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Why would you reach for ancient China instead of, you know, ancient Japan? Are you under the impression that Japanese civilization started with China?
by level3 11y ago
Why would you reach for ancient China instead of, you know, ancient Japan? Are you under the impression that Japanese civilization started with China?
- jpatokal 11y agoWell, actually Korea deserves most of the credit, that's where Japan got eg. tea, pottery, Buddhism and, most likely, its Imperial family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...
- level3 11y agoSure, Korea and China both had their cultural influence on Japan, but neither is comparable to the influence of Roman conquest in the West.
- jpatokal 11y agoAre you serious? Can you name a single aspect of Japanese culture that can be considered indigenously Japanese, without Chinese/Korean influence?
- level3 11y agoArt, music, dance, much of the spoken language, for example. Or do you mean completely devoid of outside influence? I think that's probably hard to find anywhere in the world today. My main point is that there's a significant difference between a civilization adopting parts of other cultures, as opposed to other civilizations suddenly forcing it upon you through conquest. The original thread I responded to seemed to argue that Japan had no history (read: civilization) before the adoption of kanji.
- yongjik 11y agoRe: the original thread, I was just using "the start of recorded history" as a convenient yardstick for measuring "ancientness" of civilizations. Of course the people and culture existed before that, but without any record it kinds of blends into prehistory. I'm not suggesting having short history makes Japan inferior or anything like that. It's just a predictable consequence of living on islands across the sea from the culture center. (My own country's history is not much longer, after all.)