Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities.
>attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.
Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.
How is "Japanoid" pseudoscientific language? It is standard practice in linguistics and archaeology to add -oid to X to denote languages that the historical record shows were related to X, but were not necessarily the same as X. (Another example are the dialects further north in the Balkans in the first millennium that were related to Albanian but not necessarily Albanian, hence Albanoid).
> Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors.
Again, Japanese shares the same family with neighbours they had on the Korean peninsula before the Korean peninsula's demographics changed. Almost no one disputes this. Longer-range connections like Altaic or Martine Robbeet's Transeurasian hypothesis are more controversial, but still within the scholarly mainstream.
Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities.
>attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.
Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.