It is not just outsiders who tend to isolate and insulate the Japanese experience; no one makes more of a fetish of the supposed singularity of the national character and the national experience than the country’s own cultural essentialists and neonationalists. Even during that passing moment in the 1980s when Japan seemed to have emerged as the master of global capitalism, it was the peculiarly “Japanese” dimension of its practices that drew greatest attention at home as well as abroad. Although all peoples and cultures set themselves apart (and are set apart by others) by stressing
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