Guess they didn't get the Jock Jams reference.

obviously the guy has no sense of humour when it comes to hairstyles.

I hope this entry isn't intended to give the impression that the only Japanese who "pick at" your pieces are right wingers. I'm sure Japanese leftwingers are just as upset by your views -- the idea, for instance, that making firing people easier is preferable to unionization of temporary workers. No leftwing blogs making disparaging links to you? Perhaps only the rightwingers are reading you.

Maybe. I think it is an obvious thing for you to allege the silence of the Left means that they would be angry with me if they only read me.

I think your bigger challenge will be to find people of any political persuasion who take offensive of my views relating to yarase, kisha clubs, advertorial, bout fixing, yakuza, 12-year old swimsuit beauties, and all the other machinations of reality that you seem to believe constitute some kind of enviable Japanese cultural tradition.

between the suddle financial threats, and "marriage". i don't know if momus can really throw around "right wing" as an insult anymore ?

well, ok, i guess he CAN. he is momus.. that be like asking you guys to agree to dissagree.. you can't, cause you love it!

well, it's a start ..

meanwhile here's a good new book i recomend.

I must say that I have been pretty amused by Momus' use of the right wing tag here recently. Seems to be the fad of the month.

More seriously, I actually believe he's an agent of the reaction. The truthiness style of choosing to accept only those aspects of reality that please one is inherently right wing, and the complete opposite of a materialistic, progressive position.

It's also incredibly 80s.

So there.

I've always thought of Momus as a right-winger. Obviously not the small-government free-marketeer kind; more the conservative statist kind.

Gosh aint it ironic (or Pretarnarian) that young rebels turn into old conservatives? Hey momus, you know I grew up "punk" right?

between the suddle financial threats, and "marriage". i don't know if momus can really throw around "right wing" as an insult anymore?

Getting married is right wing? So if Marxy gets married, you're going to throw up your hands and say "Pshaw, we're disappointed in you, Marxy! All this stuff about giving the market free reign was progressive stuff, but now you've gotten reactionary!"

I actually believe he's an agent of the reaction. The truthiness style of choosing to accept only those aspects of reality that please one is inherently right wing, and the complete opposite of a materialistic, progressive position.

I think you need to learn the difference between "materialist" and "materialistic", der. And if you meant to say that Marxist "dialectical materialism" is progressive, I'm with you, but you have to be aware of what dialectics is: putting a thesis next to its antithesis. In other words, exactly what we do here daily.

I've always thought of Momus as a right-winger. Obviously not the small-government free-marketeer kind; more the conservative statist kind.

Ah, one of those "I love big government and trade unions" right wingers, gotcha. What's the word? Oh yes, "socialists".

I think you need to learn the proper way to form adjectives in your mother tongue, Momus.

it does pose the question of. A. what is "right wing". and B. why is it so bad? (i'm all kinds of down with reduced goverment power), and more power to states, verse federal. though, i support taxs if they could give us. universal heath care? and public art works)
but marxy is obviously center wing with both left and right leanings. (how ironic! like me.) i can't believe in these certainties. that this or that is right or wrong. but yes. marriage is more right then you tend to lead your self to seem to be. (though i guess you could have some kind of shamen ritual tribal marriage thing?) but that is my opinion. so, how do we decided who gets to decide what is left and right? and why would they be correct?

marriage is more right ..

seriously now, by what definition is an early 21stC post-many-things idea of marriage per se right ????

I think you need to learn the proper way to form adjectives in your mother tongue, Momus.

So which did you mean, materialistic or materialist? They're both adjectives, but they mean totally different things.

Marriage is communism a deux! The opposite of "bourgeois individualism".

And now someone witty should say "Do you mean communalism or communism, Momus? They're both adjectives, but they mean totally different things."

ok, I'll take the bait. I admit that I've never read Marx in English translation, but if I use your favourite mode of research, I get "materialistic" as the adjective to the abstract noun "materialism", which for example here is defined as "the heory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena". I leave it to you to go to Wikipedia and look up the connection to Marx.

A nice exercise would now be to connect your love of Marx with your love of truthiness (i.e., the exact opposite of materialism), but it is one that, quite frankly, I don't think you are capable of. It certainly isn't one that can be dealt with in a what-shall-I-do-with-these-free-minutes-today essay.

