If you're going to use Rome+Egypt for the West, you should probably include Ancient China in Japan's history. Japan didn't suddenly emerge out of the woods in 250AD.

Well, Rome and Egypt were just two famous examples I could think of, and I'm no means suggesting they represent the whole Europe. (And Egypt isn't even that much West. Do "Western people" consider Egypt as one of them?)

By the way, I wouldn't recommend including Ancient China in Japan's history: at least don fire retardant suit, because frankly that sounds like an efficient way to offend Chinese and Japanese people at the same time.

Japanese are well aware of their shared history with China. I mean, kanji literally means "Chinese characters".

From what I've seen Japanese and Chinese get on well. It's their governments that use the other as a convenient boogeyman 1984-style.

To expand on the shared history between China and Japan:

China was the superpower of ancient Asia, exerting significant influence on neighboring regions, and exporting its writing system, as well as science and technology to neighboring regions. As a result, approximately 60% of the words found in a Japanese dictionary are of Chinese origin (this becomes closer to 20% when you weight for usage).

Informatively, the Japanese word for China is 中国, or central country.

Additionally, the nature of the Japanese writing system means that any literate Japanese speaker would recognize the symbols in 中国 (China) mean "middle" and "country", and the symbols in 漢字 (kanji) mean "China" and "character".

That's the Chinese word for China too, which reinforces our point. The Japanese word for Japan has a Chinese origin too (land of the rising sun, to the east of China.)

I think most Western people don't consider ancient Egypt to be directly part of their history. The Romans, definitely. Many of the words in your comment and mine are hardly changed from Latin.

Why would you reach for ancient China instead of, you know, ancient Japan? Are you under the impression that Japanese civilization started with China?

Well, actually Korea deserves most of the credit, that's where Japan got eg. tea, pottery, Buddhism and, most likely, its Imperial family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan%E2%80%93Korea...

Are you serious? Can you name a single aspect of Japanese culture that can be considered indigenously Japanese, without Chinese/Korean influence?

Art, music, dance, much of the spoken language, for example. Or do you mean completely devoid of outside influence? I think that's probably hard to find anywhere in the world today.

My main point is that there's a significant difference between a civilization adopting parts of other cultures, as opposed to other civilizations suddenly forcing it upon you through conquest.

The original thread I responded to seemed to argue that Japan had no history (read: civilization) before the adoption of kanji.

Re: the original thread, I was just using "the start of recorded history" as a convenient yardstick for measuring "ancientness" of civilizations. Of course the people and culture existed before that, but without any record it kinds of blends into prehistory.

I'm not suggesting having short history makes Japan inferior or anything like that. It's just a predictable consequence of living on islands across the sea from the culture center. (My own country's history is not much longer, after all.)

Roman culture is gone. Ancient Egyptian culture is gone.

The western world is largely a direct descendant of the Roman Empire.

Language, architecture, cultural ideas, religion, science, just about everything around you shares Roman origins or influence.

If you think Roman culture is gone, you might consider the Pope, head of the religion started in and promoted by the state whose seat is in Rome (ok, Vatican City is it's own thing, but the Pantheon is like a mile away), who conducts mass in Latin, the language of the empire ... might I go on? ~15% of the world population are Catholic.

> Language, architecture, cultural ideas, religion, science, just about everything around you shares Roman origins or influence.

Roman influence, sure. Also Arabic, Indic and Chinese influence. Every experience affects us. But would we really be so different without the Roman influence? E.g. Roman sewer systems were used to argue for the design of London's sewers... but only for about 20 years, after which modern sewer design surpassed anything the Romans had done.

> you might consider the Pope, head of the religion started in and promoted by the state whose seat is in Rome

But only adopted in the fading years of the Empire, well after 250AD, and not really a reflection of Roman culture.

> who conducts mass in Latin, the language of the empire

Rarely, and getting rarer.

> ~15% of the world population are Catholic.

Sure. But how many of them know Latin? How many of them have any real influence of the Roman empire?

It's interesting to think about how much more "gone" ancient Egypt is than ancient Rome. Sure, much of ancient Egypt was really ancient, but the present culture of Egypt owes very little even to the Ptolemies.

it is pretty interesting...

I think there are many reasons but a large part is the religious aspect... pre approximately 500 AD Egyptian Culture was more or less wiped out during the spread of islam. I dont know how much pre common era egyptian culture was related to ancient egypt culture...

Meanwhile on the european side catholocisms spread only increased the influence of (certain parts of) roman culture. The renaissance which was significantly due to 'italian' culture further served to increase the influence of roman culture (especially in architecture and the arts)

Of course not. New cultures were build up on their remains. Such is Europe.