They went that hard also specifically because of the culture they had been boiling themselves into for a thousand years - life and death, hierarchy, the complete lack of value for an individual life, especially if they’re not nobility. They were doing that to themselves first with spears and swords and bows, and then when the outside world forced them to modernize, they took the guns and the chemical crap and did that to everyone around them. And they were good at disregarding all human life. At the very beginning, it’s the result of this culture they locked themselves in, where death and life lost value (thanks Buddhism, also a way to cope with what the powerful were doing to the poor); their history with Korea and China a thousand years ago then with Europe and the US is just a thing that happened to them on top of that.
The isolationism part, both 1300 years ago and 400 years ago, was adopted because lots of war was happening on the mainland that caused a lot of people to flee to Japan, and then because Europe was pushing religion. Isolation was not an unfair conclusion, if heavy-handed. Xenophobia is bad, isolationism is bad, being victimized and invaded is bad, militaristic culture is bad, religious extremism is bad, but I don’t know if you can pinpoint it on one thing. It all just came down to a really bad mix.
They went that hard also specifically because of the culture they had been boiling themselves into for a thousand years - life and death, hierarchy, the complete lack of value for an individual life, especially if they’re not nobility. They were doing that to themselves first with spears and swords and bows, and then when the outside world forced them to modernize, they took the guns and the chemical crap and did that to everyone around them. And they were good at disregarding all human life. At the very beginning, it’s the result of this culture they locked themselves in, where death and life lost value (thanks Buddhism, also a way to cope with what the powerful were doing to the poor); their history with Korea and China a thousand years ago then with Europe and the US is just a thing that happened to them on top of that.
The isolationism part, both 1300 years ago and 400 years ago, was adopted because lots of war was happening on the mainland that caused a lot of people to flee to Japan, and then because Europe was pushing religion. Isolation was not an unfair conclusion, if heavy-handed. Xenophobia is bad, isolationism is bad, being victimized and invaded is bad, militaristic culture is bad, religious extremism is bad, but I don’t know if you can pinpoint it on one thing. It all just came down to a really bad mix.