ABSTRACT
Historians of Japan become accustomed to dealing with slippery concepts. They wrestle with definitions of development, modernization and Westernization; they worry over the application of concepts like feudalism, fascism and democracy to the Japanese experience. But in all this the one term which seldom appears to need discussion is the word ‘Japan’. Japan seems real and self-explanatory: as Delmer Brown once put it, a ‘natural region’ whose isolation and climatic uniformity accounted for the early rise of national consciousness. 1 In the words of a more recent study, ‘the surrounding ocean serves as a protective moat’ shielding Japan both from invasion and migration, so that since the third or fourth century ad there has been ‘very little infusion of other ethnic groups, resulting in a contemporary population that is fundamentally homogeneous’. 2
