@TheSubliminalKid,
There are a wide variety of reasons for why cultures become what they are. Archaeological evidence of cultural artifacts, and the lingustic evidence is that the Japanese and Koreans were originally Altaic people, closely related to the Turks. They owe a big cultural debt to the other east Asians, especially the Chinese, for obvious reaons--but what a culture becomes is determined by factors which are almost always unique in the experience of the people involved.
The archaological evidence of Japanese culture is impressive. When virtually every culture outside Africa used storage pits (there is little to no evidence of long-term food storage in Africa), the Japanese were using above ground storage facilities. It appears that they invented pottery. The oldest Japanese ceramics are older than those in China by more than 2000 years. It appears that this, among other cultural successes (such as large scale exploitation of the ocean as a food source), lead to significant population growth thousands of years ago--perhaps as much as 8000 or 9000 years ago. The Japanese have lived at the very edge of their food resources throughout their history, once again, for thousands of years. While this is somewhat true of the Chinese, China (not yet known as China) underwent large scale warfare for control of the rice producing areas beginning more than 3000 years ago. Such warfare never occured among the Japanese. Ceratainly they were warlike, but the evidence from the pre-historical eras, and in the historical era (since 500 CE) is that there were no large scale, prolonged was in Japan until quite recently. The first such protracted warfare was in the Sengoku period, roughly from 1550 to 1600. That "warring states" period ended with the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. Early in the 17th century, the meticulous records of the shogunate show a population of 30,000,000 Japanese, producing 25,000,000
koku of rice per annum. Although there is disagreement over exactly how much rice a
koku was, all authoritative sources agree that it was sufficient rice to feed an adult male for one year (the majority view is that it was about 172 liters). So, with either inferential or incomplete evidence before the 17th century, the evidence since the foundation of the Tokugawa shogunate is that they were living at the very edge of their capacity to feed themselves, as seems to have always been the case.
This has been accomplished (living in a sense from hand to mouth, and without major conflict for most of their history) because of a carefully crafted social system based on behavioral consensus. There is no evidence that there was ever a temple society phase in their cultural development (temple societies produced the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus River valley, as well as the pacific coast of South America and the central Mexican plateau). Neither was there a temple society phase in China, but there, the need for a priesthood was obviated by the development of an established bureaucracy, which became the Mandarins. No such device was ever used in Japan. It appears that the Japanese developed a
modus vivendi thousands of years ago, and have succesffully maintained it ever since. That is how a nation in which the population was always crowded into all the available agrarian space and living at the edge of its means has survived. In Japanese society, thousands of years ago, the farmer held the highest social status in society after the aristocracy and the
Bushi, the warrior class. Artisans, merchants and "hewers of wood and drawers of water" were the lowest orders, and were looked down upon by the aristocracy, the warrior class and the farmers.
The Japanese are a fascinating study, and i have always admired them, and admire them all the more as i learn more about them.
