ABSTRACT
The Japanese Foreign Ministry conducts opinion polls in European Community countries at regular intervals, foreign school textbooks are frequently analysed by the Ministry of Education, and the University of Tsukuba is conducting a world-wide comparative study in this field. This chapter shows that for two peoples, the Japanese and the Ainu, there is a fixed set of images spanning the extremes of the honest, skilled and talented, a model to be emulated, residing in peaceful and paradisical lands in a harmonious society, and the sly, ugly, dirty, lazy, cruel, beast-like creature. It aims to show how many different approaches to the understanding and interpretation of Japanese reality can be differentiated in the course of European history. The first ‘set of ideas’ to be taken into consideration is the medieval European world view, based on the Bible and formed centuries before Japan even became known to Europeans.
