Japan Must Learn from Serbia

by Kazuhiro Hayashida

Kazuhiro Hayashida tells the tale of two civilizations: one that resisted and one that yielded.

I often describe Japan as a meeting point of Eastern and Western civilizations, a cultural junction located at the far eastern edge of Eurasia. Yet modern Japan, beginning with the Meiji Restoration and accelerating after its defeat in the Second World War, abandoned its own civilizational sovereignty through blind imitation of the West and through an even deeper over-adaptation to Western norms.

If the Japanese people wish to liberate themselves from this Western colonial condition by their own will, they must first recognize that there exists a nation whose spirit we should emulate—not because it resembles the West, but because it has resisted the erosion of Westernism with unwavering resolve. What we must learn is not Western behavior, but the spirit that confronts Western expansion.

In the early twenty-first century, European political theorists began writing openly that “Western universalism is over.” Thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Giorgio Agamben have pointed to the limits of Western state models and liberalism, acknowledging the particularity—not universality—of Western systems.

The Western state evolved along a unique path: from city-states to nation-states. Because of this narrow evolutionary trajectory, Western institutions are structurally incapable of sustaining the kind of broad civilizational order valued by continental civilizations. Concepts fundamental to non-Western worlds—empire, dynasty, tribal confederation, religious community—are not based on “state = territory and contract,” but on “civilization = space and order.”

Japan’s fatal mistake was to misidentify Western norms—institutions, language, values—as universal “standards,” and to internalize a psychological habit of defining itself through an external civilizational mirror.

Technological progress and civilizational spirit are not the same. Unless Japan abandons the illusion that its civilization requires Western approval to exist, true independence will remain impossible.

Yet at the very center of Eurasia, there is a nation whose civilizational structure stands in complete contrast to this Western-dependent pattern.

That nation is Serbia.

Serbia’s indomitable spirit has preserved precisely what Japan has lost: civilizational sovereignty. Modern Japan consumes itself at the Western periphery, maintaining a deeply colonial structure of “Western-model imitation” and “external-standard dependence,” whereas Serbia is positioned at the fault lines of four vast civilizations:

• Roman Catholic Europe,

• Ottoman Islam,

• Habsburg Central Europe,

• the Soviet sphere,

never surrendered to Westernism. It is the only nation that remained unbroken at that crossroads.

Serbia has not been swallowed by the borders of civilizations; it has made the border itself its identity. The legacy of Byzantium, the Orthodox civilizational core, the memory of the Nemanjić dynasty, the spiritual structure of the Kosovo myth, and the refusal to submit during the NATO bombings of 1999: these are not mere historical episodes. They constitute a civilizational language of defiance, deeply engraved in Serbia’s sovereign identity.

At the heart of this identity lies a uniquely Eurasian form of sovereignty:

• not imitating the West,

• not entering the Western civilizational center,

• defining one’s own boundaries.

Slavic languages preserve a structure of absolute refusal, a linguistic expression of civilizational autonomy. This stands in stark contrast to Japanese, where values, standards, and even refusal shift according to relational context.

Japan possesses many admirable qualities, yet the magnitude of what it has lost is profound. The civilizational essence Japan abandoned during its modern transformation survives today in the Serbian spirit.

Japan traded its soul for Westernization. Serbia fought the world of every era for the sake of its civilization.

The difference was never a matter of national size or military capability, but of the deep civilizational capacity to refuse.

Japan today suffers from a series of interconnected problems:

• uncritical acceptance of Western standards and the hollowing-out of democracy,

• blind obedience to American geopolitical demands,

• diplomatic subordination and loss of historical agency.

These are precisely the forces Serbia has resisted with its entire being.

What Japan must learn from Serbia is not policy or technique, but a civilizational posture: the capacity to defend one’s identity against Western centrism.

Civilizations survive by rejecting foreign domination; slaves are those who cannot refuse.

Japan has lost the language of refusal. Serbia has preserved it.

Thus Serbia still possesses an independent center of gravity within the Eurasian world.

For Japan to recover its civilizational sovereignty, nothing is more essential than learning from the unbroken structure of Serbian civilization.

(Translated from the Japanese)