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When I lived in Japan and was asked "Why are you interested in Japan?", I used to respond "It is the only non-Western country(at the time) where I have seen an
by jankcorn 27d ago
When I lived in Japan and was asked "Why are you interested in Japan?", I used to respond "It is the only non-Western country(at the time) where I have seen an extremely high level of technical/economic development and it is interesting to see similiarities/differences". (This is of course, long long before the rise of modern China)
The society is based so strongly on group cohesion and de-emphasis of the individual, the experience of living there is very, very different than the West.
I think that this "deep cultural difference" is what the original comment was trying to get at. Sadly the reference point of "American South" ended up triggering a different (less useful) trajectory for the responses.
- eqvinox 27d agoDoes the American South actually have that kind of group cohesion?
- oliculipolicula 27d agoThe kind of group cohesion you have in Japan tiday wasn't quite all there during the Meiji era (they'd just come out of a civil war, after all. Then there were also sporadic uprisings for decades after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichibu_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichibu_incident) The following may help--- if you think of Othello as a kind of ideal southern gentleman, as the Japanese sort of did https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Othello-in-Tokyo%3A-Performing-Race-and-Empire-in-Tierney/2a1a84d875d74f08f5db92b6a54193a13b0d8000 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Othello-in-Tokyo%3A-Pe... Now a Alt-Dixie readaptation of that adaptation must of course be the story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest (Taiwanese would be negroes loyal to the Cause, and Ainu would be the native Americans)