The Un-Imperial Island

One of the most shocking things to me about moving to Japan was discovering just exactly how isolated and insular this country is. I went to France this past summer; France was another country. Then in July I landed in Tokyo, and Tokyo was another planet. A few days later I stepped off a plane in Akita...and forget different country, forget different planet...Akita is at least an entirely different galaxy, if not a different universe. Japan itself is a virtually monolingual, almost 100% homogenous population. As an island, particularly as a small island separated from its nearest continental neighbors by an entire sea (the Sea of Japan), its total homogeny is virtually unique on the planet. In the United States, most people speak English, but you will frequently overhear conversations in restaurants, on buses, or from passerby on cellphones or with friends, in numerous other languages. In Japan, if you hear anything other than Japanese, your head snaps around. Furthermore, Japanese citizens are almost to a one ethnically Japanese. This is because citizenship of children is based on the citizenship of the parents...not on birth within Japan's borders. So, if your parents are not Japanese citizens, you may have been born in Japan, lived your whole life here, speak nothing but Japanese...and still have to carry an alien registration card with you at all times.

Japan's inward tendencies have a long history - and have many visible modern repercussions. For example, the Japanese language is probably the only natural language in the world that comes close to the clean, logical patterns of artificial languages. While Japanese is undeniably an intricate and challenging language to learn, it is shockingly logical - and notably free of irregular conjugations. The entire language has ONLY two irregular verbs, and they are irregular each according to their own set of rules, in every conjugation. The language is formulaic almost to the point of being mathematical in its constructions. Why? My only conclusion is that Japan's isolation prevented other languages from "mixing" with Japanese - thus minimizing the irregularities that linguistic interchange (think English, with its mixed Latin and Germanic roots, and regular interaction with other continental European languages like French, Spanish, German, Dutch, etc) introduces to less isolated languages and countries. Japan's island location prevented easy linguistic crossover, and even its interactions with countries like China were tightly regulated. Only specially chosen Japanese emissaries visited other nations, and emissaries from other countries to Japan were tightly controlled - they were not allowed to mingle freely, being supervised by government officials at all times and effectively quarantined from normal Japan. They saw only the Japan that Japanese officials chose to show them, and were permitted no free interaction with the nation's people, language, economy or anything else. This degree of control over foreign influences meant Japan borrowed much (think kanji, the Chinese characters that form such a challenging and integral part of written Japanese), but had firm control over how those influences were introduced. Thus, Japan managed to remain purely Japanese even as she incorporated to some degree select foreign influences.

This leads to the next great mystery about Japan; why did she ever become more than a hunter-gatherer society? The emergence of an advanced society in Japan is a great puzzle. Most societies evolved either in response to food pressure or to pressure from competing groups. Japan has an abundance of huntable and gatherable foods - fish, seaweed, nuts, roots, wild fruits and vegetables, small game, birds - in quantities more than sufficient to sustain the populations of that kind of society. It has adequate space, also, for such populations. It has materials such as reeds and bamboo for shelter and basic tools. With no neighboring societies to pressure them, why did Japan's effectively homogenous people ever move past the level of sophistication seen in societies like Alaskan natives or African communities? While sophisticated, these groups would certainly not be considered to have attained the degree of development reflected by Japanese agricultural, military, architectural and governmental technologies, techniques and infrastructures. Why did Japan ever become an advanced modern society? To me this is a great mystery.

Furthermore, Japan has never, in the true sense of the word, displayed colonial or imperial tendencies. Even in World War II, Japan was not imperial. She did not seek to relocate her own people outside her borders - rather, she sought to exploit other groups to benefit Japan...where, naturally, all Japanese people would still live. This oddly anti-imperial, anti-expansionist philosophy reflects the deep-seated introversion of Japanese society that I think foreigners often mistake for xenophobia or racism. While in some sense perhaps it is, I think its roots are fundamentally different than the way the Western world might perceive them.

That said all these factors combine to make Japan a marvel of unique (and often incomprehensible!) cultural, artistic, spiritual and philosophical traditions...and it certainly makes for an experience being an outsider living in a cultural that is not only fiercely introverted, but also populated almost exclusively with the in-crowd. I sometimes feel as if I am window-shopping through life but all the store doors are locked and I don't have the key. The views sure are spectacular though...