Civilizational Aspects of Japanese History

valid points made by those who see Japan as a highly self-contained cultural world. After a brief
consideration of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on Japan, the central section of the paper deals
with Shmuel Eisenstadt’s work. His conception of Japan as a distinctive civilization characterized by pre-axial patterns is rejected on the grounds that the native mode of thought which he
proposes to describe is more plausibly interpreted as an offshoot of Chinese traditions, although
a notably autonomous and historically changing one. The transmission of Daoism to Japan,
although much less explicit than the reception of Confucianism and Buddhism, was of crucial importance. That said, Eisenstadt’s concrete analyses of Japanese ways to transform foreign
inputs are often detailed and insightful, and his comments on the relationship between culture
and institutions raise important questions, although they must in many cases be reformulated in
more historical terms. The paper discusses the genesis, dynamics and collapse of the Tokugawa
regime (1600–1868), and concludes with reflections on Japanese modernity, up to and including
its present crisis.