INTRODUCTION TO JAPAN GALLERY

Our observations of foreign lands are refractions off our own distorted experiences. And so one writer's critique of Japan being stuck in a museum culture tells only part of the story viewed from the outside. Our various cultures are what we prize in setting us against the Them. Japan has its castles (such as Matsumoto-jo, Kanazawa-jo and Himeji-jo), kendo, samurai, kimonos, geisha (really meiko and geiko), sumo wrestling, Edo-era architecture, shinto shrines and temples, but it has so much more. Chinese cultural influences are all around you when visiting Japan but the Japanese have made these borrowing their own and they have achieved a level of refinement seldom seen in most other parts of the world. They continue to take foreign borrowings, more recently from the West, and make them their own in unique ways. Japan is a contradiction. A culture so largely reliant upon cultural borrowings and yet so incredibly homogenous at the same time.