Richard Halloran Japan Images and Realities

Trouvé le 29 mars 2009 (Sakura) à Book Off. Charles E. Tuttle, 1970, 13th edition 1981

The image of [Japan as the first genuinely Westernized nation in Asia] is an illusion that is reflected from the surface of Japan. Beneath, the essence of Japanese life flows from ideas, ethics, customs, and institutions that are anchored deep in Japanese culture and history. The core of Japanese tradition guides the daily lives of the Japanese and directs the internal and external courses of their nation. That core has been little touched by incursions from the West.

Western influence has changed the face of Japan and the accoutrements of Japanese life, but it has not penetrated the minds and hearts of the Japanese people... The Japanese have taken from the West a few things whole (technology), adapted and made Japanese others (political forms, economic organization, and the press), and rejected outright still others (Western religions).

Americans and Europeans mistake the use of Western objects for a revision in the essence of Japanese values. Their interpretation overlooks the continuity in Japanese thought and the residual forces in Japanese life. It fails to take into account the selective nature of Japanese acquisitions from the West. More important, it underestimates the absorptive genius of the Japanese, who have taken forms from the West and molded them around the substance of Japan. The things Japan has borrowed from the West are changed by the Japanese - the borrowed items change the Japanese far less.

"Despite industrial imperialism, despite television, despite the crush of urban life, the Japanese essence will remain. Don't look for the Japanese essence in society but in the individual." Yasunari Kawabata, 1968 Nobel Prize

"There is not evidence enough to show that because she adopted Western machines and commercial practices to her own uses, Japan became Western in the essence of her national character by the close of the 19th century. Whether a similar conclusion as to the first half of the 20th century would emerge from a survey of its cultural history is beyond the scope of the present enquiry. Yet a study of the earlier period raises doubts whether any of the chief civilizations of Asia will, even if they voluntary follow a Western economic pattern, submit to Western precept in political, social or religious life." George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan

Emphasis should be given to the deep running continuities in the flow of Japanese history. Japan is perhaps the world's most fascinating social laboratory for the study of the effect of one culture on another.