Japan Through the Looking Glass
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1861979673
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Contemporary Government Reform in Japan: The Dual State in Flux
The Dragon King's Palace (Sano Ichiro, Book 8)
dominant monotheistic religion and of a belief in an individual soul related to one God is clearly a factor. The Japanese forms of Buddhism tend to deny the existence of the individual soul. Some have suggested that the flimsy, communal, traditional Japanese house where everyone lived and slept in one room and where it was impossible to obtain privacy is another. Whatever the reasons, the effects are well known. It is very difficult Japan.indb 77 13/5/08 16:34:42 78 japan through the looking
but somehow less emotionally than in the West. Above all, the couple are joined by their shared investment in and love for their children. This half-arranged system is often acted out in the theatre of the extraordinary marriage hotels of Japan. Having been brought together by a broker, the future spouses go to a wedding hotel. There they inspect the selection of wedding costumes and for a moment the woman is transformed in her kimono into a traditional Japanese bride. The couple then move along
bureaucracy. All this is changing fast in both the West and Japan, yet we cannot understand the present odd mixtures in Britain, America and Japan if we do not recognise how the paths to the present have been different from the majority of centralised states. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of bureaucratic centralisation, the political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville expressed the conviction that distributed, unbureaucratic power led to far more innovation, spontaneity, involvement in
separate ruling elite. Japan, while having one of the greatest literary traditions in the world and the widest use of reading and writing, remained a curiously oral culture in its law and administration, often with a distinctive anti-intellectualism among its ruling elite. A second feature which may be related to this as both cause and effect is the absence of universities in Japan. Universities were one of the glories of Europe from the Middle Ages, but there was nothing equivalent in Japan. In
fine and shifting distinctions of Western warfare, of the Geneva Convention, of the idea that you Japan.indb 130 13/5/08 16:34:48 pow e r 13 1 could firebomb Dresden or slaughter innocents in their thousands, but also had to treat prisoners with a minimum degree of humanity. The Westerners who argued that they played by the rules were duly shocked to meet in the twentieth century another set of people who behaved as the Christians had done towards peoples they had enslaved or colonised in