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Japan's Eightfold Fence (2017)

For Westerners sympathetically acculturated to accepting radical multiculturalism, Japan offers an almost shocking vision of an alternate reality. As engaged as the Japanese are with the world through trade, diplomacy, study, and the like, they also live in a society that celebrates both its uniqueness and its segregation from the rest of the world. Perhaps some of that is natural to an island nation, but this feeling of detachment exists in a society whose wealth has come primarily from...

These maritime exclusion edicts, restricting trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants primarily to the city of Nagasaki on the far southwestern home island of Kyushu, later gave rise to the legend of the era of isolation, the so-called sakoku or “closed country.” Only when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his “Black Ships” in 1853 was Japan forced to “open” itself to the world, at least in the popular Western imagination. The tension between modernity and tradition that had resulted in the unprecedented emergence of Japan as a world power, and which was intensified by continued European colonialism in Asia and the ravages of the Great Depression, destroyed oligarchic control of the government, allowing ultranationalist militarists to plunge the Pacific into conflict. The uncertainty that clouds so many of the world’s economies exacts psychic and material costs, but Japan, where GDP growth has been sluggish for decades, seems less threatened by the roller coaster that is prevalent in the West, in part because its system remains more resistant to radical restructuring and the diktats of unrestrained market forces.

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