The Heritage of a Long Isolation

"Much of the pre-modern Japanese history can be understood as an interplay between the indigenous and the foreign - not as a mechanical interplay, with one rhythmically rising as the other rhythmically falls, but rather as a process whereby a stubbornly native element continues to assert itself despite a flood of borrowing."

LIFE World Library: Japan (by Edward Seidensticker). Original edition 1961, 1970.