Even today, historical awareness is never a foreign concept. The exclusionist dynamic works in favour of one who's home to the referent polity, but against those others who remain foreign within the same social space.
In other words, Japan is also never foreign to the dialectical relation between the center and its periphery, which plays a gatekeeping role to divide the population between locals who are capable of being Japanese, and those akin others who were once domesticated yet marginalized from beneficiaries of humane safety and dignity in an egalitarian sense.
It also formulates how we differentiate the akin other from our own selves, only to embrace an illusionary sense of exoticism toward this other, while our precedents attempted to homogenize them in the name of imperial subjects. Furthermore, Japan had to colonize its body politic to stave off the Western encroachment into its body natural (in other words, life-world). They had to westernise themselves. Its imperial policies are manifestation of self-orientalizing spirit as such.
Kantorowicz' two-dimensional preposition of polity is the key component of political understanding of Japan's ambivalent place between the 'Western' other and its 'Oriental' self, so to speak. Strange as it may seem, furthermore, the Freudian refrain is always at work when one is a neighbour to the other, but less likely when both parties are distanced further from each other.
To sum up, the reason we're indebted to learn our neighbours' history, as well as our own, is therefore because we're keen on knowing how small differences will always justify the means to enlarge each others' antagonisms, and often justify one's belligerent attitudes towards the other (and vice versa). Historical understanding can't be absent from our stream of consciousness, since it's a vital element of figuring out a genealogy of our historical existence in relation to the historical others.
