America is toxic, poisonous and ruinous to Japan’s great and wonderful culture. How many times do we have to spread our “democracy” or “increase our market shares” until we learn to stop fuc*ing up other cultures and countries? Why can’t we just realize that what we have here is enough, and there is no reason what-so-ever to commit “breaking and entering” into other governments, economies and social structures of third party countries. Where am I going with this? MySpace, a massive social site that is a cultural phenomenon here in America, is going to expand into the Japanese market to grow its market share and try to monopolize the world market to leave room for no one. As if the $327 Million dollar projected worth was not enough, they want more! This, while on the surface, may seem like an ordinary corporate project, but underneath, it represents everything that is wrong with America. But before I go off on my rant, let’s go over a little history on western influence on Japan and then we will come back to the MySpace issue. If the history is of little interest, you can skip to the bottom of this article for the MySpace effect on Japan.

Western Influence on Japan’s History

Japan, with its earliest evidence of human existence around 10,000 years ago, is amazing not only historically, but culturally as well. Japan is a complete anomaly considering it has little natural resources and is about the size of California, but claims the second largest economy and is the sixth largest importer of goods in the world. America is, of course, the largest economy, but is also the largest importer of goods. Go figure, considering we have one of the greatest supplies of natural resources right here in our own country. But, let me get back to my point.

Here is a rundown on how the western influence has continually been toxic, and corrosive to the culture of Japan. Japan’s unique isolation to other influences has created a great sense of “being” Japanese. This is how they developed such a strong and loyal bond to their country and their culture. But, there have been 5 major influences that have affected their country in a significant way.

The first influence came from China where Buddhism was shared with Japan, influencing Japan to adopt it as the national religion in 593 AD. This was, of course, a good influence as Buddhism encourages peace, simplicity, respect of all living things and a “path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence and opposing self-mortification.* ” The second influence was again from China; this time being more political with the introduction of political bureaucrats that influenced the Japanese to create a “Seventeen-article constitution that promoted Confucian morals and virtues in 604.* ” This, in turn, caused a rapid growth of nationalism, as they developed a penal code, created a court system, which then lead to the Heian period. This marks the first creation of Japan as a national State.

“In 784, Emperor Kammu moved the capital to Nagaokakyō for a brief ten-year period, before relocating it to Heian-kyō (modern day Kyoto) in 794, where it remained for more than a millennium. This marked the beginning of the Heian period, when a distinctly indigenous Japanese culture emerged, noted for its art, poetry, and literature. During this time, Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, the world’s oldest surviving novel, and the lyrics of modern Japan’s national anthem “Kimi ga Yo” were written. The Japanese court stopped sending diplomatic missions to China in 838, ending official relations with China for the next 500 years. And, Japan continued to turn increasingly inward. The Fujiwara clan, which married its daughters into the imperial family, dominated politics. - Wikipedia.com”

This also marked the end of positive, still Eastern, influences on Japan, in my opinion. Once European, Western, influence started to come into play around the 16 century, they introduced many parts of the European culture that was opposing to what their traditional Japanese beliefs were. One of them being the introduction of Christianity and firearm weaponry. Both of these cultural influences had a negative effect on Japan. The first being religion; Christianity being an antagonist to what Buddhism teaches created strife within their society. The Christian priests would coerce the Japanese into believing in guilt and sin, and that the human, by nature, is evil and vile. This was contrary to Buddhism in which all people are considered perfect and good with no sin or angry, vengeful God. This very obvious difference in religion caused a division among the people of the country — one that stayed faithful to Buddhism and the other that converted to Christianity. This influence caused Japan to stray away from the strong, unified nation to a country that was divided by religious extremes.

The other Western, European influence being the firearm caused an imbalance in power between the clans of the State. This allowed some Japanese to incorporate the unfair advantage so that they could exploit the warrior’s code of honor. Instead of having wars fought in the honorable, traditional sense of dying by the sword, they were being shot and killed from a hundred yards away by someone that was only taught to shot everything that moved. To the Japanese, this confused them, because there was no honor is this type of battle.

Now don’t get me wrong, Japan was not a peaceful country by any means, but the warrior class of Japan called the samurai, fought wars in a very honorable way respecting the enemy. This respect was shown by killing the enemy or allowing to be killed in the most painless, honorable way. This may seem very strange and demented from the Westerner’s perspective, but to the Japanese, the way one dies is everything to them. The Japanese samurai never feared death as their national religion, Buddhism, declared that one has multiple lives and there is no consequences to face in the after life.

