Another library…

“Tape recorders had been developed in Germany in the thirties by Grundig and Telefunken, and had been used to record and disseminate Nazi propaganda during the war. In the United States, after 1945, Ampex had led the market in developing the machines; Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (later the 3M Company) was the principal supplier of magnetic tape. The technology had been reported in Japan but not yet applied.
Ibuka asked to borrow the machine so that his engineers could study it, and although the Americans declined to let it out of their hands, and office agreed to bring a recorder to Gotenyama for a demonstration. Everyone at Totsuko gathered to record messages and to appreciate the quality of the playback. […]
The new company’s eventual success at developing magnetic tape and a tape recorder with little else to guide them than an instinctive cleverness about circuitry and mechanism, and with scarcely any material resources, is a vintage example of the ingenuity and determination that drove Japan’s postwar recovery.”

Nathan, J. (1999) Sony: The Private Life. Harper Collings Publishers. PP27-28

“Numerous external influences- ideas, artefacts, technologies, styles of dress- have been incorporated into Japanese culture, so much so that Japan has often been called a country of imitations and imitators. But such as designation is misplaced, because a central aspect of Japanese historical experience has been that most such borrowings, while very influential, have been thoroughly ‘Japanized’, that is, organized or structured to principles specific to the Japanese experience or modes of life.
This capacity of the Japanese to absorb, in their own way, many external influences, has been vividly described by Endo Shusaku, in his novel Silence, in the powerful metaphor of the Japanese swamp. This ‘swamping’ capacity can be identified in many arenas- those we have analyzed above, as well as the transformation of Christian beliefs and sects analyzed by Robert N. Bellah and recently by the eminent Japanese psychoanalyst Kawai. On a more mundane level this capacity for Japanization can be seen in the transformation of baseball practice- vividly described by Robert Whiting- or of the basic premises and organization of the Jamaican Rastafari movement in Japan.
But the Japanization of foreign artefacts, ways of thought, and patterns of behaviour has been carried out, as is the case with regard to processes of change and movements of protest, in a double-pronged manner. On the one hand, these foreign influences, insofar as they are incorporated into Japanese life, are often consigned to segregated areas; at the same time, their basic premises are radically transformed on both an institutional and an ideological level, so they become congruent with the basic ontological vision and conceptions of social order prevalent in Japan. On the other hand, under the impact of these foreign influences, new, highly developed modes of discourse and collective and cultural consciousness have developed in Japan.
Among the most important and dramatic such transformations were, as we have seen, the Japanization of Confuscianism and Buddhism- two major Axial civilizations. We noted the transformation of orientations that stressed the chasm between the transcendental and mundane orders in a more ‘immanentist’ direction, and the parallel transformation of some of their basic premises and concepts of the social order- manifest, for instance, in the change from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, a remarkable change in view of the obvious dependence of the Japanese tenno emperor (ten= heaven) on the Chinese model, but without the Chinese version’s conception of authority and implication for the accountability of rulers. Unlike China, where the emperor was, in principle, ‘under’ the Mandate of Heaven, in Japan he was seen as in close touch with heaven- and heaven itself was on the whole conceived in sharply transcendental terms- and not accountable to anybody. Similarly, the strong universalistic orientations inherent in Buddhism, and more latent in Confuscianism, were subdued and ‘nativized’ in Japan.
Thus, the Japanization of Buddhism and Confuscianism entailed, not just the addition of local color, but the transformation of the basic conceptions in line with the basic premises of Japanese civilization. The same processes have been operative in the modern period with respect to Western ideologies and forms of social organization. One interesting aspect of the Japanization of Buddhism, Confuscianism, and various Western univerlistic ideologies has been that the Japanese bearers of the ideologies have not attempted to reexport their versions; this in itself attest to the weakening of their universalistic, often missionary orientations. Japan has, however, attempted in modern times to put itself at the head of an Asian counteroffensive against the West, which has entailed an expansionist turn. This constituted, as Johann Arnason has observed (in private correspondence), ‘a radical transfiguration of particularism, in which Marxism played a very ambiguous, complex and intriguing role: on the one hand, Marxism was- as Mauyama has argued- the symbol of consistent and uncompromising opening to the West, but on the other hand, it was indirectly instrumental in the radicalization of particularism.’
Nevertheless, it is probably Japan’s continual encounter with China, with Confusciansim and Buddhism, and later with the West, and the continual necessity to distinguish itself from China and the West without either denying the outside values or admitting their superiority, that has led to the development of the intense, complex and sophisticated mode on ideological discourse that distinguishes Japan from most other non Axial civilizations. This highly developed discourse has paradoxically constituted a conscious and highly reflexive denial of the type of ideologies grounded in the premises of Axial civilizations; but at the same time it has been couched in terms derived from these ideologies.”

Eisenstadt, S.N. (1996) Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. The University of Chicago Press. PP305-307.

“Japan has always lived with these other civilizations but never been one of them- continuously maintaining its conscious collective distinctiveness and the distinctiveness of its civilizational premises.”

Eisenstadt, S.N. (1996) Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. The University of Chicago Press. P308.

Books that were scanned:

Hendry, J. & Raveri, M. (ed.) (2002) Japan at play: The ludic and the logic of power. Routledge.
Cortazzi, H. (1987) Victorians in Japan: In and around the Treaty ports. The Athlone Press, London.
Nathan, J. (1999) Sony: The Private Life. Harper Collings Publishers.
Massarella, D. (1990) A world Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press.
Sugimoto, Y. (1997) An Introduction to Japanese Society. Cambridge University Press.