Well, you're not a native English speaker, so I'm not going to hammer this too hard, but in everyday usage "materialistic" is a bit of an insult, it means someone's overly focused on bling. "Materialism", on the other hand, is simply a neutral descriptor for a philosophy based around what's tangible rather than, say, intangibles like "spirit", and the adjective from that is "materialist".

right. everyday usage in the context of "agent of the reaction" etc.

what's the usenet law regarding spelling / grammar trolls again?

I was just trying to explain to you the joke of you talking about a "materialistic, progressive position", because it makes you sound super right-wing, Der. Sorta like "I think you're conservative, because I think that what's liberal is having lots of stuff, the more the better; that's progress."

I was just trying to explain

... earning yourself in the process a place in the next Collins Cobuild, in the entry for "obnoxious (adj.)".

Someone got out of bed the wrong side this morning! Why not go out and walk in the gentle Berlin evening? There are people strumming guitars down by the river.

A. what is "right wing". and B. why is it so bad?

Right-wingers used to be conservatives but they are now the people who want to thrash and destroy old, traditional (and always public) institutions. They also happen to be baby-boomers, the ones who got everything for free.

Conservatism can be a good or bad thing for you, it just depends in which industry you work for and where your leanings are within that industry: at law school, people are taught they they must be conservatism and cynical; at art school, in order people must be a bit innovative and edgy (but not too much) in order to succeed. Neomarxisme regulars are in their vast majority indie/visual arts types who happen to be in the edgy side of business so being called right wing/conservative/boss-friendly here basically means an insult right? Marxy is, it seems (correct me if I'm wrong. No sarcasm needed thanks), working for big business corporations so that hurts his indie credentials and tarnishes all of his opinions. Not that if he worked for MTV things would much different or better.

And finally, people here have to realise for once that whatever is "left-wing" in America, is pretty much "right-wing" by most countries' standards (I have never ever met/heard of an American who would claim to be a socialist). Individual entrepreneurial capitalism might have worked to colonise the Wild West, but I'm not sure if it's applicable anywhere else in the world.

I don't think Momus is right-wing. I just get frustrated with his pinning every "universalist" as right-wing - as if cultural relativism is 100% accepted as the only voice of the true Left. Sure, neoliberalism is also universalist, but that does not mean that the Left-Right axis' works on universalism-relativism.

Also, if Momus were Japanese, we would all take his ideas about Japan to be either staunchly conservative or at least apologetic for hard-line stances. Pushing for LOHAS is different than trying to convince everyone that Japan is already approaching perfect environmentalism. Trying to protect Japanese uniqueness is different that announcing that "the Japanese like to be lied to."

if .. were Japanese ideas about Japan to be either staunchly conservative or at least apologetic for hard-line stances

that's obviously also relative to context. think if any of the dissidents here would have the honour to speak to mr Fujiwara & co what they'd have to say would somewhat differ to what one ends up having to say here in order to keep some balance and perspective

I think you may agree and disagree with Fujiwara but I don't understand why no one will stand up and just say, "Yes, democracy doesn't work. Japan should have an elite Confucian bureaucracy." I will state for the record - wrong or right, damned to hell - that I think Japan would benefit from more democracy, not less.

2ch, eh? What self-respecting person takes that hellhole of gossip and flamebaits seriously? I've read that thread before (just a little bit), and all I have to say is that promoting hateful nationalism on some fucking English learning board is beyond pathetic. At least try to raise the level of your reading comprehension, suckers!

On a sidenote, 2ch doesn't allow posting from overseas except on certain boards for which it's deemed benefitting or necessary (such as the English board). They don't state it in the rules but just try it once and you'll know... 4ch on the other hand bans all foreign IPs outright, with a clear statement when you try to post. So even on the Internet where national borders are supposed to be eliminated, the Japanese still feel the need to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, eh? It's deja vu all over again.

I'm actually quite glad that I pulled out of Japan before I even had a chance to get into "the system". Granted there was some failure on my part, but whatever.

Sorry for all this off-topic ranting.

Oops, I meant 2chan (双葉ちゃん). 4ch is like an Englsih-language clone of 2ch, albeit much smaller.

