How much of Japan's traditional culture comes from China ?

[lexico]

This is an exciting field of study that deserves continued attention. There would be two approaches possible, 1) that of micro-historical study tracing all parallels and possible origins to culminate in a macroscopic overview of the specific cultural item evolving and inventing in the natural course or historical development, 2) that of conspired inventions that were cooked up during the later periods of the contending nation-states as Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger analyse in their coedited work, The Invention of Traditions (Canto S. 1983, 1992, 328 pages).

Out of a dialectic examination of the two approaches, a more solid perpsective of national-ethnic culture can be obtained; this is thoroughly exciting line of research to pursue, not necessarily aimed at "bashing" any one particular culture; identical studies should be applied to all cultures that "boast of long-held traditions of their glorious past." Although the relativist tendency of post-modernist studies are not altogether to be accepted, it is here with us to enrich our understanding, with anthropology and archeology giving stimulating new finds to supplement our historical tunnel vision all the time.

Fascinating subject, uneven quality

The re-issue in paperback by a general publisher of an academic work originally from the CUP is a rare event. But even the original edition cast a sidelong eye at the general public, who might be willing to bear with academic minutiae for the sake of its astonishing revelations (to all but professional historians) on a subject they thought they knew about.

If you're going to write an academic work, footnotes and all, for the "educated layman", you'd better be a good writer, lively and stylish, as well as a good academic. From that point of view, the essays in this collection are very uneven, ranging from the occasionally tongue-in-cheek polish of Hugh Trevor-Roper (on the invention of the Highland Tradition in Scotland) to the convoluted and occasionally asyntactic sentences of Prys Morgan (on "the hunt for the Welsh past"). The one invites you on an enthralling voyage of discovery, the other requires you to wade through a viscous Sargasso Sea. Nonetheless, both journeys are well worth undertaking, as are the others in the collection.

But perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is that it encourages us to reflect in general, quite aside from the specific examples studied, on the human need for a link to the past and evidence of superiority, if not now, then at least in a prior Golden Age. If human communities divide the world into "them" and "us", how do they define who "we" are? And what makes "us" special? On the lines of Voltaire's famous comment that "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." we are forced to the conclusion that if a national history and culture do not exist, it is necessary to invent them. (A process traced also by Y. Nevo and myself in our study of the early history of the Umayyad State).

It appears that the need to define one's community as valid -- by reference to an historic past -- is most acute when that community is only just established or is in decline. The lessons of this book should be kept in mind when reading the history of any nation.