Guest Post: What is Japanese About Japan?

So geishas, shoguns and woodblock printing are Chinese originally. Fine. Plenty of things are 100% Japanese, however.

(This is a guest post by Dr. Christopher Harding, a Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh. I encouraged Christopher to write this post after we had a chat about the issue of Western appreciation for Japanese and Chinese cultures, one that is very dear to me. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to Christopher’s Substack, IluminAsia.)

Somewhere near the heart of Japan’s famously fractious relationship with its next-door neighbour China lies a desire for independence – economically and politically, but also culturally. Now and again, across Japanese history, influential thinkers have popped up, trying to put their fingers on what it is that’s particularly ‘Japanese’ about Japan.

I was thinking about this after reading ‘Why Western People Love Japanese Stuff & Despise Chinese Stuff,’ which makes the case – and I’m paraphrasing a bit here – that a lot of Western affection for Japanese culture is based on snob value, given how much of it in fact has roots in lesser-known or less popular Chinese originals.

Let me start by developing that argument a bit. Then I’ll see if I can answer the question of what is ‘Japanese’ about Japan.

There is a kind of snob value to Japanese culture in the West, and I think it goes back to Europeans’ love-affair with China in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Those who visited China in those decades, many of them Jesuit missionaries, sent back news of an ancient and sophisticated culture, far older and more stable than any European country. China’s art was vibrant and free, its Confucian ethics were impeccable and the place was run by highly-educated bureaucrats (‘mandarins’).

That view changed later in the 19^th century, when the Chinese rebuffed European requests for trade and unhappy European traders began to say that while China’s imperial court might be a grand and rarefied place, ordinary Chinese could be rude, tricky and unpleasant. Then came the Opium Wars.

By the time Japan was forced to open its doors to western trade and diplomacy in the 1850s and 1860s, European views of China had soured considerably. Much of what they used to admire about China, especially its aesthetics, meanwhile appeared to be on offer in Japan: a country, claimed Victorian-era travellers with experience of both China and Japan, where ordinary women and men behaved with the manners of ladies and gentlemen back home – plus they kept their towns and cities fastidiously clean.

This theme of Japan as ‘not China’ continued after World War II. Japan’s comeback from international pariah status was not instantaneous. In the 1950s, Japanese exports were regarded in the same disparaging way that products from Taiwan and China would be in later decades. Sony used to make the label that said ‘Made in Japan’ as small as possible on their products, so as not to put off western consumers.

But from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics onwards, Japan was able to sell itself as a place where modernity meets tradition – in everything from Zen to manga to J-Pop. Should China one day change its political arrangements, and become a soft-power superpower like Japan, it’s possible to imagine western affections shifting back in China’s favour – accompanied by talk of ‘returning to the original’ where the arts are concerned.

What, then, of that tricky question: what is ‘Japanese’ about Japan?

Historians and archaeologists often shrug their shoulders at this. They’ll tell you that given the long history of migration and exchange of ideas between mainland Asia and Japan, plus China’s ancient and varied culture, you’ll struggle to find anything in Japan that doesn’t have a Chinese counterpart of some kind. It’s a little like expecting to turn up something in the UK that has absolutely no counterpart or forerunner in mainland Europe. You’d struggle to find something unarguably unique.

That said, let me offer two possible answers to the question. The first is very popular in Japan. The second is more promising.

The first answer is this: when you’re looking for something Japanese, don’t look for ideas and technologies (though Japan has these, of course) – look at values and behaviour.

The very first account we have of a Chinese visitor to Japan, featured in the Records of Wei (early centuries AD) includes three fascinating observations. People there love nature and live in awe of the supernatural. They are extraordinarily well-behaved. And they respect hierarchy – sometimes kneeling on the ground and bowing their heads when a superior passes by.

Even now, people who argue for Japan’s distinctiveness tend to focus on these three things. They point to ancient clay figurines called dogū, some dating back to the middle of the Jōmon period (14,500 BCE to 500 BCE), featuring exaggerated eyes, breasts and buttocks, alongside heavy bellies – suggestive of people seeking to reach out to spirits or energies with whom they share their world.

By the time of Japan’s first written records, in the early 700s AD, these intuitions about the natural and supernatural had developed into stories and rituals that came to be known as Shintō (‘the way of the gods’). For all Buddhism’s influence in Japan, the nature-worshipping ethos of Shintō never went away. People continued to intuit the presence of kami (gods) residing in trees and mountains, to set great store by the purifying power of water (some trace Japanese cleanliness back to this) and to re-build the Grand Shrine at Ise every 20 years, using fresh, pure materials drawn from nature.

You find this ethic, too, in one of Japan’s best-known aesthetic ideals, wabi-sabi: the particular beauty and presence possessed by objects created using raw and naturally-imperfect materials. To shun a perfectly-crafted tea-set made from gold and rich lacquer in favour of a misshapen one fashioned from dull-looking clay and bits of wood and metal: that would be a victory for wabi-sabi and the value of closeness to nature.

It's there, too, in Japanese food. Where Chinese cuisine makes heavy use of spices, a great many Japanese dishes stand or fall on the freshness and quality of the ingredients used, with as little as possible done to disturb their natural flavours.

An influential thinker called Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) claimed that it was this kind of thing that distinguished the Japanese from the overly ‘rationalistic’ Chinese. Japan’s kanji and syllabaries might have their origins in China, he argued, but the way they are put to use in writings like The Tale of Genji reveals a ‘pure Japanese heart’, which is essentially feminine and defined by mono no aware: a capacity to be deeply moved by the knowledge that everything in the world is passing away.

Put this alongside the high value given, in Japan, to knowing your place and acting accordingly – at least in public – and you have a useful set of distinctions, rooted in long history, between Japanese and Chinese culture.

I think there’s something to this argument. It’s not about claiming the Chinese have no sense of nature, the supernatural or social hierarchy. It’s more about looking at how these things have continued to shape life in Japan down the centuries, to an extent not seen in China. It runs alongside an ethic of perfection: the claim that ideas enter Japan and are then perfected there. Some modern Buddhists have made this claim, arguing that Buddhism emerged in India, developed in China and Korea and was then brought to perfect completion in Japan – like steadily polishing a diamond.

The second answer to this question is to say that since the 19^th century, Japan and China’s trajectories have diverged significantly. China entered its ‘century of humiliation’ while the Japanese got rid of their early modern system (the Tokugawa shogunate) and embraced western modernity.

‘Tradition meets modernity’ might strike you as a tourist-board cliché. But it’s also an accurate description of how people in Japan saw their role in Asia, and even in the world, from the late nineteenth century onwards. The West, it was argued, had lost a part of its soul in the course of rapid industrialization and urbanisation. Japan would avoid that mistake, by bringing the best of its traditional culture with it as it modernized – not least that sense of closeness to nature, in poetry and aesthetics, and respect for hierarchy.

This second sense of Japanese distinctiveness from China might not be as romantic as the first. But it’s easier to defend. The mid-19^th century is the point at which Japan and China’s historical roles start to reverse, with Japan blazing a trail that some in China – before and even after the rise of Communism – hoped to emulate. Quite what the future may hold for this relationship, of course, no-one knows…