I think Japan would benefit from more democracy, not less.

As you acknowledge, that's a big and bland statement. But what does it mean? According to Bush, democracy is dropping bombs on a country and installing a puppet government. In Britain, it means we get to vote (for parties which all accept basically the same market philosophy) once every five years or so, but that two men called Tony and Gordon make all the really important decisions. Or what about the idea that democracy means people making incremental changes in the places where they have direct influence: the little old lady making a tiny public garden in front of her wooden house and watering it every day, or the art student who decides to make a cafe slightly different from any existing cafe? Does Japan need more of that kind of democracy, microchoices coming up from below, or is it doing okay?

Ah, one of those "I love big government and trade unions" right wingers, gotcha. What's the word? Oh yes, "socialists".

Momus, do you really need a history lesson? Not all right-wingers are small-government lovers. Pre-revolution Portugal was both statist and right-wing, for example. Even in America, "small government" has been rhetoric rather than reality for most Republican administrations. As Marxy points out, if you were Japanese, you would be labelled as a conservative right-winger.

if you were Japanese

My politics correspond very much to what Ryuichi Sakamoto endorses in his interviews. (I frequently quote and endorse him on my blog.) In other words, ecological and anti-war activism, and a futuristic vision of Japan as "a beautiful third-rate country" able to weather successfully the transition to a post-industrial economy (and perhaps pioneer the detail of that for other societies which are still to make that change, ie most of them), together with a belief in art and culture as agents of change.

Do you call Sakamoto a conservative right winger?

4chan bans japanese IPs, except during Golden Week, if I remember correctly.

momus, comparing your non-controversial agreements when they aren't up for discussion is shady, yo.

Jesus Christ liked fish, Jeffrey Dahmer liked fish... are you accusing Jesus of pouring acid into young boys brains to create sex zombies?

4chan bans japanese IPs, except during Golden Week, if I remember correctly.

I don't know about 4chan, but 4-ch certainly allows Japanese IPs. In fact, there's even a Japanese board that particularly welcomes Japanese users, and guess what, it attracts loads of ネット右翼 (online right-wingers) to spread their hateful nationalist propaganda -- on some anime-centered English-language forum, for God's sake!

As for 4chan banning Japanese IPs, I guess it has something to do with the tension and resentment between these two forums. It's only my guess, though, since I'm by no means a 4channer.

But yeah, in the English-speaking world those -chs and -chans are largely irrelevant outside otakudom, which I'm not part of, so why should I be bothered, anyway...

Jesus Christ liked fish, Jeffrey Dahmer liked fish... are you accusing Jesus of pouring acid into young boys brains to create sex zombies?

But that's exactly what the people accusing me of conservatism here are doing! Momus likes big government, some conservatives like big government, therefore Momus is a conservative!

Nice try. No one thinks you are conservative because you support big government. People call you "right-wing" because your arguments seem to always be apologetic for many things that common sense would say are anti-democratic or elitist or otherwise hostile to liberty.

I know you never will, but you desperately need to stop taking ideas like "common sense" and "liberty" and "democracy" on trust and assuming they're unproblematical, culturally neutral universals.

I read this article on Tony Blair yesterday and thought of you.

The thing is, you cling to this notion that the global market is inherently benign at precisely the time that it is abandoning any pretense of serving any interests other than its own, just when it's torn up its road map to justice (the Doha round of trade talks), and just when it's clear that business, democracy and endless pre-emptive resource war (now posing as "values war") are indissolubly linked.

It would be nice to see some tiny passing acknowledgement of these issues here. Some serious deconstruction of international capitalism and even what passes for "democracy" is very much in order, no? But of course that's not what Neomarxisme is about. Neomarxisme is about deconstructing Japan, one of the few relatively sane societies in a world of increasingly iron-fisted madness -- a madness motivated by the very "neutral" things you want to see wooden-horsed into Japan.

Actually, I can't see Momus having any solid political stance aside from the "it's agreeable if not adorable as long as it's Japanese" thing, plus, of course, the usual America-bashing (all thanks to Bush -- gotta love Dubya, he made Imperial America such an easy target!)

And Momus doesn't speak Japanese.

These two factors combined are enough to make him a "wapanese" in my opinion.

