Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 1
Chapter I
Geographic Background
In the islands of Japan nature fashioned a favored spot where civilization could prosper and a people could develop into a strong and great nation. A happy combination of temperate climate, plentiful rainfall, fairly fertile soil, and reasonable proximity to other great homes of civilized man predestined the ultimate rise of the inhabitants of these islands to a place among the leading peoples of the world.
The four main islands of Japan, strung out in a great arc along the coast of East Asia, cover the same spread of latitude and the same general range of climate as the east coast of the United States. The northern island of Hokkaido parallels New England; the heart of the country from Tokyo west to the Inland Sea corresponds to North Carolina; and the southern island of Kyushu parallels Georgia.
Americans have often tended to overemphasize the smallness of Japan, contrasting it with the vast stretches of our own country, or to other geographic giants like Russia and China. A more reasonable comparison would be with the countries of western Europe. Japan is smaller than France or pre-war Germany but slightly 
Japan superimposed at the same latitude
on the East Coast of the United States
Like Italy, Japan is a mountainous country. Throughout all four of the main islands are great stretches of towering mountains and jumbled hills. The combination of rugged coast line and precipitous mountainsides makes of the whole country one of the beauty spots of the world, but it leaves little land for the Japanese farmer, who finds only about twenty per cent of the land surface of his islands level enough for cultivation.
The mountains of Japan have pushed the Japanese out upon the seas, making them the greatest seafaring people of Asia. Sea lanes have been great highways within Japan; sea routes have beckoned the Japanese abroad; and the cold and warm sea currents which bathe the shores of the islands have always provided rich fishing grounds for the hardy Japanese fishermen.
Nature has been rather niggardly with Japan in mineral resources. Coal the islands have in some abundance, but few other sub-soil riches in significant quantities. The mountains of Japan, together with the heavy rainfall, have, however, given Japan one great asset in the modern world—water power, all the more important in a land comparatively poor in other respects.
Next to its favorable climate, the geographic factor of greatest importance in shaping the history of Japan has been the factor of isolation. Japan is a part of the Chinese zone of civilization, that zone in East Asia centering around China which has been dominated by the culture developed in ancient times on the plains of North China.
The Chinese sphere of civilization is itself the most isolated of the great spheres of early civilization, cut off from the centers of early culture in India, the Near East, and the Mediterranean world by the great land barrier of the mountain ranges and vast deserts of Central Asia, and the jungles and rugged terrain of Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula.
In this relatively isolated zone of Chinese civilization, Japan was in the past the most isolated area of all. Like England, Japan is an island country, but the straits between western Japan and Korea, the nearest continental land, are well over 100 miles wide, many times the width of the Straits of Dover; and some 500 miles of open sea stretch between Japan and China, the home of civilization in East Asia. In days of primitive navigation these water barriers were very broad, and made of Japan the most isolated of all the older countries of the world.
Culturally Japan is a daughter of Chinese civilization, much as the countries of northern Europe are daughters of Mediterranean culture. The story of the spread of Chinese civilization to the alien peoples of Japan during the first millennium after Christ is much like the story of the spread of Mediterranean civilization to the alien peoples of northern Europe during the same period. But the greater isolation of the Japanese from the home of their civilization and from all other peoples meant that in Japan the borrowed culture had more chance to develop along new and often unique lines, and to grow into distinctive patterns of civilization.
One popular concept is that the Japanese have never been anything more than a race of borrowers and imitators. The truth is quite the contrary. Although 
Ancient centers of civilization in Asia and Europe
Take, for example, things as basic as domestic architecture and the manner in which the Japanese live at home. The thick straw floor mats, the sliding paper panels in place of interior walls, the open, airy structure of the whole house, the recess for art objects, the charcoal heating braziers, the peculiar wooden and iron bathtubs, and the place of bathing in daily life as a means of relaxation at the end of a day’s work and, in winter, as a way of restoring a sense of warmth and well-being—all these and many other simple but fundamental features of home and daily life are unique to Japan and attest to an extremely distinctive culture rather than one of simple imitation.
Isolation has also made of the Japanese a highly self-conscious people, unaccustomed to dealing with foreigners individually or as a nation. The Japanese are always strongly conscious that they are Japanese and that all other peoples are foreigners. Isolation has made them painfully aware of their differences from other peoples and has filled them with an entirely irrational sense of superiority, which they are anxious to prove to themselves and to others. Isolation has made it difficult for them to understand the attitudes and actions of other peoples. In short, the factor of geographic isolation during the past two thousand years has helped fashion national traits which eventually, and almost inevitably, led Japan to political isolation and to crushing defeat in war.