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In an introduction to The Iwakura Embassy, the Japanese historian Akira Tanaka observes that

The Embassy … presented models for Japan's modernisation from among the great powers and the lesser nations of the West. What Japan chose as its model in the end was not a leading power nor a smaller country but a potential power, Prussia. Thus, modern Japan adopted the Prussian model of growing from a smaller country into a powerful one and applied this in Asia, where it responded to international problems with military might.

If we set this observation alongside French's article, we might conclude that the course which Japan disastrously chose in the period leading up to World War II can't be usefully explained by "insularity." And perhaps it would be equally misleading to trace Japan's current woes to this disposition.

Westerners have a way of seeing Japan as the quintessence of something, never mind what. In an April 2001 essay in The Observer, the influential science-fiction writer William Gibson described Japan as "the global imagination's default setting for the future. The Japanese," Gibson explained,

seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious attention to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They've been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call "future shock" (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives.)

Can this be the same country French describes in the Times: in-turned, fearful, stifling? And Gibson's Japan, so much like Gibson's fiction? Reader, beware.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

"Mind Control" and the Christian Citizen | Historian Sean Wilentz's misguided attack on Justice Antonin Scalia. (August 5, 2002)

Speak What We Feel | Frederick Buechner's latest book is one of his best. (July 29, 2002)

The Great Inflatable Shark Hunt | A report from the Christian Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim. (July 22, 2002)

Why Evangelicals Can't Opt Out of Political Engagement | Remembering Jeremiah Evarts and Samuel Worcester. (July 19, 2002)

The Pledge Controversy | Asking the wrong questions? (July 8, 2002)

Reading Danny Pearl | How would the murdered journalist want to be remembered? (July 1, 2002)

A Cry for Help | Sudanese Christians gather in Houston and ask for U.S. support. (June 17, 2002)

Agrarians of the World, Unite! | Wendell Berry's vision, and how Christians should respond to it. (June 10, 2002)

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46