You are going to love Japan - the Abe Years. It will surely be the height of world sanity. Get your bindle packed up and come on over.

If you see Japan as a transcendent wonderland and the solution to the world's problems, this blog would really rub you the wrong way.

No, but really, don't dodge the issue. Are you ever going to address the fact that there is nothing culturally neutral in concepts like "democracy" (let alone concepts like "common sense")?

(And by the way "relatively sane society" does not equal "wonderland", unless you're a maker of straw men.)

Also: we haven't heard the tiniest squeak on this blog about what Israel's doing in Lebanon, and what the world might be like if the conflict turns into a conflagration by dragging in Syria and Iran and America directly. You think that won't affect Japan? You think rigging boxing matches affects Japan more?

Are you ever going to address the fact that there is nothing culturally neutral in concepts like "democracy" (let alone concepts like "common sense")?

As soon as you will state for the record that elitist bureaucy is superior to democracy, that inaliable human rights are a mistake, and that collusive statism is superior to free market capitalism.

I will admit that there are arguments that democracy/capitalism are not universalist concepts and I will admit that certainly the Western should not try to "impose" democracy on non-democratic nations (although this is usually more of a cover than an actual mission.)

But I don't think I can say, yes, the media should have more responsbility to those in charge than the public; yes, political power should be only for the elite; yes, economic power should only be for the grandsons of a certain caste. This blog is not neutral or non-political. But I do not think that the things I rail against are particularly dogmatic, nor especially foreign to the dialogue already opened in Japan.

Israel and Lebanon are out of my jurisdiction. I don't think anyone is here on my blog to read my personal/non-useful views on that subject. Isn't there a I Love Everything page for that?

Also...

You think that won't affect Japan? You think rigging boxing matches affects Japan more?

Which story has been grabbing headlines more here in Japan?

I would suggest that you refuse to make any comment on what's happening in the Middle East, even a passing one when someone asks you where you stand on the most burning issue of the day, for these reasons:

* Because you don't want to appear hawkish or partisan.
* Because you know that people tend to cluster political opinions, and would see your views on Japan in a different light.
* Because nowhere is it more clear than in the Middle East that the liberal values you cite (democracy, human rights etc) are being used as a fig-leaf for illiberal acts.
* Because, by taking sides on what's happening in the Middle East, you would have to renounce the idea that democracy, human rights and "common sense" come from Mars and are guaranteed throughout the universe by some benign star fleet, and accept that currently they come from the barrel of a gun wielded by the most right wing administration in your nation's history.
* Because, if you were forced to condemn your own administration on the basis of its redefinition of the very words you use here day in, day out, you'd have to sit down and actually think about what democracy really means, and who guarantees it, and you don't want to do that.

As a result, you suffer from "out-of-touch emigrant syndrome". Like the British in India, or like Bangladeshi elders in London, you cling to a rosy, outmoded view of your own culture, unaware that since you left, things have completely changed back home. You view the culture you're now in through the lens of the values of your own culture when you were growing up there (hence all these nostalgic entries about 80s buddy movies), rather than through the lens of what it now is. You use language from the 90s, rather than post 9/11 language. By refusing to be relevant about what's going on outside Japan, you are unable to be relevant about what's going on inside it.

By refusing to be relevant about what's going on outside Japan, you are unable to be relevant about what's going on inside it.

And yet my irrelevance is interesting to a large number of people - including you!

To be honest, I don't feel like getting sucked into this conversation or even trying to deconstruct your highly aggrevating debating techniques. Sadly I am probably losing to your assault, but the constant barrage of this kind of unfair rhetorical sucker punching just makes my life worse and me more unhappy.

I'm sorry. I enjoy this blog, and it's true I hold it to a much higher standard than, say, Jean Snow's blog. But I think it does have to justify its terms more than Jean Snow does, because it does have an ideological agenda -- "liberalization" or "modernization" of Japan. And yet it never actually looks into where those ideas are coming from, or where they're going.

Apropos of the confession a little bit further up, I happened to read a long essay by David Foster Wallace today, which made me think of Momus. The article is well written (in a slightly obnoxious, self-conscious way), funny, --- and amazingly, brain-cramp inducingly far off the mark, clearly about something the author doesn't understand, but, paradoxically, has spent enormous energy thinking about. (As an aside, it seems that no such essay can possibly be complete without an off-hand reference to some physics theory or other that may show one thing or the other.)

