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National cultures are less alike than we mostly prefer to think. Japan's present reflects upon Japan's past, which is long and deep and rich even if one would

National cultures are less alike than we mostly prefer to think. Japan's present reflects upon Japan's past, which is long and deep and rich even if one would like to say that it went off the rails a century ago. America has no past for the present to reflect off. 250 years are nothing. We do not have traditions; we have defaults.

joe_mamba 8mo ago
More like Japan is a nation of the Japanese people where maintaining national values and tradition comes first, while the US functions as the world's largest economic zone where making money any way you can get away with trumps any forms of culture or identity, so they each optimize for different things and get different outcomes.
- simfree 8mo ago
  There is a lot of money floating around major cities in the US. So many nonprofit entities are preserving some cultural niche thanks to their older patrons using their qualified minimum distribution to fund a long lasting endowment. I feel like you see this less in other parts of the world where people don't have tens of thousands of dollars from their retirement savings that they have to take out each year, and they would rather give it tax free to their favorite nonprofit than take a haircut with taxes and then do nothing with the money
  - queenkjuul 8mo ago
    You might be surprised at how much other countries invest tax revenue into cultural projects
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      The difference is in other countries the government decides to invest their own citizens' tax revenue in whatever cultural projects they decide, versus in the US where individuals decide for themselves to do it.
- BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
  > maintaining national values and tradition comes first Japan's had a couple of major upheavals in their "national values" over the past 210-ish years, you might have heard of them.
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    What does that supposed to mean?
    - BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
      Consider the "national values" pre- and post-Meiji restoration, and pre- and post-WWII.
      - joe_mamba 8mo ago
        What exactly do you mean with all these dogwhistles? Just say it, don't beat it around the bush. A country can have good values and moral and be peaceful high trust society with low crime, despite past atrocities. Which country on this planet with a history of imperialism has NOT committed similar atrocities in the past? Does that invalidate their achievements? So what's your argument here, except a cheap gotcha like you just found out something revolutionary in the history books, that invalidates the argument.
        BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
        I'm saying your claim that "maintaining national values and tradition comes first' is completely ahistorical to the point of being "not even wrong". Let's take the Meiji restoration for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration#Destruction_of_cultural_heritage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration#Destruction_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_tax_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_tax_riots
marginalia_nu 8mo ago
Many western countries, even with longer histories, don't have a national identity that is that much older than the US. There was this 19th century idea of deliberately building a national identity that swept through the world, that in many ways superseded any prior identity that merely happened to exist. So even if buildings and ruins may be old, the identity itself is often surprisingly young. It may hark on events from the 18th or even 17th century, and tack on some fairy tales of brave knights or ferocious vikings, but it was more often than not penned about the same time the US national identity began to crystallize.
A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago
> America has no past for the present to reflect off. Well, what do you mean by "past"? European settlement in America has a very long history, which of course extends back to the 17th century. It has a rich intellectual tradition, in which respects it surpasses many European countries -- and many of the dominant strains of thought today have their roots in America. It has an exceptionally rich literary and artistic tradition, with numerous styles which are characteristically American. In scientific achievement, few countries can compete. It even has its own aesthetic, just as Japan does. You could say that Japan is regressing from modernity into older ways of being, but this is far from true. Japan before Meiji was strictly aristocratic and feudal. The average Japanese family were tenant farmers with zero political power, economic power, and near-zero potential for advancement in society. If anything, Japan is apparently regressing into an American-style older way of being. A pre-New-Deal manner, with big winners, bigger and more numerous losers, and increased social strife. Also, the atomization the article picks up on isn't a Ye Olde Japanese thing; it's very American.
- silvestrov 8mo ago
  > a very long history [...] back to the 17th century I think you proved the point (about no history) without wanting to. How large percentage of history lessions in Europe do you think is spent on the years after the 17th century?
  - A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago
    A lot! The majority, surely. The period from the 18th through the close of the 20th centuries was a time of tremendous upheaval, where nations were forged. German students, for instance, don't spend all of their time on the HRE; they tend to focus more on the nation-forming events of the 18th and 19th centuries, and then of course the 20th. Of course, students also learn ancient and ancient-adjacent history -- the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Charlemagne, etc. -- but this is general and isn't unique to any national tradition, but common to the entire continent.
  - piva00 8mo ago
    A lot, the period from National Romanticism onward is the most relevant for any form of study of a "nation". Before that you could only think in terms of loosely connected realms/kingdoms, before more in terms of tribes and some city-states. Those aren't that useful to study to understand the present, from the 17th century is where most of the current culture branched out from. The historical connection to the land from the people/tribes living in territories of modern Europe from before the Middle Ages is more akin to studying Native Americans in the USA, they were the people inhabiting the land, they had their traditions, and some of those traditions were used to forge the national identity of present cultures but there's a lot of this national identity that was myth-making by National Romantics to generate a sense of unity needed for creating the nation and nation-states.
PostOnce 8mo ago
The British did not suddenly and instantaneously turn American in 1776, they had to already be culturally American for things to have wound up there. What's more, the British didn't leave Britain so they could go be British overseas necessarily, but so they could go do un-British things, it could be argued. On top of that, 250 years is both a very short time, but also a very long time. It's more than enough not to be hand-waved away, at least. In 250 years it went from a coastal breakaway to the sole hyperpower, slavery came and went, communism arrived and died out, the information age dawned, religion became more of a niche than a facet of everyday life... That's a lot of cultural upheaval.
- OutOfHere 8mo ago
  Let's revisit where exactly it is that slavery went. It went into prisons, where it remains legal and used, with about a million people bound by it. To make a long story short, in the US, you are and have always been one of two things: the exploited or the exploitor.
  - PostOnce 8mo ago
    We spend substantially more on prisoners than they could ever hope to generate in labor. After all, the average prisoner is not a diligent, sober, hardworking person trying to get ahead; how much economic value are you really likely to extract, even if you're evil? Chattel slavery and prison labor may be distant relatives, but they're not siblings, and it's wrong (in a dozen different ways) to imply they are.
SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago
Is tomato sauce an Italian tradition? It's barely older than the US, tomatoes are a new-world crop.

