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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SKyOdin" data-source="post: 4656259" data-attributes="member: 57939">Of course the samurai would have been annihilated if the Japanese attempted to take on an industrialized Western power in the year that Commodore Perry arrived in Japan. I would be an idiot to claim otherwise. That has no bearing on your original claim that Japan was "culturally and technologically stagnate for 500 years". Military power is not the end-all, be-all of measuring a country's technological and cultural progress. If it was, then Attila's Huns would have been the most advanced civilization in Europe in the waning days of the Roman Empire.Most technological developments in Asia were primarily designed to help support very large populations using as few resources as possible. To this end, China and Japan were very successful countries. Writing off those technologies as meaningless is foolish at best. If you study Japanese and Chinese history, you can track the developments of this kind of technology. For example, Edo-period Japan possessed home stoves that were more energy efficient than any Western one. That is the kind of technology those civilizations excelled at. As a result, they were able to support large urban populations much earlier in their history than Western countries did. Those technologies were generally not replaced by Western technology after Perry's arrival either. It is not like Japan completely replaced its technology and culture after Perry arrived. They mostly just stole industrial technology and military technology.I do not mean to imply that I think Chinese and Japanese civilization is somehow perfect or superior. In particular, I think China's almost dogmatic adherence to various forms of Confucianism as the main form of philosophical thought constrained the country's intellectual development. But it is not right to say that these countries were stagnant or completely inferior to Western countries.I do not claim to be the one true arbiter of historical knowledge, but I am someone who spent a few years of my life studying these things as my major in college, and I am confident about the veracity of my claims.</blockquote>

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