[FrankWilhoit]

National cultures are less alike than we mostly prefer to think. Japan's present reflects upon Japan's past, which is long and deep and rich even if one would like to say that it went off the rails a century ago. America has no past for the present to reflect off. 250 years are nothing. We do not have traditions; we have defaults.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> America has no past for the present to reflect off.

Well, what do you mean by "past"?

European settlement in America has a very long history, which of course extends back to the 17th century. It has a rich intellectual tradition, in which respects it surpasses many European countries -- and many of the dominant strains of thought today have their roots in America. It has an exceptionally rich literary and artistic tradition, with numerous styles which are characteristically American. In scientific achievement, few countries can compete. It even has its own aesthetic, just as Japan does.

You could say that Japan is regressing from modernity into older ways of being, but this is far from true. Japan before Meiji was strictly aristocratic and feudal. The average Japanese family were tenant farmers with zero political power, economic power, and near-zero potential for advancement in society.

If anything, Japan is apparently regressing into an American-style older way of being. A pre-New-Deal manner, with big winners, bigger and more numerous losers, and increased social strife. Also, the atomization the article picks up on isn't a Ye Olde Japanese thing; it's very American.

[chneu]

There's a joke in the race world that White Americans have no culture so they have to steal other people's culture.

This is relatively true and largely because the US has little history compared to other nations. That's part of why so many facets of American society and history are nonsense myths, such as the American West myth. So much of US culture and history is made up ego stuff.

[silvestrov]

> a very long history [...] back to the 17th century

I think you proved the point (about no history) without wanting to.

How large percentage of history lessions in Europe do you think is spent on the years after the 17th century?

[joe_mamba]

More like Japan is a nation of the Japanese people where maintaining national values and tradition comes first, while the US functions as the world's largest economic zone where making money any way you can get away with trumps any forms of culture or identity, so they each optimize for different things and get different outcomes.

[simfree]

There is a lot of money floating around major cities in the US. So many nonprofit entities are preserving some cultural niche thanks to their older patrons using their qualified minimum distribution to fund a long lasting endowment.

I feel like you see this less in other parts of the world where people don't have tens of thousands of dollars from their retirement savings that they have to take out each year, and they would rather give it tax free to their favorite nonprofit than take a haircut with taxes and then do nothing with the money

[BigTTYGothGF]

> maintaining national values and tradition comes first

Japan's had a couple of major upheavals in their "national values" over the past 210-ish years, you might have heard of them.

[marginalia_nu]

Many western countries, even with longer histories, don't have a national identity that is that much older than the US. There was this 19th century idea of deliberately building a national identity that swept through the world, that in many ways superseded any prior identity that merely happened to exist. So even if buildings and ruins may be old, the identity itself is often surprisingly young. It may hark on events from the 18th or even 17th century, and tack on some fairy tales of brave knights or ferocious vikings, but it was more often than not penned about the same time the US national identity began to crystallize.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Is tomato sauce an Italian tradition? It's barely older than the US, tomatoes are a new-world crop.

[PostOnce]

The British did not suddenly and instantaneously turn American in 1776, they had to already be culturally American for things to have wound up there.

What's more, the British didn't leave Britain so they could go be British overseas necessarily, but so they could go do un-British things, it could be argued.

On top of that, 250 years is both a very short time, but also a very long time. It's more than enough not to be hand-waved away, at least. In 250 years it went from a coastal breakaway to the sole hyperpower, slavery came and went, communism arrived and died out, the information age dawned, religion became more of a niche than a facet of everyday life... That's a lot of cultural upheaval.

[OutOfHere]

Let's revisit where exactly it is that slavery went. It went into prisons, where it remains legal and used, with about a million people bound by it.

To make a long story short, in the US, you are and have always been one of two things: the exploited or the exploitor.