Is rationalism a humanism?

[Belacqua]

Japan and the West have always swapped influences. It is hard to discern which has influenced the other the most.

Somebody could write a big good book about mutual misunderstandings -- the images that Western people project on Japan and vice versa. 

So for example in the first wave of Japanese art imported into France, when advanced collectors were first collecting netsuke, ukiyo e, etc., French people imagined Japan as a land of sensitive aestheticism and free sexuality. This is clear in the Goncourts' writing, and in the more recent Hare with Amber Eyes. But my Japanese students were amused to read this because to them, it's France that represents a place of sensitive aestheticism and free sexuality. 

When I was in art school years ago, we all read Alan Watts and John Cage, and we thought we were learning about Japanese Zen. But then I got to Japan and I realized that Zen here is completely different. The ideas that Watts and Cage are talking about, however, are described in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience as recurrent themes in American thought -- especially Emerson and those guys, but other minority traditions as well. 

Japanese people think America is the land of the free, where everyone can express himself, but I have to tell them that nowhere is more conformist than a small town in the Midwest. It's all image and symbolism. Japanese weirdos tend to be a lot less self-conscious.

Lots of creative misinterpretations going on.