a single moment." Ishihara, blinking in his owlish way, went
on, "The haiku is the shortest poetic style in the world. This was not created
by the Chinese but by the Japanese."

Much of what we today consider quintessentially Japanese originated from this
period of breaking with China. Ian Buruma, a brilliant scholar of China and
Japan told me, "As knowledge of the world grew, the Japanese began to realize
that China was not the center of world, and to recognize the weakness of
China. So they thought, ‘We better start repositioning ourselves.'" Similarly,
much of Japan's supposed exceptionalism was a modern construct, said Buruma.
"The reason the Japanese nativists describe their own culture as completely
different from China was a form of defensiveness." From the 1880s, after the
overthrow of the shogun and the establishment of a modern state in the name of
the emperor, history books were rewritten to begin not with the Stone Age, but
with Japan's own creation myth, tracing a supposedly unbroken imperial line
from the sun goddess Amatarasu to the present day. Japanese Shintoism, an
animist set of folkloric beliefs mixed with ancestor worship, was elevated to
a state religion with the divine emperor at its center. Much of Japan's
supposed uniqueness, in other words, was propaganda; a political exercise in
nation building and establishing Japan's credentials as a standalone culture
distinct from China.

Tokyo used that propaganda to create support for Japan's imperial ambitions,
based on the supposed superiority of the Japanese, who were closer to the
divine emperor than foreigners. Japan's "civilizing" mission was elevated to
an idea that was worth dying -- and killing -- for. Things were very
different, of course, after the war. Years later, in 1971, Henry Kissinger
told then-Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that Japan's "tribal outlook" made it
capable of rapid change. "Japan believes that their society is so different
that they can adjust to anything and preserve their national essence," he
said. "Therefore the Japanese are capable of sudden explosive changes. They
went from feudalism to emperor worship in two to three years. They went from
emperor worship to democracy in three months."

Some foreign observers have been as enthusiastic about promoting Japan's
alleged uniqueness as the Japanese themselves. Of course, all nations are
unique, but in Japan this truism became a fetish. The Japanese developed a
form, which dates back to the Tokugawa era but which flourished in the post-
World War II period, of quasi-philosophical writing called Nihonjinron, or
"essays on the essence of Japaneseness." Written by both Japanese and
foreigners, these tracts sought to explain what made the Japanese unique and
how they differed from foreigners, who were, all too often, lumped into one
homogeneous category. Such lines of inquiry often settled on a description of
the Japanese as cooperative, sedentary rice farmers who use instinct and heart
rather than cold, Western logic. Unlike Western hunter-gatherers, the Japanese
were seen as having a unique sensitivity to nature, an ability to communicate
without language through a sort of social telepathy, and a rarefied artistic
awareness.

In 1946, U.S. anthropologist Ruth Benedict made it respectable to see the
Japanese as a race apart with the publication of her classic study of Japanese
culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. She described a highly codified
society operating with conventions all-but-incomprehensible to outsiders. Her
work paved the way for shelf after shelf of Nihonjinron texts by Japanese
authors. These multiplied with Japan's post-war economic success, which the
Japanese and foreigners alike began to attribute to the country's supposedly
unique organizational and social structures. Gavan McCormack, an Australian
academic, describes Benedict's book as "one of the greatest propaganda coups
of the century." In stoking Japan's own sense of its own uniqueness, he
argues, the book helped sever Japan's psychological ties with its Asian
neighbors. "What they believed to be ancient tradition," he writes, "was
quintessentially modern ideology." Japan's perception of itself as isolated
and different persists to this day, often to its disadvantage.

Japan's perception of itself as isolated and different persists to this day,
often to its disadvantage. It has, for example, hampered the country's
electronics industry: Japanese manufacturers often produce goods perfectly
adapted to Japanese customers but of little global reach. It yearns for what
it sees as its rightful place in the hierarchy of nations -- it has for years
waged a campaign to obtain a permanent seat in the United Nations Security
Council. But whether defending whaling, or the rights of its leaders to
worship at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the "souls" of more
than 2 million dead Japanese soldiers, including 14 class-A war criminals from
World War II, Japan often has a hard time explaining itself to the rest of the
world.

Some in Japan, however, especially on the right, seem bent on preserving the
mystique of a country that is somehow unintelligible to outsiders. Masahiko
Fujiwara, a right-wing author (and mathematician), suggested only half-
jokingly in a popular 2005 book that the Japanese should stop trying to learn
English altogether as this would help preserve a barrier between their own
exceptional culture and the rest of the world. He told me that when non-
English-speaking Japanese went abroad, they preserved the mystique of a
profound culture beyond the grasp of foreigners to understand. As soon as they
spoke in English, he said, the illusion was broken and foreigners realized the
Japanese had nothing to say.

Donald Keene, perhaps the greatest post-war U.S. scholar of Japanese
literature, told me a similar story from the other direction. His lectures in
Tokyo, mostly in Japanese, are invariably standing-room only as Japanese
students flock to learn from his encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese language
and literature. Yet as soon as he draws on the board a simple kanji --the
multi-stroke characters derived from Chinese -- there are often gasps of
amazement from members of the audience astonished that a foreigner has
penetrated Japanese hieroglyphics. In Bending Adversity, my book on Japan,
Toshiaki Miura, a shy and thoughtful commentator on the left-of-center
newspaper Asahi Shimbun, summed up Japan's sense of geographical, even
psychological, isolation, coupled with its long-frustrated attempt to find a
place in the hierarchy of nations. "Our psyche is very insular, but we always
see ourselves reflected in the mirror outside," said Miura of the twin
impulses to be isolated and yet to be internationally respected. "One of the
tragedies of Japan's position in international society is that we have no
neighbors of the same size or the same level of industry. If Japan were placed
in Europe," he said, airing that 19th-century impulse to leave Asia, "it would
have Germany, Italy and England to get along with, and we could learn how to
coexist with countries of the same strength."

But Japan is not in Europe. It lies next door to China, the fount of much of
its civilization, and a country that Japan invaded when China was weak. It
must now watch in alarm as China, which has neither forgotten nor forgiven,
grows stronger.

