ABSTRACT
Many Japanese scholars have emphasized the fact that, among the samurai leadership, training increasingly centered on Neo-Confucian strains of rationalism and pragmatism. Within Japan an oral tradition was evolving, ideas to be denounced as "mere legends," but which, just before World War II, were revived to play a key role in extreme nationalism and a disastrous militarism. Japanese meanwhile continue to stress the Yamato damashii, the original Japanese spirit, the traditional, and the unique. Discovery of an advanced, sophisticated culture in China had an immediate effect on Japan. In Japan, a community-centered lifestyle was closely connected with rice culture, in which the Japanese, like the Chinese, participated. Several developments took the Japanese in a direction quite different from the Chinese. One of the clearest illustrations of Japanese capacity to absorb imports and adapt them was the further development of Buddhism in the countryside.
