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Comment by earthboundkid | Hacker News Reader

Yes, although this is true of history everywhere. Why are there statues of Columbus and Pulaski in the park by my house? Because my city had active Italian and Polish communities in the twentieth century, and having mythic great American ancestors helped them cement their identities.

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Casimir Pulaski served with remarkable distinction in the American Revolution. See #2 on this list: https://www.history.com/news/6-foreign-born-heroes-of-the-am...

... as did his countryman, Tadeusz Kościuszko, #4 on that same list.

I 100% agree. The amusing/frustrating thing is that these types of articles/essays usually really lack any context, so that's what I'm adding here.

It's very doubtful Shinto could be called the 'Soul of Japan'

Funnily enough there is another, much older book also called Soul of Japan, that may actually capture its essence.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12096 https://librivox.org/bushido-the-soul-of-japan-by-inazo-nito...

Great book, just finished it for the second time. Also recommend (both on Gutenberg btw)

"Japan: An attempt at interpretation" (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5979) and

"Tales of Old Japan" (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13015)

Especially "Japan: An attempt at interpretation" I found remarkable, It really struck a cord and goes in-depth on cultural expectations and habits in Kami (villages). "Tales of Old Japan" is a great collection of mythological tales.

Japan and America really are different, but any explanation you create to systematically explain the differences (communitarian vs individualist, Shinto vs Christianity, Plato vs Buddha, etc) will only be correct to a limited degree and miss many important edge cases.

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