Oscar Wilde wrote in 1889, “In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.”
Japanese culture has been Orientalized, romanticized, and exoticized for over a hundred years. The result? Much of the (Western?) world has come to think that there is something inherently profound, unique, and intrinsic about Japanese culture.
Just look at the output from ChatGPT — which basically spits out existing data that it has been trained on:
Screenshot from OpenAI ChatGPT, prompt by author.
Even I have been accused of committing cultural essentialism in the piece “Five Things about Japan I Didn’t Fully Appreciate until I Lived There.”
Cultural essentialism refers to the now-outdated belief that there is something intrinsic, primordial, and unchanging to a culture.
That there is an “essence” to a culture.
But this critique misses the mark. As someone with a background in the study of society and culture, I have never subscribed to this philosophy.