If you are interested in seeing this conveyed in a movie that is quite accurate to history, please watch Shogun. This is an older “epic” type movie that is quite long, but it is wonderfully made and is a great educational tool for learning about Japanese history.

One thing that Japan does that not many other countries have been able to do is learn from their mistakes. Once the leaders of the country realized what the European influence was doing to their country, they not only kicked out all westerners, but they also banned firearms and Christianity from the country. This was a huge step in a positive direction leading to the isolationist sakoku policy which sprouted the Edo period of peace that lasted 250 years.

This is often considered to be the height of Japan’s medieval culture. The study of Western sciences, known as rangaku, continued during this period through contacts with the Dutch enclave at Dejima in Nagasaki. The Edo period also gave rise to kokugaku, or literally “national studies”, the study of Japan by the Japanese themselves. - Wikipedia.com

During this period, all samurai laid down there swords and picked up politics and created academia. It is quite interesting how when Christianity and Western influence was removed, Japan experienced one of the longest periods of peace in the world since the birth of Christianity. This era of peace lasted about as long as this country has been in existence. Unfortunately, this era of peace, art, literature and science had to stop. What caused this period to cease? Well, us, and I mean U.S. or America. Yep, America, the country that forces and coerces countries to operate like it does. We didn’t understand a country who wanted to be left alone and not open to trade with other countries. The nerve of Japan in doing that. [Sarcasm].

The end of this period is called the late Tokugawa shogunate. The cause for the end of this period is controversial but is recounted as the forcing of Japan’s opening to the world by Cmdre Matthew Perry of the US Navy. Cmdre Perry’s armada (known by Japanese as “the black ships”) fired weapons from Tokyo Bay. Several artificial land masses were created to block the range of the armada and this land remains in what is presently called the Odaiba district.




The Tokugawa did not eventually collapse simply because of intrinsic failures. Foreign intrusions helped to precipitate a complex political struggle between the bakufu and a coalition of its critics. The continuity of the anti-bakufu movement in the mid-nineteenth century would finally bring down the Tokugawa. From the outset, the Tokugawa attempted to restrict families’ accumulation of wealth and fostered a “back to the soil” policy, in which the farmer, the ultimate producer, was the ideal person in society.- Wikipedia.com

If you would like to see the effects of this tragedy, please watch The Last Samurai which is one of the most beautiful epic films ever created in modern film making. It tells the story of the last clan of samurai trying to defend their way of life from the westernized world. Obviously, the samurai did not succeed as they were trying to defend themselves with swords against massive firearms of (guess who?)–the U.S., among others.

Repeating History: The MySpace Effect on Japan

With all the above history being explained, you may now realize how the Japanese do not function well with Western influence. So, why are we still trying to infuse our culture into theirs? Well, because we don’t care. The bottom line and the financial gain of Westerners’ is more important than people’s happiness and way of life. Now let’s get to how MySpace will destroy another part of the Japanese culture.

Mixi is a Japanese version of MySpace with some obvious differences. One of them is the visual difference — the layout is simple, functional, and humble, especially when compared to the “flashy text and teen-magazine-like layout of its counterpart, MySpace.** ” The other difference is the lack of the “look at me, look at me” theme of MySpace. The “me” orientation that is so prevalent in the “I want to be famous” addiction embedded in American culture, is missing in the Japanese Mixi. Mixi focuses more on groups of networks, having more of a “its all about us” not an “all about me” perspective.

When you take a closer look at Mixi, you will also notice the lack of intimate personal information that is readily displayed on MySpace. Mixi, on the other hand, tends to encourage people to get to know each other better on a gradual pace, instead of the “balls to the wall” type speed meeting in MySpace. Along with this is a difference in how communication is conveyed. Mixi Inc. President, Kenji Kasahara, says that the messages on Mixi are more positive since their culture believes in more peaceful communications, encouraging harmony and friendliness. This being the antithesis of MySpace, where people speak their minds without a second thought as to how it could be interpreted on the receiving end of the message. Here in America, we tend to lose our inhibitions when using virtual worlds because of the lack of consequences associated with our messages.

Just from this, you can tell that we, Americans, are nothing like the Japanese. And history will tell that our involvement with their country will do nothing but damage their positive and harmonious culture. So, as far as MySpace goes — stay in America! However, we should not stop there. We should stop interfering and infecting all the other countries as well. If we could only learn from the Japanese, and stop meddling in other peoples’ business, but that would not be very American. We don’t like to learn from our history; we stay stubborn and forthright with “our way is best for everyone” type of mentality.

Additional Resources:

Wikipedia.com — Edo Period, Japan