ABSTRACT
If Lemuel Gulliver had recently returned from a fourth voyage to ‘Laputha, Balnibari, Luggnagg, Glubbdurb and Japan’, his narrative would not have been more full of strange incidents and novel observations…. Indeed, it was by a happy conjecture that Dean Swift ranked Japan with those creations of his own misanthropic genius, where all the conditions of European society were at once reflected, distorted, and inverted. (1863)1
Japan is no longer the hermit of the East, but the most Western of the nations of the West. (1903)2
Japan consists of a cluster of islands off the mainland of East Asia. The similarity between Japan’s geographic position in Asia and Britain’s in Europe did not go unnoticed, and as Japan became industrialised (and especially at the time of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902-22) it was not uncommon to refer to the country as the ‘Britain of Asia’. (The alliance, as a Japanese government minister proclaimed, joined the Empire of the Rising Sun with the Empire over which the sun never sets.) Although both Britain and Japan are island nations, their histories are very different. Japan, unlike Britain, was never conquered by a foreign power, until the American victory of 1945. There was no equivalent to Roman or Danish invasions, no 1066 in Japan. Britain participated in European affairs and wars; Japan’s involvement in continental Asian affairs remained minimal. When Japan came closest to being invaded, in the thirteenth century by the fleet of Kublai Khan, she was saved by a typhoon which destroyed the bulk of the enemy fleet; the typhoon was baptised the Kamikaze (Divine Wind). In the nineteenth century, while the Western powers carved up most of Asia as colonies, Japan remained a sovereign state.
