There was never a time when we were entirely sure about who or what we were dealing with in Japan.

I cannot imagine the shock to both parties when Europeans first discovered the advanced cultures of Japan and other Far Eastern countries. Until that encounter, the European assumption of superiority had had a relatively unruffled ride.

In early European colonial ontology there was a column of righteousness, the Great Chain of Being, headed by God and the nine orders of angels, closely supported by the decent Englishman, or dwellers of Christendom, and featuring, lower down, the natives of other parts of the world, and still further below them, the beasts. This stratification had remained intact through all contacts with Africa, the Americas, and the East Indies. In all cases, the technology and societies encountered by European explorers appeared less advanced than their own. Whatever particular advantages other cultures might have had, whatever fields in which they could demonstrate further development than that of Europe, were easily dismissed. And the beneficent spread of European civilisation and piety fitted perfectly as a rationalisation for the plunder and bloodshed that was intrinsic to most European colonisation.

But Japan presented a terrifying challenge to that set of Euro-centric assumptions and threw the happy world-view into disarray.

The Japanese, in European eyes, were not of the same lower echelon of other societies that had already been subjugated around the world. Here in Japan were complex cultures that were highly organised politically, militarily, and socially. Here were inventions that the west had never seen. There were arts and crafts so diverse and outstanding in their refinement they certainly rivalled and perhaps even overshadowed those of Europe. There were huge populations living in the world’s largest cities supported by vast agricultural systems, there were powerful and elaborate religions, extensive histories, there was great wealth, great self-assurance, and great knowledge. And to top it all off there was the cleanliness, symbolically linked in European thinking to being without sin!

But the Japanese were also so unlike the European ideal of civilisation. Practices such as infanticide, mixed public bathing, public nakedness, sleeping and eating on the floor, frequent savagery, and decidedly non-puritanical attitudes towards defecation, promiscuity, homosexuality and other taboos of European society made the Japanese seem alien in the extreme. As Ian Littlewood says in The idea of Japan, when civilised people start doing these things, we have to start revising our definition of civilisation.

The Japanese were clearly civilised, but they were just as clearly not one with Europe. So what does that make us? That was the shocking question that confronted Europeans for the first time. The Japanese could not be placed above, below, or at the same level as Europeans in the Great Chain of Being. What Japan demonstrated, of course, was that the accepted columnar ontology of the Great Chain of Being was a nonsense, and this was disconcerting in the extreme. It seems that the European response was to place the Japanese in a vague parallel category all by themselves – neither man nor beast.