Japanese Culture as a Part of Asian Culture - Essay Example

In Japanese films, her traditional values and identity had been mentioned little despite its growing popularity. The films produced in the country particularly, by Miyazaki show Japanese tradition as static and monolithic from ancient times and depicts Japanese culture as a dynamic composite of various cultures from different period's history. The Japanese people consciously remember their traditions and culture. The Japanese culture is a combination of Japanese-ness and Western-ness. There was an attempt to interpret Japanese tradition from a modern viewpoint.

During the period from 1955 to 1957, the media (one magazine) published the Japanese tradition controversy. The six characteristics stated above in the field of space had been divided into two streams. The Yayoi tradition was derived from the first three characteristics of Shinto shrines residential buildings and teahouses. The Jomon tradition was derived from the other three features mentioned above, they are, the use of beautiful natural materials, right and left asymmetry, and harmony with nature which display ordinary people's vitality and dynamism.

The Japanese-ness in architecture was not monolithic but derived from conflicting Jomon and Yayoi, Japanese cultural history as per Tange. The postwar Japanese architects were able to build up ideas of Japanese-ness in prewar years. Okinawa Okinawa, Japanese and American military personnel had various views of Japanese-ness after the pacific war. The Americans were in the belief that the Okinawa people were different from the Japanese people. As a result of this, the Americans ordered Okinawa publishers to remove all associations with prewar images of Japanese-ness in their school textbooks.

Though Okinawa was under the control of the Japanese Ministry, the Department of Education was administratively under the control of Americans but Okinawa had imported textbooks from Japan since 1949. The ethnic differences between the peoples in Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea complicated the process of inventing Japanese-ness at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many study papers reveal that the unique aspect of Japanese colony policy was attention to cultural assimilation, the enforcement of the Japanese language, and Shinto religion, and obeying the Japanese emperor was under princess during the years between 1895 and 1945.

In the beginning, the Japanese technocrats were similar to Taiwan technocrats as the cultural legacy of Chinese civilization bases on Confucian classics. The people of Taiwan did not accept the culture and tradition of the Japanese as the textbooks edited and published in the year 1901 showed the Japanese as evangelists of European civilization, depending on western medicine, punctuality, and industriousness. During the colonial period, the modern ideas of democracy, hygiene, and sanitation, Taiwanese intellectuals approved industriousness and punctuality. These aspects were partially regarded as of Japan but this legacy of official Japanese-ness gradually faded.