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I appreciate the discussion around Trump lately, but I've had this idea in my head that I can't shake, so I guess I have to post about it now. It's about liberalism again.
When I get bored at work, I tend to surf Wikipedia for historical and cultural tidbits. One of the things that dizzies me is taking a look at the various ethnic groups of Asia. There are an insane amount of them in India, in China, in Russia, in Southeast Asia, and most of them have their own language. A shocking amount of diversity. Even more shocking is learning of the occasional huge impact of former ethnicities -- I had never heard of the Circassian genocide before bumping into it on Wikipedia, nor of the Moriori genocide in New Zealand, nor of most of the stateless peoples fighting for their own nation. It makes a nation like Japan seem somewhat boring, since it was mostly one ethnicity just interacting with itself instead of duking it out with dozens or hundreds of other ethnicities in a massive historical cultural bloodbath.
Where this ties into America, and liberalism: America, for the most part, has had all its ethnicities jumbled together. It was really, really great at integrating people in the melting pot. I am, by blood, Irish mixed with German, but I hold no allegiance with Ireland or Germany. I, and most white people I know, would describe themselves as American, if anything. But seeing this culture war flare up and the value differences becoming obvious makes me think: what if the rise of social justice politics has absolutely nothing to do with liberalism? Maybe we're seeing the rise of a new ethnic group, not based on shared genetic traits, but on certain cultural traits being emphasized more than others, as has happened thousands or millions of times in history?
If that's what's happening, then we might say that liberalism is not entirely at fault for the rise of progressivism (or whoever you blame for causing this rift). Liberalism is more of a new thing, but diversification of ethnic groups is far older. I would argue that this stratification has been intensified by the internet and television and other mass communications enabling people to self sort into their own groups, regardless of geographic distance. Perhaps you might also say that liberalism gave more of an equal playing field for cultures to fight it out amongst themselves, thus accelerating such diversification. But it may have been inevitable.
I'm going to nitpick that I don't think this is a historically accurate picture of Japan.
Firstly, Japan has historically possessed non-Yamato ethnic groups which were driven out, destroyed, or assimilated by the Yamato. The Ainu are the most famous one still extant, but historically you might consider the Emishi, the supposed 'shrimp barbarians' of northern Honshu who appear to have been either wiped out or assimilated into the Yamato whole.
Secondly, we should not assume that the Yamato specifically constitute a single 'ethnicity' who historically understood themselves to be a single united people. Modern Japan is the product of several generations-long processes of nation-building - the Tokugawa shogunate wanted to tamp down on regional identities and clan loyalties, and promoted a pan-Japanese identity, and the imperial government after Meiji took over intensified that process even further. Even today the process is not entirely complete or successful, and you will find very strong regional rivalries, including different languages and customs.
Go back a few centuries and I suspect that if you asked a group of people from northern Honshu whether they are 'one ethnicity' or 'one people' with a bunch of people from Kansai, and then you asked both groups whether they are 'one ethnicity' with a group of people from southern Kyushu, they would all say no. They might realise that they are more similar to each other than any of them are to Koreans, or to Han Chinese, or heaven forbid the Nanban, but I don't think they would see themselves as one homogenous group.
And just in general - I'm not sure how a person could look at the history of Japan and say that it's striking for lacking a "massive historical cultural bloodbath". Surely the history of Japan is a history full of distinct regional groups slaughtering each other? It feels like a form of special pleading to say "oh, that's different clans within a single cultural/ethnic group", rather than recognising that as different cultural groups. Perhaps they were all Japanese, in the same way that, say, the different states of the Holy Roman Empire were all German, but there is definitely a history there of rivalry, warfare, and bloodshed between groups that spoke differently, behaved differently, and felt themselves to be meaningfully different to one another.
I don't disagree, but still think the description of Japan as "monoethnic" still has merit. I see the question as being one of cultural proximity, since by your definition there wouldn't be such a thing as a truly monoethnic part of the world - people tend to bifurcate hugely even within a small geographic region, and even those ethnic groups who are 99% similar culturally will often consider each other as irreconcilably different due to the remaining 1% of variance - Scott's post "I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup" comes to mind. It's not entirely wrong to state that the Yamato gained political and demographic dominance fairly early in Japanese history.
Even if the Yamato might not have considered themselves a singular group, it is also true that they would have been fairly culturally homogenous due to a shared origin from the Yayoi and a lot of cultural flow between different parts of Japan, and excepting a bunch of fringe minority groups like the Ainu, much of the ethnic/cultural bifurcation basically amounted to the tyranny of small differences. This is not to say these small differences aren't significant in local context, and cultural variance is a weak proxy at best for a spongy concept like self-identified "ethnicity", but there's a material difference in variance between a country like Japan vs. the exceptionally diaspora-like nature of many Southeast Asian countries (for example Yamato comprise over 98% of Japan's modern population, whereas Malays comprise 58% of the Malaysian population, with a lot of very distinct subgroups within every ethnic group and a lot of syncretism between them). Perhaps Japan wasn’t just one self-described ethnicity, but the level of within-country cultural variance is relatively low in global context, no matter how much tribal warfare they participated in.
I guess the point I would emphasise is that the idea of Japan being 'monoethnic' had to be produced, in large part by the Japanese themselves, through a struggle that took at least centuries. Japan, like every modernising nation, went through a process whereby national identity had to be constructed, often in the form of top-down policies of homogenisation and assimilation from the metropole.
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