ABSTRACT
Visiting Japan a few months after the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, Duret presented this notion in his travel account, Voyage en Asie:
The Japanese had almost nothing of their own civilisation, everything came to them originally from China: their writing, the seed of their arts and what they have of science, their religion and what they can claim in philosophy. [...] As long as they knew only China the Japanese were very satisfied with the Chinese model they adopted; but once in contact with Europe they ceased to be content.
