31–38 of 38 posts
Why would they want that? Groups with strong ethnic identity (like the Japanese) want their lands to be inherited by their descendants; this is the default historical position. But atm the Japanese are going to zero with their low birthrate, so idk.
While I respect you asking a legitimate question, I would recommend being cautious while reading this thread. Discussions about Japanese culture, and foreign cultures in general, tend to be dominated by westerners retelling ideas they've read by other western people on the internet. Japan not having a large presence in American social networks makes it especially vulnerable to exoticization, speculation, and exaggera…
I saw a line printed pin up of Lum from Urusei Yatsura when I was in college, went to the anime club, and developed an obsession with Japan that continues today.
It is well compartmentalized (I rarely talk about it on HN) so I rarely come across as a North America weeaboo but if you open my backpack you might find a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendama
and a Nintendo 3DS and a Sony Minidisc player and a box of 4x6 prints I made some of which are anime art and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-e
and also a book or a copy of the Pillow Book. (This is not all I am into you will find some Italian and Russian futurist painting reproductions, maybe a book about Fuzzy Logic or Margaret Thatcher too. Probably the strangest thing about my backpack is that it is overpacked, something appropriate for a long trek into an intellectual desert.)
Until Japan every non-western culture posed no effective resistance to imperalism. The Japanese felt they had choice but to beat the white man at their own game and they've come very close to doing so, setting a precedent for other cultures.
If there was one thing unique about Japan I'd say it is highly resistant to Christianity. In the past they banned Christianity and oppressed them just as violently as Christians oppressed Christians in Europe. Today there is little direct hostility to Christianity but there is almost no market penetration for it. Contrast that to Korea, where people will discover it, think it is the best news they ever heard, get more people to show up at church and next week have them bursting out the doors and ready to start a new church across town.
I think it happens in certain circumstances to any type of people, not just East Asian. The same could be said for the Turks. They are also very much into their own culture, and are ethnically homogenous, despite being previously an inclusive and imperial society. The United States can be said to be like that to an extent but with two separate cultures instead of one.
I hesitate to say this, but I think we do have to acknowledge that Turkey is only ethnically homogeneous because of 1) the mutual ethnic cleansing by Turkey and Greece of of Anatolian Greeks and Greek Turks 2) the Armenian Genocide 3) heavy discrimination against Turkish Kurds
Why would they want that? Groups with strong ethnic identity (like the Japanese) want their lands to be inherited by their descendants; this is the default historical position. But atm the Japanese are going to zero with their low birthrate, so idk.
The birthrate in Japan isn't that much lower than the US, and it's higher than China and much higher than South Korea. All the developed nations have low birthrates now, so it's not unique to Japan, though it is lower than most.
This book might interest you: Culture Hacks: Deciphering Differences in American, Chinese, and Japanese Thinking https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Hacks-Deciphering-Differences...
I actually like how the Japanese have preserved their culture. With East Asian nations it is easy to fall into the trap of over-westernization as many of Japan's counterparts have done. I think South Korea is the most prominent example. Korea gave me a very off-putting vibe when I visited. It felt like a massive, heartless tribute to capitalism. I got the sense of a certain perversion of western culture, where a glor…
What do you mean by “integrating culturally with others”? What would be examples of that?
Good point. There's always divisions (with any culture we can say 'integrates well' with other cultures)...let me think about it for a day, it's pretty late here-- and I'll probably get back to you--hopefully with something more clear. There's something there, I just don't know how to put it into more words right now.
It's essentially kind of similar to how the southern Chinese ("world best migrants"are) are very migratory and they kind of migrate anywhere in the world with the difference being that the Chinese will often set up a sort of like a local monoculture so that Chinatown kind of place and still kind of maintain a strong culture where as in the west we have sort of a looser idea or own culture and I think we're more flexible.
But I don't see the Japanese having a correlate in either of these activities: they don't really seem so migratory and when they do migrate they don't really seem to do the same sort of integration or mercantile sort of transaction that the westerners or the Chinese do.
Also we can take a look at their country--JP--and while Western Nations commonly include (not all) but commonly include folks from all over the world (and there's certainly still plenty of racism from the dominant anglo cultures but there's still inclusion of folks from all over the world) and immigration policies that are more open. whereas in Japan I think there's obviously stricter and more xenophobic immigration policies but also there's less of this sense of groups from all over the world to the same extent coming in and forming sort of a community there.
It's much more of an exotic thing I think for non Japanese people to move to Japan (while it certainly existent and occurs to some extent), the degree is much less I think than the type of air quotes multiculturalism you'll see in you know a western nation.
And other nations as well it's not exclusively Western but I think Japan stands out for having a sort of xenophobic monoculture that's quite insular and so that's sort of what I'm talking to.
But this is just a first draft kind of elaboration I could probably say a lot more so I'll see you know where that sticks with you and lands on anything and where you take that.