joe_mamba 8mo ago

More like Japan is a nation of the Japanese people where maintaining national values and tradition comes first, while the US functions as the world's largest economic zone where making money any way you can get away with trumps any forms of culture or identity, so they each optimize for different things and get different outcomes.

simfree 8mo ago
There is a lot of money floating around major cities in the US. So many nonprofit entities are preserving some cultural niche thanks to their older patrons using their qualified minimum distribution to fund a long lasting endowment. I feel like you see this less in other parts of the world where people don't have tens of thousands of dollars from their retirement savings that they have to take out each year, and they would rather give it tax free to their favorite nonprofit than take a haircut with taxes and then do nothing with the money
- queenkjuul 8mo ago
  You might be surprised at how much other countries invest tax revenue into cultural projects
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    The difference is in other countries the government decides to invest their own citizens' tax revenue in whatever cultural projects they decide, versus in the US where individuals decide for themselves to do it.
BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
> maintaining national values and tradition comes first Japan's had a couple of major upheavals in their "national values" over the past 210-ish years, you might have heard of them.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  What does that supposed to mean?
  - BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
    Consider the "national values" pre- and post-Meiji restoration, and pre- and post-WWII.
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      What exactly do you mean with all these dogwhistles? Just say it, don't beat it around the bush. A country can have good values and moral and be peaceful high trust society with low crime, despite past atrocities. Which country on this planet with a history of imperialism has NOT committed similar atrocities in the past? Does that invalidate their achievements? So what's your argument here, except a cheap gotcha like you just found out something revolutionary in the history books, that invalidates the argument.
      - BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago
        I'm saying your claim that "maintaining national values and tradition comes first' is completely ahistorical to the point of being "not even wrong". Let's take the Meiji restoration for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration#Destruction_of_cultural_heritage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration#Destruction_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_tax_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_tax_riots

marginalia_nu 8mo ago

Many western countries, even with longer histories, don't have a national identity that is that much older than the US. There was this 19th century idea of deliberately building a national identity that swept through the world, that in many ways superseded any prior identity that merely happened to exist. So even if buildings and ruins may be old, the identity itself is often surprisingly young. It may hark on events from the 18th or even 17th century, and tack on some fairy tales of brave knights or ferocious vikings, but it was more often than not penned about the same time the US national identity began to crystallize.

