I - Facing History: Getting Past the Nation-state

Summary

Contemporary Japan is a fascinating mix of cultural influences. Japanese language, art, architecture, religion and government are all inconceivable without the influence of Chinese and Korean culture. Japan is the land of the rising sun only because it was so described from the perspective of China to its West; in this sense, an intercultural identity is infused into the very heart of Japanese consciousness. Immigrants from what is now Korea taught Japan's indigenous ancestors how to farm rice. Modern Japanese economic, legal and corporate models have Prussian, American, French and British influences. The Portuguese gave the Japanese bread, or pan. The wildly popular “Japanese” game, sudoku, was first developed by an architect from Indianapolis, Howard Garns, and first popularized by a New Zealander, Wayne Gould. Even the Japanese tea ceremony, so emblematic of Japanese culture, is animated by Zen Buddhism, which originated in India.

As these and countless other examples show, there is no monolithic culture in Japan; it is a richly multicultural society. But we will go a step further, and argue that even the idea of the uniqueness of the Japanese race is pure myth, because the Japanese “race” is largely the result of waves of immigration from Asia. There is much that is potentially liberating for Japan and its neighbors in acknowledging these multicultural and immigration-based features of Japan. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, because the nineteenth century construct of Japan as a unified nation-state, a monoculture and a homogenous race retains deep roots in the Japanese imagination, and serve as anchoring principles for Japanese nationalists to this day.