“I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the products of our industrial art — would they not have suited our national temper better than they do? In fact our conception of physics itself, and even the principles of chemistry, would probably differ from that of Westerners; and the facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms might well have presented themselves in different form.”

– Junichiro Tanizaki,
In Praise of Shadows, 1933