> Japan is an island. It has always been and not just from a geographical perspective. Its very culture and history are ones of isolation. The restrictions are not new, the perspective "Japan first" is not new - these have always been there, they are at the very core of the nation.

That's not at accurate from what I know of Japanese history. You seem to be over-indexing on the (relatively) brief Tokugawa-era sakoku policy and ignoring the thousands of years surrounding it where Japan was an active importer of culture.

Kanji, government structure, Buddhism, law, art and more were all imported from China and hugely influential in Japanese history. After the the Meiji Restoration, Japan explicitly set out to Westernize and went abroad to study European and American institutions, invited Westerners in to help build European-style banking systems and government systems, adopted Western clothing, architecture, military organization, legal codes, etc. etc.

If anything the Japanese are masters at importing the things they like of foreign culture and then modifying to make it their own. They have always been importers of culture.