What Is Japanese Culture

Where did Japanese culture come from, and when did it become its own? Between 1919 and 1929 the Kyoto historian Naitō Konan gave answers that unsettled the nationalist histories of his day.

Japanese culture, he argued, did not grow from a native seed: it was set, as bean curd is set by bittern, by contact with China. The Japanese state took shape under the pressure of Chinese expansion; Japan's cultural independence came only in the fourteenth century, under Go-Uda and Go-Daigo; and only in the dark age after the Ōnin War did Japan show what it could create once it had taken off its borrowed clothes.

This book gathers the two pieces titled "What Is Japanese Culture?," the essay "Conditions in Ancient Japan," the lecture "The Independence of Japanese Culture" and "The Cultural Endowment of the Japanese People," each translated complete and unabridged from Japanese, with a translator's note, endnotes and source information.