Japan is, rightly or wrongly, often portrayed as a homogenous country. Its territories are largely clearly defined, and its populace is virtually all Japanese-speaking.

A closer look at the land of the rising sun, however, reveals a very different picture about Japan.

Much has been written about the formation of the Japanese nation came at the expense of the indigenous Ainu (or Ezo) in the north, but tentative research is perhaps yet to be conducted on the plight of the Burakamin a major target of Japanese racism. That a search on www.google.com will not return much findings on the subject speaks for itself.

And, surprise surprise, Japan has its fair share of separatist movement too, although it is mostly confined to the Okinawans, and is yet to develop into the scales seen in Aceh, Sri Lanka, Tibet and Taiwan.

(Unlike certain right-wing, nationalistic Japanese politicians out to make Taiwan independence a diplomatic pawn against China, I have been conjecturing that the affinities of separatist Okinawans with independence-minded Taiwanese would take on a different dimension, as both groups of people are eager to wrest free from the dominance by a powerful nation and state.)

No different from other nations in the world, territorial integrity forms an important part of Japanese nationalism also, and Japan's diplomatic relations with the neighbouring countries are often plagued by territorial disputes. Tokyo is embroiled in an overlapping claim on jurisdiction over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands with China, and gets on the nerves of the Koreans, north and south alike, whenever it reiterates its sovereignty over the Takeshima/Dokko.

Recently, Japan's dispute with Russia over the Northern Territories, known in Russia as the Southern Kurils, has come to dominate the diplomatic relations between the two countries.

When Russia and Japan commemorated the centenary of the Russo-Japanese war in February last year, they did so with very different yet complex feelings.