[porkloin]

The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway. Japanese culture and language has been enormously influenced by colonial and migrant presence in the country, from Chinese to Dutch to British to American, and a zillion others.

Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that.

The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war.

The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.

[happytoexplain]

I think you're misunderstanding - "homogeneous" as a cultural description is a spatial metric, not a time metric. Homogeneous cultures indeed change across time, influenced by war and foreign media/languages, just like any culture. The point is not that they do or do not change, the point is that they do so together, largely.

>The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity

This, and race/culture, is what is meant when people say Japan is homogeneous compared to other developed nations.

[pandaman]

I think you are confusing "homogeneous" with "indigenous". With the common meaning of "homogeneous" your entire post is a non sequitur. There are many different words ending with "-geneous" meaning entirely different things, you need to look at what goes before the "-genous" part.

[nec4b]

>The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway.

This is a very postmodern point view.

[HerbManic]

I was going to say, Japans history is one that was very... combative. They fought amongst themselves heavily for a long time.

[porkloin]

I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.