6 ideas
The Himalayas separate the Confucian communism of China from the Vedic individualism of India only to accentuate each. Beneath that division, all Asiatic peoples share a love for the Ultimate and Universal. This is what separates them from the maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and Baltic, who dwell on the Particular and search for the means of life rather than its end.
Because Japan was never conquered, kept an unbroken imperial line, and was sheltered by insularity, it retained every successive wave of Indian and Chinese thought. On the mainland, dynastic upheavals and invasions erased these forms. In Japan they survive side by side as a layered, living archive, so Japanese art is the place to study the whole of Asiatic consciousness.
The Japanese mind practices a non-dualist absorption: it welcomes the new without losing the old. The result is continuity through accumulation, not rupture through adoption.
Read a civilization's history through its art rather than its politics. Each period's painting, sculpture, and architecture externalizes the dominant ideal of that age, whether religious devotion, aristocratic refinement, martial heroism, or Zen restraint. Stylistic change is therefore evidence of a shift in national consciousness, not merely a shift in technique or fashion.
Japanese art unfolds as a sequence of dominant ideals. The Asuka and Nara periods absorb the Buddhist and Tang ideal, the Heian period the esoteric, and the Fujiwara period national aristocratic refinement. After them come the heroic Kamakura, the Zen-inspired Ashikaga with its suggestive ink painting and simplicity, the decorative and popular Toyotomi and Tokugawa, and finally the Meiji encounter with the West.
The Meiji rush toward Western models threatens to overwrite Asia's inherited ideals with imported means. Genuine revival cannot come from imitation. It must come from Asia recovering self-consciousness of its own ideals and reasserting them. Okakura frames this as a choice between a victory from within or a mighty death without.