imco this is not nonsense M, it is propaganda -- and my bet is someone got paid very big bucks indeed to write those very calculated phrases, designed to instil contempt for (maybe also fear of) Japan in Anglo readers.

the country, consumed by domestic fears, could turn inward

to tell the truth, I wish more countries when consumed with domestic fears would 'turn inward' -- if the American history of 'invade somebody and kill a few thousand civilians to make ourselves feel better' is the alternative.  what country is more consumed with domestic fear than the visqueen/duct-tape happy, Arabs-under-the-bed, security-mad Amurkans?  can we spell "projection and transference"?

well maybe that's a bit too psychological, but anyway, can we spell "a very thinly disguised way of taunting 'Nyah Nyah, Japan is a Sissy'"?  

and maybe also a not so thinly disguised jab at an old scar, i.e. Perry's "gunboat diplomacy" (i.e. armed invasion) which "forcibly opened" (can the patriarchal sex-memes get any more blatant) the "old" isolationist Japan?  surely that violation of national sovereignty has not been forgotten, nor the more than half century of US occupation of Okinawa, and all these taunts imho draw on those memories to add spin and sting (and implicit threat) to Anglo descriptions of Japan as "old," "inward turning," and "isolationist."

... blue-skying off into Anglosphere media generally... this reflexive contempt for any/all nonwhite, nonwestern cultures is not far below the (white) skin anywhwere in Anglocentroid media... recently the Scottish Sunday Herald decided to run an article on "affordable plastic-body cars in India" using a photo of -- guess what -- an inanely grinning (white) toddler in a toy plastic car.  footnote.  subliminal message is not very subliminal:  grownups drive great big powerful wasteful expensive metal automobiles, third world people are toddlers who get cute wittle toy cars to play with?  to be fair it might have been the 'liberal' US website that tacked the stupid image onto the story and not the SH, but either way, the arrogant concescension drips off of it.  to my jaundiced eye anyway.

and my eye is pretty durn jaundiced lately...


The difference between theory and practise in practise ...