While in Japan I noticed one thing...

lots of Japanese. There were visitors of multi-ethnicity but predominantly wherever one went, it was abundantly Japanese. This extended to their culture. Although very polite with my cultural faux pas in certain protocols, they were uncompromising. Their culture was not watered down by immigrants who moved to Japan, frankly there weren't a lot of immigrants from what I could tell, which says something. For the Japanese culture to have survived for millennia, there had to be an uncompromising attitude and a respect for what it represented. Yes, they have adopted baseball and other westernized "traditions" but these have been homogenized into what it means to be Japanese.