I’ve written before about how Japan isn’t a very patriotic place, and lacks some of the basic concepts of national pride that people in the United States take for granted. There’s no Japanese version of the Fourth of July or Memorial Day or that story about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree, and the national flag of Japan is associated with right-wing political extremists often enough that no one would fly it openly, as we do in the U.S. Any visit by a government official to the local version of Arlington National Cemetery — the infamous Yasukuni Shrine — causes protests from foreign governments because the bones of Japan’s war criminals are interred there. When we went to go to the U.S. in December, my wife realized she’d misplaced our son’s passport, so we hurried to the embassy in Tokyo and they made us a new one while we waited. (Which was awesome of them by the way — no Japanese government office would be so understanding.) The passport we got was one of the new uber-patriotic ones, with images of bald eagles soaring from sea to shining sea in the rockets’ red glare. My wife was amazed at the imagery, which would be unthinkable in Japan.
Japan lacks the basic symbology of normal patriotism that Americans take for granted.
