The collective consciousness field of Japan across roughly two millennia β from the animist JΕmon and the coming of Buddhism through the Heian aesthetic height, the long Tokugawa closure, the Meiji lurch into modernity, the militarist catastrophe, and the postwar re-emergence. An island civilization that repeatedly absorbed outside influence β Chinese, Buddhist, Western β and remade it as something distinctly its own. Where it rises and falls tells a different story than the world average or its mainland neighbor.
This is derived, not measured. Two lines run across the chart. The promise is the era's dominant worldview or professed ideal; the practice is the more binding of its political and economic order β the reality people actually lived under. The band between them is the gap: the distance between what a civilization professed and what it enacted. The Sengoku warring-states age professed a refined worldview near 350 while endemic civil war pinned the enacted order at 150 β a chasm. Imperial militarism sat far lower, promise and practice nearly meeting at a grim, honest floor (175 / 150); the Meiji Restoration, by contrast, narrowed the gap by lifting the order toward the ideal. Where promise and practice converge β at a peak or a floor β the civilization was telling the truth about itself. Every input opens on click β argue with the numbers.