“The Westerner has been able to move forward in ordered steps, while we have met superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years. The missteps and inconveniences this has caused have, I think, been many. If we had been left alone we might not be much further now in a material way than we were five hundred years ago. But we would have gone only in a direction that suited us. We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it is not impossible that we would have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane of today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our own culture, suited to us.”

– Junichiro Tanizaki,
In Praise of Shadows, 1933