A fabricated Japan after Meiji

The book, the notes begin, describes Japanese culture in some detail, so that Japan may be seen again as a neighbor, not an enemy. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan set about making Japan itself. Being called the emperor’s country, having a uniquely Japanese samurai spirit, and having maintained a single ethnicity for thousands of years were all, they write, a fabricated Japan. If one knew Japan as it was, one would need to peel that myth away and look at what remained.

To see that inner face, a lecture on Japanese culture was held at Tokyo University, which the notes call Japan’s foremost university. There people began to ask what kind of society Japan was, and what could really be called Japanese culture.

Ito Abito, and more than one people

Ito Abito, a friend of Korea who had studied Korea for decades, begins to speak about Japan, its society and its culture. He talks, the notes say, not of a terrifying Japan that had dominated and oppressed them and shouted of ritual suicide, but of a Japan in which people like themselves live. The book thus shows Japan as a gathering of many different peoples.

The imperial line said never to have been broken, and the emperor’s house as the ancestral head of all Japanese, are opened to the question: are they in fact a single ethnicity? How, then, are the Ainu of the north and Okinawa of the south to be explained? Many kinds of people have historically lived in Japan, yet the government officially declares that there are no ethnic minorities. That is why, they write, the matter of the residents of the annexed Ryukyu kingdom — the notes write 류큐 왈국 — and of Zainichi Koreans keeps coming up. Between an ideology of something uniquely Japanese and the actual present, collision is constant.

A long archipelago, north and south

First of all, they write, Japan is an archipelago, and a very long one: about eight times the distance from Seoul to Busan. So the south and the north differ in climate, and therefore in livelihood, and in the people who do that work. The notes leave the lecture there, before a later heading on the household and the neighborhood. The same Korean report, written out more fully, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of a Tokyo University lecture on Japanese society and culture: a fabricated Japan after Meiji, Ito Abito, questions about the imperial line, the Ainu and Okinawa, the annexed Ryukyu kingdom and Zainichi Koreans, and an archipelago some eight times Seoul to Busan.

Last updated: 15 November 2026