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