INTRODUCTION

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No hay entre los infieles ningún pueblo más bien dotado que el japonés.

San Francisco Javier

 

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As many thinkers have said, Japan is a country where opposites coexist peacefully. Foreigners who live in Japan do not get surprised any more when they go to a traditional oriental inn and see a Japanese woman dressed in kimono sitting on her knees and playing with her cell phone, or when the quietness of the rice paddies landscape is suddenly broken by the passing of the bullet train.

 

From the old times, as reflected over the annals of Japanese history, Japan has always had a strong interest in the overseas cultures, and has absorbed the best of the other countries, made it its own and even improved. Even nowadays, while we acknowledge that most of the best technological devices are made in Japan, only a few of them were actually invented by a Japanese company. Many of the flamenco teachers say that Japanese learners are very good at copying the movements and mastering the secrets of the dance, but that is very rare to witness improvisation in them.

 

However, there was a dark period in Japanese history, where the emperor of that time, thought that the presence of western philosophers and missionaries in the Japanese islands was a threat to his unquestioned divine power, and that it might affect the peoplefs beliefs. For this reason, he decided to put Japan under a national isolation regime, only allowing a small port in Nagasaki to work as a door for the commerce with other nations. It was an almost 200 year period that went from the early 17th century until the middle 19th century.

 

Maybe due to an urgent need to catch up with the 200 years of closure to the world, from the 19th century Japan underwent a very massive westernization in a matter of years. The influence spread through all areas, affecting Japanese architecture, philosophy, medicine, literature, politics, science, fashion, cuisine, music, etc. Surprisingly enough, even after being defeated in the II World War with two atomic bombs dropped over Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the United States, Japanese society has been admiring and copying the modern American way of living.

 

The United States might still be main source of influence as well as the main point of reference, but it is a fact that the Japanese have an enormous curiosity for the rest of the cultures. Otherwise, the Japanese government would not have been promoting projects like the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Program, were young graduated students from all over the world were recruited to teach in high schools or to act as international coordinators between his/her country and Japan, carrying on activities like cooking lessons, giving speeches and planning cultural events for the local residents of each area. 

 

This curiosity can bee seen at various levels. Trying to gather all the examples of the presence and influence of the western cultures in Japan would be an endless task, so we will try to narrow down the range, and limit our quest to two of the greatest literature figures of Europe, and probably of the world: William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. Furthermore, we will focus our search on their presence on the internet websites.

 

In order to do so, we will make use of one most well known, yet one of the most powerful search engines: Google. There are many ways to narrow down the search, for example, by entering into category topics or by trying the several options that the Boolean search offers us with combinations of the words gCervantesh, gShakespeareh and gJapanh. Nevertheless, in this article we will attempt another method, maybe a little less conventional, but still an interesting one. The secret simply consists in looking at the results obtained when typing the words gShakespeareh and gCervantesh written in the Japanese alphabets. Since the resulting homepages are too numerous, we will pick up the most representative ones, and will try to offer a view in as many areas of interest as possible limiting the number to 20 to 30 websites per author. Since all the sites will be written en Japanese, we will try to offer a commentary as enriching as possible in order to compensate for the obstacle that the language presents.