Integration Without Erasure: How Can a Shared Human Culture Be Possible?—Cultural Rights, Cross-Cultural Translation, and the Generative Mechanisms of a Shared Cultural Layer

Culture carries historical experience, identity, value judgment, and ways of life. Language, art, custom, festivals, knowledge traditions, religious expression, and social norms allow individuals and communities to answer basic questions such as 'Where do I come from?' and 'Who are we?' Yet culture is not a static inheritance. Every living culture has already passed through diffusion, borrowing, conflict, recombination, and re-creation. The central question is therefore not whether humanity must choose between 'cultural purity' and 'global homogenization,' but whether different cultures can, without eliminating subjecthood or historical continuity, learn from one another and jointly create an expanding layer of shared human culture. Building on Paper 06 and its framework of civilizational integration, this paper proposes the Shared Cultural Layer Model (SCLM). 'Shared human culture' does not mean a single world culture, nor is it synonymous with globally commercialized popular culture. It refers to a body of cultural resources that becomes increasingly understandable, usable, developable, and recreatable across cultural boundaries through long-term exchange, translation, comparison, diffusion, adaptation, and recombination. Such resources may include knowledge, norms, symbols, artistic forms, social practices, and forms of shared human memory, while local, ethnic, religious, and personal cultural identities continue to exist. The paper further argues that cultural elements cannot be handled through one universal rule. Traditions deserve protection, but tradition does not automatically possess permanent legitimacy. Cultural sharing should be encouraged, but cultural sources and cultural subjects should not therefore disappear. Cultural innovation requires open exchange, yet under severe power asymmetry, borrowing can become extraction, misrepresentation, or symbolic domination. The formation of shared human culture therefore requires cultural subjecthood, cultural rights, open exchange, recognition of provenance, reciprocity, criticizability, and respect for basic human dignity. A central distinction follows: making cultural achievements common does not mean erasing their provenance. A civilizational achievement can become a resource used by humanity while its historical origins, originating communities, and - in relevant cases - requirements of consent, attribution, and benefit-sharing remain normatively meaningful. The direction of shared culture is not to make humanity forget where cultural achievements came from, but to release increasingly valuable achievements from exclusive cultural enclosure without stripping them of memory. The paper concludes that, if a shared human culture is possible, its basic structure is 'higher-level sharing, lower-level diversity, continuous renewal.' The shared layer expands; local cultures continue to flourish; and new cultural differences continue to emerge. Great Unity is therefore not cultural homogenization. It is a human capacity to preserve memory while crossing cultural boundaries, to know where one comes from while participating in the creation of cultural futures that did not previously exist.