CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION

Understanding a foreign culture can be a challenge. When people come face to face with cultural traditions that differ from their own, they often react with confusion, misunderstanding, or hostility. Several years back, when the United States was pressing Japan to open up its market to rice imports, some Japanese argued that rice cultivation needed to be protected because it was an integral part of traditional Japanese culture. To Americans, though, this argument was anything but convincing. Similarly, few Japanese were persuaded when Americans, under pressure to tighten gun control laws, responded that guns are part of American culture. From the American standpoint, liberalization of rice imports is a purely economic issue, and to Japanese, gun control is simply a matter of safety and social order. But viewed in a historical context, there do exist some grounds for claiming that rice and guns are integral to the cultures of Japan and the United States, respectively. Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that the issues of rice imports and gun control also have important implications for the world economy on the one hand and the safety of residents and visitors on the other. Appeals to cultural factors cannot excuse failure to address these real problems. But any fair and productive debate of these matters must be based on the objective recognition that they are to some degree cultural issues with origins reaching far back into each country’s history.

Every culture is intimately tied to the land of a particular locale, as suggested by the etymological root of the word culture—to till or cultivate. People who live in different regions will inevitably develop different cultures. In other words, each culture has its own unique character rooted in the features of the land and people of a given region. Civilization, in contrast, tends to transcend locality and spread far and wide. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that when the products of a particular local culture are widely embraced in other regions, we call that which has thus spread “civilization.” Kawakatsu Heita, in the essay featured in this section, defines civilization as “a culture that has this centrality, that is copied and disseminated.” Thus, civilization by its nature tends toward universality rather than particularity. This is why one frequently hears phrases like “indigenous culture” and “local culture” but not “indigenous civilization” or “local civilization.”

Scholars and commentators have discussed Japanese culture endlessly, but the term “Japanese civilization” appears much less frequently. This is because, at least until recently, the products of Japanese culture were not perceived as having been widely embraced by other peoples. In the recent American bestseller The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, however, Samuel Huntington makes it clear that he (following Arnold Toynbee) recognizes Japan as possessing a distinct civilization. Reading Huntington’s work, literary critic Saeki Shôichi was inspired to reexamine the nature and “power” of Japanese civilization as a distinct, independent entity. To Saeki’s way of thinking, the existence of such a civilization is attested to by the glories of Heian-period (794-1185) literature, as exemplified by the Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji) and the culture that flowered in the Edo period (1600-1868), as embodied in haiku, kabuki, and ukiyo-e. These forms, while distinctively Japanese in character, are nonetheless admired by people all over the world. It is highly significant that these two cultural zeniths were attained during periods of isolation—in the one case, the later Heian period, after Japan had stopped sending envoys to China; and, in the other, the era of government-mandated national seclusion that began in the first half of the seventeenth century. The isolation allowed Japan—a “peripheral” country within the Chinese sphere of influence and one that often sought actively to emulate the great civilization of its continental neighbor—to fashion its own unique and, paradoxically, universal civilization. This historical pattern provides food for thought as we consider the best path for Japan to follow in the years ahead.

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In 1986 the renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was invited to speak in Japan. In the lecture he gave at that time, titled “L’Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne” (Anthopology and the Problems of the Modern World), he argued that while the spread of modern industrial civilization may seem to augur the emergence of a single “global civilization,” the very idea of global civilization is incompatible with the ideal of the coexistence of diverse cultures, which is in fact essential to civilization itself. He also suggested that the example of Japan could point the way to a solution to this dilemma. He explained himself as follows:

“Of all modern nations, yours has shown itself most adept at navigating between these two shoals, at developing formulas for living and thinking capable of overcoming the contradictions to which humankind has fallen prey in the twentieth century. . . . For centuries Japan has maintained an equilibrium between two postures: that of being open to external influences and quick to absorb them and that of being shut up in itself, as if to give itself time to assimilate these foreign elements and put its own stamp on them.”

Of course, today it is unthinkable for Japan to become completely “shut up in itself.” Still, the historical mechanism by which Japan has actively embraced foreign cultures and, at the same time, has selectively adapted elements of that culture to build its own “Japanese civilization” can still function effectively. This ties in with Kawakatsu’s assertion that Japan should henceforth strive to be a “country of wealth and virtue.” More specifically, he proposes that we build “garden cities” that embody an aesthetic predicated on harmonious coexistence with nature. This, in fact, is precisely the kind of traditional Japanese residential landscape—something found nowhere in Western Europe at the time—that captivated Engelbert Kaempfer and Heinrich Schliemann when they visited Japan during the Edo period. (TAKASHINA Shûji, Director General, National Museum of Western Art)

© 1999 Japan Echo Inc.