The "Land of the Rising Sun" is a country where the past meets the future. Japanese culture stretches back millennia, yet has also been quick to adopt and create the latest modern fashions and trends. Japan is often difficult to understand for those educated in the west. It can seem full of contradictions. Many Japanese corporations dominate their industries, yet if you read the financial news it seems like Japan is practically bankrupt.
Cities are as modern and high tech as anywhere else, but tumbledown wooden shacks can still be spotted next to glass fronted designer condominiums. Japan has beautiful temples and gardens which are often surrounded by garish signs and ugly buildings. The most acclaimed restaurant in the country, which costs hundreds of dollars for dinner, is a small shop located in a subway station seating less than a dozen people. Japan has often been seen in the West as a land combining tradition and modernity, and many traditional structures and practices are preserved, but modern structures and practices definitely dominate your experience in Japan.
Japan was the first Asian country to independently modernize, and the country continues to embrace new technologies and aesthetics, but unlike in many countries, Japan does not feel a particular need to attack or remove older technologies, structures, or practices.
New things are mostly just layered beside old things. In this way, development mostly happens in a piecemeal fashion, one building at a time, rather than in large redevelopment projects. Many urban blocks evolve to line up dozens of narrow buildings spanning fifty or more years of design history. Clothing styles evolve along a dozen paths at the same time rather than singular mass fashion trends. An individual that embraces a particular subculture and its fashions may alternately conform to vary different norms when working or at home, but there is little sense of conflict between these roles.
Japan's location on islands at the outermost edge of Asia has had a profound influence on its history. Just close enough to mainland Asia, yet far enough to keep itself separate, much of Japanese history has seen alternating periods of closure and openness.
