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Hi there,Stumbled on the site from google, and just been going through - was pleasantly surprised to find you too have found and excoriated the guy who, regarding Japanese web design, chose a chopstick metaphor obviously influenced by the two restaurants in his town (he says he has never been to either China or Japan) and their arbitrary choice of chopstick producer. (Anecdotally, gathering from my travels I would actually say the usage trends are the exact opposite, but anyway...)I agree with much of what you say in this article and many others, however I feel at times you are guilty of what you accuse Ishihara of. Here you have just held up what he has said and called it ridiculous, without too much proof, or at least arm-chair sociologising, of your own. Perhaps it is because I have recently been reading some historical and sociological texts of my own, and have fallen for the very generalisms that I originally wanted to investigate and perhaps debunk, but I would agree with at least Ishihara's fourth point.Japan has quite a history of self-consciously adopting traditions and knowledge of other countries, which many places do, but the differing is that Japan constantly reminds itself of the foreignness of these things. I would cite for example the katakana-isation of foreign words, or the separation of food between 'washoku' and things that are definitely Japanese, but are still not accepted as being Japanese down to the soul, such as niku-jaga. Foreign things are then easy to take on and off, like the costumes of OLs at the weekend, something unimaginable for the proverbial American/British punk/goth/what have you of this common argument.This feeling of transience is especially noticeable with foreign things, but so too with most others, something taught by denial of the group over the self (causing the ability to adopt, at least at face value, whatever the majority consensus says one must) as well as the teachings of the Mahayana, especially the Zen branch, even more than Nichiren or Shingon, of the Buddhist tradition.The main problem with any of my pronouncements though is exactly what you have said - lack of evidence. However when one gets in to Humanities conversations, you cannot demand someone to back up every statement with 'as proved by Gibbs et al(1993)'. You may say that I have provided insufficient proof for my previous views, which I would still understand. However, repeating everything ever said on these subjects that I have ever read is again difficult. I have reached however, a slightly muddled and incoherent conclusion (to go with the incoherent and muddled rest of it I suppose :D ). The link is dead and I have not been able to read this article, so I cannot even claim to have any detailed knowledge to defend Ishihara, even if I am perhaps defending something he just stumbled on, through logic that I disagree with or just regurgitation of hysterical nihonjin-ron authors.I apologise for the length of this comment, but now that I've started I might as well get out my last  thoughts.1. As easy as it is to say, I wouldn't expect "falsifiability of the hypotheses, open access to methodology and data, and reproducibility of results" of sociology or history (especially of intellectual concepts) 2. In cases where it IS possible, please try to follow what you tell others to. Saying "People making austere, elegant pieces of traditional artwork… and people making gaudy, cluttered web sites… are generally not the same people" isn't exactly providing public statistics. Also, this doesn't explain the fundamental question of why Westerners would have good design, since the same skill distinctions could be said about people outside Japan. 3. Re: "the silly delusion that a shared affiliation with a political entity (“country”) among multiple individuals should mystically create a shared sense of (among other things) aesthetics". Do you really believe this? That no communities, 'imagined' (pace Anderson) or not seems to me instantly false - can one really say that Australian aboriginal art pieces share no objective commonalities with each other, never mind differences relative to say classical Japanese art? Even if one were to explain aesthetic similarities to the work of specific communities to purely practical factors such as availability of certain materials or similarity of experience, it seems to me blatantly obvious that art according to ideological, political, or cultural factors, whether a conscious decision or not, shapes each community differently.I again apologise for this long and quite rambling comment, and also for the implication that I have not enjoyed your writing. I tend to harp on about negative things, belying the true character of my overall sentiments. I also recognise that it is not always worth one's time to back up all one's criticisms when arguing with somebody, especially when that somebody is Ishihara.