The period of isolation was because the military government didn’t want any allegiance to any other than itself. “Itself” being the Tokugawa Shogun. The Portuguese brought their Catholic missionaries, and you know who sits at the top of that. Their evangelical mission gave reason to the border exclusion and death penalty for any violation of the decree. Since the Dutch were Protestant and weren’t evangelical, they were allowed to trade via Dejima Island in Nagasaki harbor.
That wasn’t the first time religion was a big deal for the military leadership in ancient Japan. During the Muromachi Period, 1336 to 1573, Zen Buddhism was made the state-sponsored religion by the Ashikaga Shogunate. This was because, unlike the other sects of Buddhism in Japan, Zen stressed inner self-improvement and discipline, something desirable when it comes to your own warriors.
Commodore Perry? The Tokugawa Shogunate was already grown unsteady. And the “opening up” of Japan came with very unfavorable trade relations with the U.S. That further lead to the destabilization of the central government and eventually to its overthrow. If anything, the desire to shake the onerous trade relations with the West lead to Japan’s industrialization and aspersions to war-fueled colonialism. Well, that and the fact that real power in Japan, up until the end of WW2, was always in the hands of the military.
That could be said about anywhere and everywhere. However, reality being what it is, the boy has a better chance of living to a ripe old age better in Japan than in the U.S. with his ethnic make up. Any naysayers out there?
A Japanese woman I knew when she was 19 already felt homeless- a foreigner in the US, and apparently just a couple years of high school in the states meant that she didn’t really fit in anymore in Japan, she already was considered too americanized.
My wife of over 20 years has officially spent more of her life in the US than her native Japan. She has never felt entirely American. But she also feels relieved not to deal with social pressures inherent to living in Japan.
She can’t stand the Japanese work culture. I get the impression it’s a nice place to live if you don’t have to make a living there. Is great to be on the receiving end of a strict service culture, it’s lousy to be the one having to deliver it.
The “too American/no longer Japanese enough” thing does rub me the wrong way, too. But, given how all social interactions are governed (and reified) by language formality (“politeness”) rules, it’s easy to imagine how one can lose touch with that world of hyper-nuance—and one that says, “the nail that raises its head gets hammered down.”
In some ways it seems the Japanese are just as hard on their own as others. Live by the code, die by the code.
Story of my life here in America. At the same time, I have no illusions about how my life might have gone in Japan, if my father had abandoned my family there. “War baby,” you know. It was bad enough here.
