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Notes -
I think there is an interesting observation here about historical memory, but I'm wary of cherry-picking examples. I could just as easily, for instance, point out that both Herodotus and Thucydides were respected in their own lifetimes and there is no evidence that either of them suffered a violent death, whereas Sima Qian, the Chinese father of history, was castrated and lived in shame before finishing his works. If I wanted to pick examples of Western sages who were respected and Chinese sages who were hated, I'm sure I could make decent lists.
So I'd want to nuance this observation a bit to make it more about the way figures are remembered - and there it might just be as simple as Christianity. The prophet crying in the wilderness is an archetypal figure in Christian tradition, as is, of course, the misunderstood and persecuted saviour.
Speaking of Christianity...
I'd argue that any definition of 'Western' that excludes Christianity is a failure. 'Western' is basically isomorphic with 'Christendom'; certainly with Latin or Western Christendom, with Greek or Eastern Christendom (also including the Slavic world) being a trifle more ambiguous. But in a broad sense, Christianity is Western because Christianity is what created the West. I believe Hilaire Belloc argued, "The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith." (He is a Catholic chauvinist and discounts other Christians, but the thesis survives, I think, if you broaden it a little.)
If people are inclined to wonder about a hypothetical non-Christian Europe, the model I usually give for that is India. Hinduism is the largest surviving branch of the tree from which European paganism springs. What would Europe be like if Christianity (or monotheism more generally) had never spread? My guess is something like India. Not identical, of course, but I think it is the closest extant model.
Why is it India, which has famously low human capital in its vast hordes of low-caste peasants, and not, say, Japan, which is still essentially pagan in character and on which Christianity has never had any significant impact?
Because Hinduism is a branch of Indo-European religion that is directly genealogically related to European paganism.
Shinto is not.
I'm not saying anything about 'human capital' or 'peasants'. I'm talking specifically about religion. I think a hypothetical mature European paganism would look more like Hinduism than like Shinto, i.e. it would be a kind of inter-related family of religious movements or cults, vaguely united by a shared (but not uncontested) corpus of sacred texts (European classics compared to the Vedas), but extremely diverse in practice. I could see, for instance, the descendants of Orphics becoming something like Krishna-ism - movements devoted to a specific religious figure interpreted as bringing liberation.
Shinto is not like this at all. Even leaving aside the part where Shinto is not part of the Indo-European family tree at all, Shinto is more like indigenous central and northeast Asian animistic or shamanic traditions. Moreover, modern Shinto is not like that either, because 'Shinto' as a unified construct comes from the late 19th century as a vehicle for Japanese nationalism - the idea of a unified national faith was confected for patriotic purposes, and even today you can find pious Japanese people who consider state Shinto and its descendants to be a perverted mockery of tradition.
But to repeat myself, it is not about liking India in a general sense more than Japan in a general sense. I don't care about that. I am making the specific claim that Hinduism is more like European paganism than Shinto, and then that I think a hypothetical surviving European paganism would look more like modern Hinduism than it looks like modern Shinto. I am not saying that hypothetical-modern-pagan-Europe would look like modern India in other respects.
EDIT: Oh, I should add that it's simply untrue that Christianity never had any significant effect on Japan. It's true that the number of Japanese people who identify as Christian is extremely low, but as we see in the West and as Tom Holland reminds us, the influence of Christianity goes far beyond people who consciously see themselves as Christians. We don't even need to get into the early missions in the 16th and 17th century - the nationalisation of Shinto was a part of Westernisation, and the need for some kind of 'state church' comparable to those in Western countries. Christian converts played outsized roles in Japan's modernisation. Christianity has absolutely influenced the way the Japanese think about religion even today.
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