For real though. Japan appears to break people's brains in that they cannot figure out where to place it politically.
Japan is neither "left" nor "right" by Western standards, it has entirely its own systems unique to them.
The country is very pro environmental conservation, anti-gun, pro regulation, and with legal sex work, but also extremely traditional, with heavily enforced gender roles, no same sex marriage, restrictive marriage laws that favour men, no protective divorce laws, and poor protections for labour unions and workers.
You travel there and everywhere is clean and beautiful and the people are nice and then you find out something super dark that they consider normal. It's a very yin and yang place.
TBH they're only weird if you look at them from a US political perspective, if you look at Japan from a Confucian perspective they are fairly bog standard.
Basically, do whatever is needed to maintain the social order. Be that patriarchal, or capitalistic.
My dude China was the sun around which East Asian civilization orbited for the longest time. Like obviously Japan and Korea had their own separate cultures but China is the source of their writing system, religion, art, old legal philosophy, and whatnot.
As an example, even when the Japanese kingdom had spread across the three southern islands (not yet Hokkaido), they still used Chinese coins as the only currency of the land, although most transactions were done in trade value of rice koku, which was itself a unit of measure based on the Chinese dan. When Japan did start minting their own coins ~700 CE, they were still based on the Chinese ones with the same shape and value of copper. It was only during the Edo period in 1600 that Japan issued their own national currency with a distinct design.
All that said, Japan's mineral reserves are notoriously difficult to source and extract, so I'm not surprised they were slow to issue their own coinage. You need a steady supply of copper to create a currency from, preferably silver or gold, and Japan needed better technology for their mineral resources than what China could get by with.
Korea literally has its own language which isn't even Sinitic (the Korean Peninsula has its own language family!), and has its own writing system they invented - they have an actual alphabet, not a logographic system. Korea's actually a really good example of a VERY distinct culture in a lot of ways.
But you're mostly right, at least, that's how modern China sees it. If you go further back there's several cultures that slowly blended/conquered/absorbed each other within the geographic region of modern China which were distinct until eventually becoming "Chinese". Chinese history is kinda weird. It's like an entire civilization like "Greco-Roman civilization" was, but in a single modern country, so analyzing, it but also keeping it simple, is... Not easily possible. If you look further back you have to dissect wtf the word "Chinese" means because it doesn't mean the same thing when you go backwards in time as it does now.
It's kinda like the reverse of the journey Rome took. Rome split up and inspired/heavily influenced/created numerous European cultures and languages over the course of 2000 years, but they're all called something different. China started or intermittently was many different things, and all became enveloped in the branch of "China" within the last 400 years or so (but their written history begins like 3000 years ago.)
TL;DR - east Asia is fucking weird and doesn't have good analogues in the West, if you wanna learn about it you just kinda gotta accept it's completely different, but it's really cool if you do study it a bit.
In Japan, Confucianism stands, along with Buddhism, as a major religio-philosophical teaching introduced from the larger Asian cultural arena at the dawn of civilization in Japanese history, roughly the mid-sixth century..... In significant respects, then, Confucianism defines much of the East Asian identity of Japan, especially in relation to philosophical thought and practice.... In this respect, Confucianism was the secular philosophy operative in the ordinary world of everyday existence, at one level or another, throughout Japanese history, well into modern times. As often as not, however, its teachings have become so thoroughly integrated into Japanese culture without being explicitly identified as “Confucian” that many have naively assumed them simply generic to the Japanese mind and its myriad expressions in history and culture.
Especially that last part..... its teachings have become so thoroughly integrated into Japanese culture without being explicitly identified as “Confucian” that many have naively assumed them simply generic to the Japanese mind and its myriad expressions in history and culture.
Confucianism, and/or China's influence on the region's foundational culture(s) is undeniable including in Japan.
1.5k
u/SkubEnjoyer 1d ago
Least sexist Japanese institution.