SOURCE: Wintle, Justin. “A Pinch of Aji No Moto.” New Statesman 107, no. 2761 (17 February 1984): 23-4.

In the following review, Wintle praises A Japanese Mirror, calling it an “engaging, at times disturbing read.”

Much has been made of Japan's isolation. Western commentators, brought up in the meta-community of Christian states, are inevitably impressed by the long periods in Japan's history when, to all intents and purposes, the country had no contact with the outside world. And yet when contact has occurred the effects have been decisive, even traumatic. Buddhism, Confucianism, Chinese and Americo-European culture have each had a critical and lasting impact. For a people who constantly return to an ideal of national purity the Japanese have been curiously vulnerable to outside influences.

It is not then isolation of itself so much as isolation combined with episodic cultural invasion which, I suspect, explains many of the peculiarities of Japanese society...