Book review: Debunking Japan’s Myths of Its Exceptional Self

For centuries Japanese have been encouraged to look at their land as exceptional. A “small island nation” set off from the huge Asian landmass, Japan was “home to the gods” and to a supposedly homogenous race of people whose origins, like those of their language, defied detection.

At various times this exceptional view of self has been used as a pernicious ideology, justifying slaughter and discrimination. More recently, during the boom years of the late 20th century, it was used to explain the nation’s spellbinding successes.

From the very beginning James L. McClain, in his sweeping and vigorously told new book, Japan: A Modern History, debunks these cherished myths. In short order he takes apart the notions of monoethnicity and cultural exceptionalism, neatly explaining, for example, how the divine-origin myth of the imperial family is at bottom a fable to cover the political massacre that allowed the Yamato clan to rule. NY Times