08-21-2013, 04:25 PM
I looked into it, have lived it and disagree, its just not something I wish to focus on and waste my non puna related talk on. Though again I somehow bet this offends Rob much less 
Maybe some time we can sit down in Kamakura and talk about it, that was the seat of neo-confusionist power in Japan and that is where my family lives, right across the street from the shinto shrine Hachimangu. There are large similarities between Japan and China and even more so Korea, but they are very different in my personal experience. What exists in Japan is different from what I have read and is defined in the San Li. One is a warrior culture(restrained beautifully) and one is not. One has been under cruel authoritarian rule forever and the other had glimpses of anarchist decentralized culture. They are both collectivist cultures, just like ours, but I know who I would turn to if I wanted independent creative thinking.
edit: As a further tidbit on the perspective my father and I take on Japan, he was the only tenured professor at the university of Tokyo to have left without retiring or being asked to leave, he left to America to work for Bell labs.
Maybe some time we can sit down in Kamakura and talk about it, that was the seat of neo-confusionist power in Japan and that is where my family lives, right across the street from the shinto shrine Hachimangu. There are large similarities between Japan and China and even more so Korea, but they are very different in my personal experience. What exists in Japan is different from what I have read and is defined in the San Li. One is a warrior culture(restrained beautifully) and one is not. One has been under cruel authoritarian rule forever and the other had glimpses of anarchist decentralized culture. They are both collectivist cultures, just like ours, but I know who I would turn to if I wanted independent creative thinking.edit: As a further tidbit on the perspective my father and I take on Japan, he was the only tenured professor at the university of Tokyo to have left without retiring or being asked to leave, he left to America to work for Bell labs.