Feature Article : ‘Japan-consciousness’ in the Past, Present and Future : Is Japan a Wet-Rice-Growing Culture, a Confucian Group-Orientated Society, and a Branch of the Chinese Civilization?

Japanese self-definition and consciousness and the Western image of Japanese culture and society are much closer and tightly connected to each other than this is the case in any other culture.At the end of the 17th century, Engelbert Kaempfer envisaged Japan as a Confucian society, thereby linking it implicit with China. One hundred years later, the encyclopaedists lamented the lack of individualism in Japanese society due to the politics of closing the country against the West. In the 19th century Karl Marx spoke of a “asiatische Produktionsweise”, in which also Japan tended to be subsumed. On the side of Japanese folklore studies, Yanagita Kunio and his followers, including ethnologists like Ishida Eiichiro and Nakane Chie, defined Japan as a wet-rice-growing culture, based on a group-orientated village society, despite earlier research on slash-and-burn-agriculture and boar-hunting of non-sedentary “people of the mountains” at the base of Japanese culture.The folklorist Miyamoto Keitaro wrote of “rice, miso, rice-bowl and chopsticks”, all cultural elements originating in China. Only in the latter half of the 20th century, ethnologist like Oka Masao, and Umesao Tadao as well as the archaeologist Egami Namio opposed that view, formulated for instance by the historian Arnold Toynbee, Japanese high-culture has to be seen as a branch of the Sinic civilization. They on the contrary emphasize the view of a complex, multi-layered Japanese culture, basically entirely different from the Chinese, but these approaches are not yet fully recognized, neither in Japan nor in the Western world