The case of Japan.
In Japan, isolation has excluded or reduced to controllable measure every foreign force that might break the continuity of the national development or invade the integrity of the national ideal. Japan has always borrowed freely from neighboring Asiatic countries and recently from the whole world; yet everything in Japan bears the stamp of the indigenous. The introduction of foreign culture into the Empire has been a process of selection and profound modification to accord with the national ideals and needs.[819] Buddhism, coming from the continent, was Japanized by being grafted on to the local stock of religious ideas, so that Japanese Buddhism is strongly differentiated from the continental forms of that religion.[820] The seventeenth century Catholicism of the Jesuits, before it was hospitably received, had to be adapted to Japanese standards of duty and ritual. Modern Japanese converts to Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a national version of the new faith.[821] But all the while, Japanese religion has experienced no real change of heart. The core of the national faith is the indigenous Shinto cult, which no later interloper has been permitted to dislodge or seriously to transform; and this has survived, wrapped in the national consciousness, wedded to the national patriotism, lifted above competition. Here is insular conservatism.
Japan's sudden and complete abandonment of a policy of seclusion which had been rigidly maintained for two hundred and fifty years, and her entrance upon a career of widespread intercourse synchronously with one of territorial expansion and extensive emigration, form one of those apparently irreconcilable contradictions constantly springing from the isolation and world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet underlying Japan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive determination to preserve the core of that character intact.
Islands as nurseries and disseminators of distinctive civilizations.
It is this marked national individuality, developed by isolation and accompanied often by a precocious civilization, in combination with the opposite fact of the imminent possibility of an expansive unfolding, a brilliant efflorescence followed by a wide dispersal of its seeds of culture and of empire, which has assigned to islands in all times a great historical rôle. Rarely do these wholly originate the elements of civilization. For that their area is too small. But whatever seed ripen in the wide fields of the continents the islands transplant to their own forcing houses; there they transform and perfect the flower. Japan borrowed freely from China and Korea, as England did from continental Europe; but these two island realms have brought Asiatic and European civilization to their highest stage of development. Now the borrowers are making return with generous hand. The islands are reacting upon the continents. Japanese ideals are leavening the whole Orient from Manchuria to Ceylon. English civilization is the standard of Europe. "The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English," says Emerson. "England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence and tastes."[822]
Ancient Cretan civilization.
The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,[823] Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub. The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.[824] From this date till the zenith of its development in 1450 B.C., Crete became a great artistic manufacturing and distributing center for stone carving, frescoes, pottery, delicate porcelain, metal work, and gems.[825] By 1800 B. C., seven centuries before Phoenician writing is heard of, the island had matured a linear script out of an earlier pictographic form.[826] This script, partly indigenous, partly borrowed from Libya and Egypt, gives Crete the distinction of having invented the first system of writing ever practised in Europe.[827]
Yet all this wealth of achievement bore the stamp of the indigenous; nearly every trace of its remote Asiatic or Egyptian origin was obliterated. Here the isolation of an island environment did thoroughly its work of differentiation, even on this thalassic isle which maintained constant intercourse with Egypt, the Cyclades, the Troad and the Greek peninsula.[828] Minoan art has a freshness, vivacity, and modernity that distinguishes it fundamentally from the formal products of its neighbors. "Many of the favorite subjects, like the crocus and wild goat, are native to the islands.... Even where a motive was borrowed from Egyptian life, it was treated in a distinctive way," made tender, dramatic, vital. "In religion, as in art generally, Crete translated its loans into indigenous terms, and contributed as much as it received."[829] The curator of Egyptian antiquities in the New York Metropolitan Art Museum examined five hundred illustrations of second and third millenium antiquities from Gournia and Vasiliki in Crete, made by Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes during her superintendence of the excavations there, and pronounced them distinctly un-Egyptian, except one vase, probably an importation.[830] All this was achieved by a small insular segment of the Mediterranean race, in their Neolithic and Bronze Age, before the advent of those northern conquerors who brought in an Aryan speech and the gift of iron. It was in Crete, therefore, that Aegean civilization arose. On this island it had a long and brilliant pre-Hellenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and other Aegean shores.[831]