A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago

> America has no past for the present to reflect off. Well, what do you mean by "past"? European settlement in America has a very long history, which of course extends back to the 17th century. It has a rich intellectual tradition, in which respects it surpasses many European countries -- and many of the dominant strains of thought today have their roots in America. It has an exceptionally rich literary and artistic tradition, with numerous styles which are characteristically American. In scientific achievement, few countries can compete. It even has its own aesthetic, just as Japan does. You could say that Japan is regressing from modernity into older ways of being, but this is far from true. Japan before Meiji was strictly aristocratic and feudal. The average Japanese family were tenant farmers with zero political power, economic power, and near-zero potential for advancement in society. If anything, Japan is apparently regressing into an American-style older way of being. A pre-New-Deal manner, with big winners, bigger and more numerous losers, and increased social strife. Also, the atomization the article picks up on isn't a Ye Olde Japanese thing; it's very American.

silvestrov 8mo ago
> a very long history [...] back to the 17th century I think you proved the point (about no history) without wanting to. How large percentage of history lessions in Europe do you think is spent on the years after the 17th century?
- A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago
  A lot! The majority, surely. The period from the 18th through the close of the 20th centuries was a time of tremendous upheaval, where nations were forged. German students, for instance, don't spend all of their time on the HRE; they tend to focus more on the nation-forming events of the 18th and 19th centuries, and then of course the 20th. Of course, students also learn ancient and ancient-adjacent history -- the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Charlemagne, etc. -- but this is general and isn't unique to any national tradition, but common to the entire continent.
- piva00 8mo ago
  A lot, the period from National Romanticism onward is the most relevant for any form of study of a "nation". Before that you could only think in terms of loosely connected realms/kingdoms, before more in terms of tribes and some city-states. Those aren't that useful to study to understand the present, from the 17th century is where most of the current culture branched out from. The historical connection to the land from the people/tribes living in territories of modern Europe from before the Middle Ages is more akin to studying Native Americans in the USA, they were the people inhabiting the land, they had their traditions, and some of those traditions were used to forge the national identity of present cultures but there's a lot of this national identity that was myth-making by National Romantics to generate a sense of unity needed for creating the nation and nation-states.

PostOnce 8mo ago

The British did not suddenly and instantaneously turn American in 1776, they had to already be culturally American for things to have wound up there. What's more, the British didn't leave Britain so they could go be British overseas necessarily, but so they could go do un-British things, it could be argued. On top of that, 250 years is both a very short time, but also a very long time. It's more than enough not to be hand-waved away, at least. In 250 years it went from a coastal breakaway to the sole hyperpower, slavery came and went, communism arrived and died out, the information age dawned, religion became more of a niche than a facet of everyday life... That's a lot of cultural upheaval.

OutOfHere 8mo ago
Let's revisit where exactly it is that slavery went. It went into prisons, where it remains legal and used, with about a million people bound by it. To make a long story short, in the US, you are and have always been one of two things: the exploited or the exploitor.
- PostOnce 8mo ago
  We spend substantially more on prisoners than they could ever hope to generate in labor. After all, the average prisoner is not a diligent, sober, hardworking person trying to get ahead; how much economic value are you really likely to extract, even if you're evil? Chattel slavery and prison labor may be distant relatives, but they're not siblings, and it's wrong (in a dozen different ways) to imply they are.

SAI_Peregrinus 8mo ago

Is tomato sauce an Italian tradition? It's barely older than the US, tomatoes are a new-world crop.