Now if only the Momster would consolidate his couple of semesters studying sociology, his Google-fu and his rhetorics once and for all into one such essay, and someone sane, with enough time on their hands, would sit down and treat it like this competent place did DFW's essay!

Der has reminded me of something I wish I'd had time to point out a few threads back, perhaps it would be germane like Jackson to mention it now:

None of the thinkers I referenced in response to Marxy's writing about「国家の品格」, Chapter 3- Zizek, Balibar, Sen, Appiah- would have anything good to say about the sort of extreme relativism Momus employs in discussing anywhere that isn't the UK/US/Israel. Please recognize that Balibar's notion, "Racism as Universalism," conceives of racism as a kind of stunted attempt at universalism- NOT "Universalism as Racism."

See the Zizek article I mentioned here some time ago, "For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy":

http://www.lacan.com/zizek-leftist.htm

and take in this one by Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le Peng don't understand about Asia":

http://www.brainsnchips.org/hr/sen.htm

Note that Zizek and Sen are not in agreement with each other about many things, but certainly both are proponents of universalism in opposition to relativism.

以上です。

I'm not sure which Zizek glove puppet you're playing with today, Brown, but I can tell you that I'm very much on the same page as the real one, the man his political opponents call "the clown prince of political relativism". Here's the conclusion of his essay Give Iranian Nukes a Chance, published late last year:

"In the same way that Reagan was "naively" convinced that democracy would undermine Communism and that Communism would fall, thus proving all the skeptic specialists wrong, perhaps Bush will be proven right in his "naive" crusade for the democratization of the Middle East.

"It is here that one approaches the crux of the matter: Such an optimistic reading relies on the problematic belief in a preestablished harmony between the global spread of multi-party Western democracy and the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. It is precisely because this harmony can in no way be taken for granted that countries like Iran should possess nuclear arms to constrain the global hegemony of the United States."

(And please, please, please would you try to get Marxy to read these people, instead of trying to get me to read them. I already have.)

By the way, William Gibson (who recently name-checked this blog as his favourite Japan-based English-language blog) has a very interesting quote from the Wikipedia article about Thomas S. Kuhn's view of paradigm shifts in science. I think it applies not only to the way concepts have changed since 9/11, and the difficulties we have in talking to each other here, but also the differences between Japanese and American ways of seeing and doing:

"According to Kuhn, the scientific paradigms before and after a paradigm shift are so different that their theories are incomparable. The paradigm shift does not just change a single theory, it changes the way that words are defined, the way that the scientists look at their subject and, perhaps most importantly, the questions that are considered valid and the rules used to determine the truth of a particular theory. Kuhn observes that they are incommensurable — literally, lacking comparison, untranslatable. New theories were not, as they had thought of before, simply extensions of old theories, but radically new worldviews. This incommensurability applies not just before and after a paradigm shift, but between conflicting paradigms. It is simply not possible, according to Kuhn, to construct an impartial language that can be used to perform a neutral comparison between conflicting paradigms, because the very terms used belong within the paradigm and are therefore different in different paradigms. Advocates of mutually exclusive paradigms are in an insidious position: "Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing science and its problems, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof."

Momus, Momus. Where to start?

1) The universalist Zizek puppet I'm playing with is the one that answers questions like this in interviews:

Q: In your book on the subject you talk of a 'true universalism' as an opposite of this false sense of global harmony. What do you mean by that?

SZ: Here I need to ask myself a simple Habermasian question: how can we ground universality in our experience? Naturally, I don't accept this postmodern game that each of us inhabits his or her particular universe. I believe there is universality. But I don't believe in some a priori universality of fundamental rules or universal notions. The only true universality we have access to is political universality. Which is not solidarity in some abstract idealist sense, but solidarity in struggle. If we are engaged in the same struggle, if we discover that - and this for me is the authentic moment of solidarity - being feminists and ecologists, or feminists and workers, we all of a sudden have this insight: 'My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!' This political universality would be the only authentic universality. And this, of course, is what is missing today, because politics today is increasingly a politics of merely negotiating compromises between different positions.

more here: http://www.lacan.com/zizek-measure.htm

2) I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with letting someone be defined by his political opponents, but you might try to find ones that aren't so poorly armed.

