>Unlike Kings/Queens in the West, the Japanese Emperor is a descendant of the Sun God Amaterasu
The British Royal family trace lineage on their German side to Wotan (Odin), so it's not all that exceptional. Also, there were Japanese willing to go to war against their Emperor, so deification had its limits. The rest of your answer does a good job of summarizing the significance of the Meiji restoration. But I think it was less important than you might think. The samurai, which had been the most powerful land-owning class, simply transformed into banks and companies of which many today still share their roots. On the surface, everything changed. But underneath, not as much.
It's why if you visit today, Japan seems westernized. But actually, it has retained its culture. The reason the Japanese are happy to build KFC restaurants and French patisseries is because they don't feel threatened by a foreign cultural invasion, as they're so assured in their own. There's a comforting permanency to living in a place like that, but being slow to change also means people are still stuck in an almost feudal mindset (shakkei, feminism, racism, and so on). You're right that Sakoku, where Japan closed its borders for 200 years, is probably the reason they were late to adopt nationalism. But its ironically also how the Japanese have maintained a coherent and shared cultural identity. Specifically, its not just Sakoku but being protected from external threats. Being an island alone is not enough. The Mongol invasion was famously thwarted by the Kamikaze, but there weren't many other threats. You compare that to an island nation like Britain that was successively invaded or threatened by Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Normans, the Spanish, the French and Germans, and its easy to see why Sakoku wasn't an option in Western Europe.
FeynmansRazor t1_j35tjv5 wrote
Reply to comment by Abject_Ad1879 in How Did Japan's National Identity Emerge? by Preyinglol
>Unlike Kings/Queens in the West, the Japanese Emperor is a descendant of the Sun God Amaterasu
The British Royal family trace lineage on their German side to Wotan (Odin), so it's not all that exceptional. Also, there were Japanese willing to go to war against their Emperor, so deification had its limits. The rest of your answer does a good job of summarizing the significance of the Meiji restoration. But I think it was less important than you might think. The samurai, which had been the most powerful land-owning class, simply transformed into banks and companies of which many today still share their roots. On the surface, everything changed. But underneath, not as much.
It's why if you visit today, Japan seems westernized. But actually, it has retained its culture. The reason the Japanese are happy to build KFC restaurants and French patisseries is because they don't feel threatened by a foreign cultural invasion, as they're so assured in their own. There's a comforting permanency to living in a place like that, but being slow to change also means people are still stuck in an almost feudal mindset (shakkei, feminism, racism, and so on). You're right that Sakoku, where Japan closed its borders for 200 years, is probably the reason they were late to adopt nationalism. But its ironically also how the Japanese have maintained a coherent and shared cultural identity. Specifically, its not just Sakoku but being protected from external threats. Being an island alone is not enough. The Mongol invasion was famously thwarted by the Kamikaze, but there weren't many other threats. You compare that to an island nation like Britain that was successively invaded or threatened by Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Normans, the Spanish, the French and Germans, and its easy to see why Sakoku wasn't an option in Western Europe.