Sea-girt Japan and sea-girt Britain responded differently to the sea's challenge. The sea that drew Britain outward hemmed Japan in. The Japanese, by and large, are an inward people. Exceptions only prove the rule. Two major ones, centuries apart, are priests and pirates. Eighth-century Japan was an infant civilization. Its prehistory had been long. Awakened at last, Japan drank eagerly from the source: China, then at its creative peak. Its capital, Chang'an, was to the East what Jerusalem was to the Christian West — the center of the world.

The 800 kilometers of stormy sea separating Japan from China barred rather than opened the way. The Japanese were neither seafarers nor shipbuilders. But Buddhist priests and scholars needed texts; they needed instruction. The books to be studied, the masters to study under, were in China. Between 607 and 838 Japan dispatched 19 missions to China — in boats that were "a mere assembly of planks and poles," as historical novelist Ryotaro Shiba (1923-96) put it. A third of those who set out never returned.

Those who did — sometimes after 30 years of study and religious austerities — returned laden with books, knowledge and administrative skills. To them, Japan owes the main outlines of its early civilization.