3) Zizek's position on Iranian nukes has nothing at all to do with relativism, so I'm not sure why you dragged it in here. He's not arguing that nukes are an integral part of some unique, inscrutable Persian culture. One need not be a relativist to find "belief in a preestablished harmony between the global spread of multi-party Western democracy and the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States" problematic.

4) I don't personally agree with him on the nuke issue, but if you care to know, Monterey's Center for Nonproliferation Studies tells us that "a minority viewpoint ... has long questioned the assumption that proliferation necessarily was undesirable. Kenneth Waltz [currently at Columbia's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies], in particular, popularized the view that the spread of nuclear weapons may promote regional stability, reduce the likelihood of war, and make wars harder to start."

http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/050825.htm

More on Waltz here:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/03/20/give_nukes_a_chance?pg=full

Again, this is all very realpolitik, and has absolutely nothing to do with mushy cultural relativism.

5) I do indeed hope Marxy will read these authors as well. Notice I posted this stuff on his blog! Heck, I recommend them to everyone. But don't blame me if they misread them as egregiously as you have. OK, that's unnecessarily snarky, but I seriously question your understanding of Zizek if you don't see him as a universalist. What part of "direct access to universality" do you not understand?

6) It really is perfectly Zizekian how Marxy functions as the neoliberal Ego here, and Momus the fundamentalist Id. Truly, "Jihad is already McJihad."

http://www.lacan.com/zizekslovenia.htm

'My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!'

This solidarity of different political struggles is far from what Marxy and I mean when we talk about universalism, although it may be close to Alain Badiou's idea that "the situated universality of a political statement can only be experienced through the militant practice that effectuates it". And since for Zizek this is "the only universality", for me it is very much as if he is saying that universality, as commonly understood, does not exist.

The reason I pointed to Zizek's position on Iranian nukes is that in that essay Zizek is very scathing about "international liberals" like Michael Ignatieff and Timothy Garton Ash. It's these people who subscribe to the kind of "universality" that I and Marxy disagree over: the universal applicability of concepts like "democracy", "liberty", "human rights", "common sense" and so on. And Zizek rejects this for the same reason I do: that these people cannot see that this "universality" is situated culturally.

I'm confused that now you're calling me a "fundamentalist", when just up the page you complain that I'm too extreme a relativist! But I'm sure you can come up with some nice paradox about fundamentalist relativism.

「摸益」は日本のニュースに興味あるのかしら。日本の報道機関から情報を取れぬ、彼の頭の中にてのジャパンは女子留学生系の観点から見た天国の様な国でしょう。埼玉とかの住宅街にいる中流・一般人の世界、及び苦労を全く理解できていません。格闘技の意味わからない、知らない。だから中東とかに話題を変えようとする。民主主義についてどうのこうの書くけど自民党の意味がわからない。暴力団体や右翼や靖国の意味がわからない。わからないからそれらのトピックに関してコメント出来ないはずなのにこの場で声を出したくなるみたい。その中に興味深い話も当然出るけど、やはりむかつく時が多い。対立していて、小さくて。
私は読者として面白いと思うし、尊敬はしているけど、たまにだまってほしいな。というかブログでマークシーとのケンカをポストするのが最悪だね。「終了」みたいなこと書いてあったけど、ここでもうポストしないことじゃないだろうな。

当て字どう？

oooh... momus got a 最悪!

当て字、意味ないけど笑える。

Don't worry, Momus. The writer isn't actually Japanese.

Hi,

I read this weblog and I saw a comment that 4chan blocks foreign IPs. This was originally due to Japan sucking away bandwidth and it being prudent for us to do so. Now that we've expanded a bit, no foreign IPs are banned. Oddly enough, ntli and btinternet block 4chan.

The‘New Dealers'(i.e the prototypical globalists)brought int japan with their ideeas that brainwashed the japanese people
duringt the Occupation years.As a result,japan has led a sheltered existence for the past half-century from the rest of
the world in terms of prevailing political thoughts,thus creating a one- domineted ruling class. This ruling class then
intentionally isolated the country from the outside, in order to maintain control over the japanese people.