LOL, I knew I was going to get yelled at for that one. ^_^

Now that I've got everyone all riled up, perhaps I should clarify a few things:

I am well aware that the U.S. is only a very small part of "The West", but since it is the part I am most familliar with I thought it would be best to use it as an example instead of a civilization I could not accurately date.

On the other hand, while Japan itself is relatively young, it has retained much closer ties to it's past than the US has--the majority of US society has been thoroughly uprooted and seperated from it's cultural background, with the exception of certain ethnic groups who retain closer ties to their heritage than to the U.S.'s dubious "culture".

I should also point out that I was referring to the age of a civilization not a particular chunk of land--using anceint greece as an example is pointless for something like this because the anceint greek civilization fell quite some time ago and was later replaced by a new civilization. One could argue that the same thing has happened to Japan, but Nihon stilll retains many cultural aspects both from it's own history and from the much older history of China--while Greece (as well as most other western civilizations) has undergone several complete transformations.

Similarly, judging the age of a culture based on it's level of advancement is downright prejudice--what about the Aborigone from Austrailia? (or the Japanese Ainu for that matter...) Regardless of what crops a culture harvests--or even if they harvest crops at all--a civilization can still develop a deep cultural foundation that it's morals and beliefs spring from.

Ultimately, the basic moral foundation of asia has remained in place more or less throughout the history of it's inhabitation--while most western cultures are rebuilt from the ground up every few hundered years.

(personally, I think your responses were less motivated by the facts and more by the instincive reaction to my essentially saying that western civilization was a bunch of young idealist punks while eastern civilization was the wise old men who knew how to make things work...

...sorry about that, but manipulating the young into shooting their mouths off is one of the favorite passtimes of the old and cynical. )