Lawrence,
It didnt take long at all. All I had to do was look up some material I had saved from something I read last year and reduce it to a compendium. As you can see I didnt take a lot of care in typing it either. But I remembered something that I was struck by when I had read the essay before. That was, that of all the countries I can think of, Japan most owes much of its art, literature, and technical progress to the selective importation of ideas from other countries, mainly China in the beginning till mid 19th century, then increasingly from the West. So I felt that pointing to their adaptation of these things from the outside as evidence that they are NOT xenophobic was felacious. That they indeed are xenophobic is supported by the closed economic policys, protectionist and internecine trade practices and policies, exclusionary social practices, etc etc. One has to marvel at the irony of that.
Best,
Stitch |
