Japan Astonishes And Fascinates The American
At first glance, Japan astonishes and fascinates the American because it seems so different.
Where Americans pride themselves on a studied informality and openness, their Japanese counterparts employ formality and complexity. If Americans value time, the Japanese treasure space. While Americans have always enjoyed a sense of continental scale, employing metaphors of size to describe both the natural environment and industrial production, Japan has exerted its genius on the diminutive and the miniature. It seems appropriate for America to produce the world's airplanes, while Japan creates cameras and transistors.
Yet these two cultures, so apparently opposite in almost every way, have always possessed a strange attractive to each other. Like their descendants, the 19th-century American visitors found the world of Japanese art, philosophy, ceremonies, and social life to be compellingly attractive. One reason is its very comprehensiveness. Japan is a tilled-in culture, with few imprecisions or empty spaces. Little has been left to chance; nothing has been too small to escape attention.
Opposites supposedly attract, but there is more to it than that. Japan and America share, to different degrees, some large experiences and broad skills which have bred a certain kind of sympathy.
Both, for example, have transplanted cultures. Each nation has a "mother" society China and Great Britain that has influence the daughter in countless ways: in language, religion, social organization, art, literature and national ideals. Japan, of course, has had more time than the United States to work out its unique interpretation of this older culture. But even today the debt to China is perceivable and gracefully acknowledged.
Both societies, moreover, have developed the brokerage art, the business of buying and selling, of advertising and mass producing, to the highest levels. Few sights are more representative than the tens of thousands of bustling stores to be seen in Japan, above all the disciplined and enticing department stores. To American eyes they seem comforting and reassuring as an expression of the commercial spirit.
Both peoples love to shop, to travel and to record. And both peoples have always emphasized the importance of work and are paying penalties for their commitment to development and modernization.
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