In 1983, Nissan Motor Company published a book titled "The Dawns of Tradition." Framing Japan's destiny as one drawn by nature, it attempted to answer the questions "Who are the Japanese?" and "Why are they as they are?"
Even more than most peoples, the Japanese have been shaped by their environment. From the dawn of their history, close communication and an often precarious coexistence with nature have dominated almost all aspects of Japan's national character and culture.
What follows is one of the book's Forewords, written by Teiji Itoh, then president of Kogakuin University.
For sometimes geographical, sometimes political reasons, Japan isolated itself at times in its history. The last and longest period was for two hundred and fifteen years, ending in 1853, when Perry appeared with his "black ships" off Uraga, south of Tokyo. Whether the Japanese liked it or not, those ships opened their nation to an influx of Western culture, thereby changing the course of Japanese history. And it all happened only one hundred and thirty years ago.
In responding to the situation in the 1850s, the Japanese had several choices: they could reject the foreign intrusion outright, for instance, ignoring the demands to open the country—and, indeed, some took this approach; or they could warmly welcome Western culture, even if it occasionally meant giving up aspects of their own culture—and some, in turn, took this approach. But the dominant approach lay in between: carefully selecting and importing Western culture, all the while carefully leaving Japanese culture unaffected. I call this the "accretionary approach."
Viewed positively, the accretionary approach accepts foreign culture and absorbs it, while preserving the principal Japanese identity. Viewed negatively, it includes no true appreciation of foreign culture. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings of Western culture were commonplace then, but that bothered no one. One result was that Japan's modernization progressed but its Westernization did not.
Actually, this approach dates well back before the nineteenth century. it is seen often in Japanese history after the sixth century, when the bureaucracy was established. The modern experience merely demonstrated anew that Japanese do not view their culture in terms of it ever ending. To the Japanese, their culture is a kind of continuum, and the foreign influence supplements it but never replaces it
There was a popular expression, "wakon yõsai" ("Japanese spirit, Western learning"), in the 1850s and 1860s, when Western culture was first introduced. In short, Western culture and technology were widely accepted but the Western thinking behind them was not. This approach is a principal reason why during the past century modern science and technology progressed in Japan, but Westernization did not.
Japan is located off the eastern extreme of the Asian continent, and Japanese have only traveled eastward—to the West—in the last hundred years. Historically, they depended almost wholly on visitors to Japan to learn about other cultures
But the Japanese are naturally inquisitive and they tend not to reject or discard but rather to store and use imported culture. The principal result is that old and new cultural elements, from the East and from the West, coexist in Japan, interacting and often leading to the emergence of new cultural forms.
Let me liken the structure of Japanese culture to the structure of an onion. As the external layers are peeled away, almost nothing remains in the core. The hard core of Japanese culture has brought about the misinterpretations and misunderstandings when foreign cultural elements were brought into Japan, and it has brought about the interacting about cultural borrowings. So the seeming hodgepodge in Japan today is the result of great cultural accumulation and diversification over the centuries around a hard core of indigenous culture.
Some call Japan's cultural hodgepodge total confusion. Others say Japan has no cultural harmony. But I believe Japan's cultural situation is a blend of the old and the new, the East and the West. The blend is like potter's clay for designing new cultural shapes for responding to an ever-changing world. The constant mixing in Japan of things "foreign" and "Japanese" to form new, fresh ideas and lifestyles may in itself be the true cultural legacy of the Japan of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
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