Introduction

Japan is a strange society because the dialectics that move within it are oppositional and highly differentiated to those of the west. Japanese thought is influenced by Confucian, Shintoist, Buddhist, Zen Buddhist and Daoist ideas. There are secular and atheistic interpretations of these belief systems as there are purely religious ones. In ancient Greece a woman could kneel or lie before a statue of a god and yet rationalist intellectuals in the same civilization could regard the divine stories as entirely metaphorical.