the shogunate governmentbanned all foreigners from the country, giving special permission only for theDutch to stay in limited areas so there could be some technological andcultural exchange in a very limited and controlled fashion. This situation onlycame to a halt when Commodore Perry forced Japan to open its market at thethreat of gunships pointing their cannons to Edo (now called Tokyo.) Japan is notoriously homogeneous andthe Japanese like it to be that way, having a zero migration rate policy whereforeigners are only admitted in the exact number that people leave and makingcitizenship as difficult as possible to obtain. Some of the obstacles includenot recognizing double-citizenship and forcing the foreigner to adopt aJapanese name and learn the language. The Japanese government makes an effortto equate citizenship with ethnicity and is extremely restrictive into who theyallow in and even more to the ones they grant citizenship: the census data onlyasks for the nationality of residents, 98.5 percent of which have Japanese citizenship,and genetic studies show that as few as 0.2 of those are of foreign ancestry.The biggest minority, the Koreans, are less than one percent of the population. The Japanese were and still area very hierarchical people. Before the Meiji Restauration in 1868 Japan had oneof the most rigid caste systems in the world, where only samurais were allowedlast names and complete even with a class of untouchables, the eta. Samurais could test their newswords by simply slicing in half any random peasant without repercussion. The eta, on the other hand, could only livein specific villages and those were not only not included in the maps, if aroad went through an eta area, thispart of the trajectory was not even included in the distance calculations! While Japan is still officiallya monarchy, its social classes are today mostly defined by age, sex andoccupation. The old are superior to the young, the men to the women and thecompany for which one works also plays an important part, with the positioninside the company being a tie breaker. The language reflects perfectly that,with a series of honorific titles and differential speech to accommodate thehierarchy. One of the most common and well known of these are the suffixes usedin the end of someones first or last name that include but are not limited to:chan (used usually for women, kids orcute things. The closest equivalent would be little, i.e. little Sarah,little Richard;) kun (used mostly toboys as the equivalent to sir or mister. Can rarely be used to address girls todemonstrate hierarchy;) senpai(senior or veteran) and sama (a verysuperior position, something like milord, i.e Kami-sama means God.) The Japanese have a very strongsense of hierarchy that includes everything from brand names, countries andraces, being the Japanese extremely race conscious. While recently the Japaneseare a little prouder of themselves, they still tend to see whites, morespecifically the ones in the Anglosphere as superior to them. The importance of the hierarchyis complemented by another very important aspect of the Japanese society: thegroup. And there is always a strong sense of who is inside the group and who isnot. While society contains manygroups