Warum lieben Japaner die „Nihonjinron“-Identitätstheorien? „Das moderne Japan betrachtet sich selbst durch den Spiegel des Westens … es hat einen Nationalismus hervorgebracht, der den Spiegel des Westens bewusst ausschließt und die Einzigartigkeit Japans übermäßig betont, was oft zu Fremdenfeindlichkeit führt.“
https://www.dailyshincho.jp/article/2026/07010530/?all=1
12 Kommentare
Some countries are more similar and some are more different compared to others. It’s nothing crazy.
日本は雑多で曖昧な国だ。歴史的に中国やヨーロッパやアメリカといった覇権国の文化を積極的に吸収しようとする。そのたびにアイデンティティの危機に陥り、定期的に「本来の日本人のあり方」を模索し定義しようとする。日本人論が定期的に流行るのは多分そういった理由なのかもしれないね。
I had a professor who once described Nihonjinron as the dominant philosophy that claims „all countries are unique and special but Japan is THE MOST unique and special.“
And yes of course it drives xenophobia.
Edit: for clarity and accuracy
[removed]
My surface level accessment would guess that it has to do with the way that Japan lost it’s national identity after world war 2. While it’s existed for much longer, these days I think that Nihonjinron is a cooping machinism for facing the lose of identity and the ever changing modern world. Probably a similar reason for why we get Mary Sues in fictional writing.
Japan really believe it’s of importance in world history, when it only come to rellavance when it mirrored west for 150 years.
[removed]
Every country is unique in some ways and the same as others in other ways. We all want to know the ways we are unique because they *do* exist. Taking pride in your culture and having the personal opinion that it’s better than other people’s isn’t „xenophobia“. It’s „xenophobia“ if you hate and harass people on the basis of their ethnicity. Am I being xenophobic if I think my home country’s literary tradition is superior to Japan’s, even though I respect both?
Lol Peter Dale wrote a book about this, quite wordy and borderline unprofessional as an academic book but interesting. At first it resembles a proper academic study and then it becomes more like a thorough excoriation of this exceptionalist nonsense.
In his opinion it was a century-long project that started properly in the 1910s in response to the Japanese Russian war and modernity/western influence creeping in, and then started to intensify to justify the atrocities during the second world war, and then it got even worse once they lost and the government needed a way to give the people some cope.
I remember looking up reviews of the book in old archives because it was so different to most Japan studies type materials and the Japan studies professors were properly upset by it, one even described it as „thoroughly dishonest“. I would say that too if my entire academic discipline transitioned from enemy analysis to enemy stanning lol
Why do Americans love “American Exceptionalism” theories of identity? Modern America views itself as the leader of the west. It gave rise to a nationalism that deliberately excludes allies, and excessively emphasizes American exceptionalism, often driving xenophobia.
It’s possible one of the defining characteristics of the Japanese identity is a deeply entrenched inferiority complex. Hence the constant and strong insistence on their uniqueness in contrast with others.
Both Buddhism and Shinto are deeply steeped in notions of physical (the former) and spiritual (the latter) purity. Nihonjinron blends this with particularly unpleasant (Western, in fact) pseudoscience that was popular in the first half of the twentieth century.
I am not sure how much space it occupies in the public consciousness, though. I reckon the blowhards make it a bigger deal than it is.