> Japan's political leaders must have felt a great deal of shame over this because around 1900 they began banning materials "injurious to public morals."

More like "they wanted to suck up to the west real bad because they felt they'd soon get screwed over like China and India".

A lot of the culture, morals and laws Japan has imported from the west simply stemmed from a feeling of inferiority that cannot be simply reduced to some actual ethical inferiority but a really weird and highly perspective-dependent historical encounter with western Imperialism.