The Political Culture of Japan in pre-State and Early State Period

The purpose of the work is to study the specifics of the formation of Japanese political culture in the pre–state and early state periods in order to identify the main factors that influenced the further historical development of the country. The research is based on a number of scientific Russian, English — and Japanese — language works of political and historical orientation, as well as written historical sources of Chinese and Japanese origin. The paper attempts to reconstruct the features of the political culture of ancient Japan, which were formed independently of Chinese influence. The study highlights the problem associated with inaccuracies in the well — established dating of the Jomon and Yayoi periods, which is significant in the context of the need to explain the reasons for the weakness of Chinese cultural influence on the population of the Japanese islands up to the IV century AD. The article examines the Shinto attitudes of the sacralization of the power of the emperors, the formal and actual place of the aristocracy in the political culture of the country and the specifics of the emergence of national identity in Japan. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that the idea of deifying the emperor originates in archaic animistic beliefs and the idea of “pacifying the gods”, and then developed as a means of building a power hierarchy between the Yamato clan and other aristocratic clans. The predominantly peaceful nature of the unification of the Japanese islands and the subsequent militarization in the IV century A.D. allowed the creation of a system of government similar to the feudal system in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. The sacralization of the figure of the emperor contributed to the legitimization of the power of the aristocracy, which allowed it by the end of the VI century AD. In the VI century A.D., the first features of national identity began to appear in Japan, which manifested itself in the idea of deifying the country and in the emergence of a self — identification system “friend — foe” in relation to other peoples. The ethno — cultural factor was a key factor for self — identification.