Art, music, dance, much of the spoken language, for example. Or do you mean completely devoid of outside influence? I think that's probably hard to find anywhere in the world today.

My main point is that there's a significant difference between a civilization adopting parts of other cultures, as opposed to other civilizations suddenly forcing it upon you through conquest.

The original thread I responded to seemed to argue that Japan had no history (read: civilization) before the adoption of kanji.

Re: the original thread, I was just using "the start of recorded history" as a convenient yardstick for measuring "ancientness" of civilizations. Of course the people and culture existed before that, but without any record it kinds of blends into prehistory.

I'm not suggesting having short history makes Japan inferior or anything like that. It's just a predictable consequence of living on islands across the sea from the culture center. (My own country's history is not much longer, after all.)