Occidentalization of Japan.
The first meeting between Japan and occidental culture is situated in the XVI century with the arrival of religious missions by spanish and portuguese, where the impact of nautical techniques and music, medicine, and technology in general, mechanics and mining industry transcended both cultures as an exchange, not only in this way but the culture trough religion too.
One important fact about this exchange was education. After the Spanish and Portuguese visit, the Dutch were interested in the knowledge about the medicine; the Japanese became one of the important countries exporting medicine.
Matthew Perry arrived Japan in 1853, there was a policy called Sakok, which started two centuries before, this policy isolated Japan from the rest of the world, the reason may be because the Shôgun (the main leader) was afraid that someone would take the power. The making of the modern Japan is supposed to be at the end of XIX century by the politic called by the historians as the “Meiji Restoration”. This is the most important fact of the opening with economical interests.
Matthew Perry forced the samurai government to open the doors for occident, he wanted concessions for harbors located in Tokyo; the concessions were successful due the internal crisis of the government. Some sectors of society refused to accept the concessions by their leader and started an internal civil war against the foreigners, but little by little, they started to adopt the culture, education and technology, highly advanced for them, and the way of thinking started to change: they saw in the learning of the new technology the key to progress.
This was the beginning of industrialization and trade, the progress that the country reached, avoided the invasion of USA and Europe. The emperor Mutsuhito was the first emperor who won legitimacy with different sectors of society and he became an icon for the Japanese.
How has Japan handled the necessity to occidentalize?
ReplyDeletehey are going to talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?? After the war.
ReplyDeleteIs a good post, interesting and brief, but maybe you could explain a little who was Matthew Perry because I had to look for information about him to understand you!
ReplyDeleteI'm very interested in the religious exchange between both cultures. So, if you can, I ask you to post information about the history of this ideo-sociological process
ReplyDeleteI think that at the beginning, occidentalization of Japan was so deep that we can see photos of japanese people wearing hakamas and kimonos with jacket and top hats
ReplyDeleteI think yor info is incomplete, what happened after the World War II?
ReplyDeleteHow did the government face the end of the war?
I´d like to see more photos because it´s realy interesting yor info
ReplyDelete