Japanese Culture and Western Influence
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In order to appreciate how Japanese culture has been affected by the West in the modern period, it is essential to get a picture of the context of Japan's exposure to the West in earlier periods. Whereas in other parts of Asia, notably China, Western influences were resisted until they fell before Western militarism, in Japan the narrative of interaction with the West was marked by comparatively more, though intermittent, accommodation before the modern period. There is evidence--until the Tokugawa closing of Japan to the West in 1790--of relative openness of the high Japanese culture to Western influences. The pattern was that European elements were modified by the Japanese so that they could become consistent with local customs. That can be attributed to a growing sense of Japanese cultural and political nationalism that was decisively expressed as early 20th-century imperialism. However, after the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945, a new wave of Western influence worked itself upon Japan's politics and culture. These are the themes to be explored in this research.Initial contacts between Japanese and Western culture took place during the wave of European global outreach and missionary Christianity in the 16th century. St. Francis Xavier was the major missionary of the Catholic Church in Japan. The Church was intolerant of heresy in Europe, but Francis Xavier and his fellow Jesuits found themselves having to adjust to Japanese religious belief and customs in order to
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es they encountered were preindustrial and often lacked a written language. However, in Asia, especially in Japan and China, the Europeans encountered politically mature civilizations. Efforts of Christians or European merchants to westernize eastern thought or commerce had relatively minor successes as compared with the impact that Japanese culture, art, and to a certain extent thought had on the west. Sansom states (112-13) that it was Asia that stimulated European thought, not the other way around.
Thus it makes sense that the Meiji government, while defined by the Charter Oath and Constitution of 1868 and representing a deliberate embrace of "Western concepts of representative government and the separation of powers," retained its distinctive identity. Meanwhile, "provisions [in the Charter Oath] to this effect soon proved unworkable and inoperative" (Tsunoda, et al. 644). Ironically, the "dynamic influences of Western ideas and institutions" (Tsunoda, et al. 638), which had a strong-central-government component, also sowed the seeds of twentieth-century Japanese imperialism, since the very Japanese who were to internalize Western influences also retained a distinctively nationalistic (i.e., samurai) character. Nationalism, r
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Approximate Word count = 3527
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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