When I traveled to Taiwan, I noticed how clean everything was. The floors were polished to a mirror shine. I asked someone: why is Taiwan so clean? The answer: they learned it from Japan. Then I went to Japan and found it even cleaner, which raised the next question: where did Japan’s cleanliness come from?
I found the answer later while reading. Japan’s culture of cleanliness traces back to China’s Tang Dynasty. More than a thousand years have passed, but Japan has preserved a remarkable degree of identification with Tang-era traditions and culture.
How Tang Dynasty Buddhism taught Japan that sweeping is spiritual practice
The Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) was the most culturally vibrant and internationally influential period in Chinese history. Japan sent official delegations known as “envoys to the Tang” to study Chinese culture, governance, architecture, and religion.
The most important cultural import was Buddhism, particularly the Chan school, the Chinese precursor to Japanese Zen. In Tang-era monasteries, monks swept and cleaned every day as a form of spiritual discipline. Sweeping served as a way to clear dust from the mind as much as from the floor. When Japanese envoys brought this philosophy home, it transformed how Japanese society understood the act of cleaning. Cleaning became a form of spiritual purification, not just a chore.
Tang culture shaped Japan’s physical environment as well. Japan’s ancient capitals, Nara and Kyoto, were modeled on the Tang capital Chang’an and the secondary capital Luoyang, following the same grid-pattern layout. Tang tea culture and bathing practices, including early forms of hot spring bathing, also took root in Japan and reinforced habits of personal and domestic cleanliness.
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Japan’s Shinto religion already prized purity before Buddhism arrived
Before Japan encountered Tang culture, its native Shinto religion already placed extreme importance on cleanliness. In Shinto belief, the gods favor purity and are repelled by defilement. Uncleanliness, known in Japanese as kegare, is associated with sin and misfortune.
At Shinto shrines across Japan today, visitors wash their hands and rinse their mouths at a stone basin called a chozuya before entering. This ritual, called misogi, is an act of purification. When Tang-era Buddhism arrived with its own philosophy of cleanliness as spiritual practice, it fused with Shinto’s existing devotion to purity. Together, the two traditions made cleanliness a basic part of Japanese identity.
Modern Japan reinforced the tradition through schools
If the Tang Dynasty and Shinto gave Japan the soul of its cleanliness culture, modern institutions gave it structure.
During the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, Japan adopted Western public health practices and built rigorous epidemic prevention and sewage systems. The education system went further. Japanese elementary schools do not employ janitors. Students clean the toilets, hallways, and classrooms themselves every day during a dedicated “cleaning time.” Children grow up with two principles: do not create problems for others, and take collective responsibility for shared spaces.
Taiwan built on Japan’s cleanliness legacy with its own innovations
The common explanation that Taiwan “learned cleanliness from Japan” is half right. Taiwan deserves credit for its own efforts.
During the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945), Japan introduced modern public health infrastructure to Taiwan: water treatment plants, sewage systems, and strict infectious disease prevention and sanitation enforcement. But Taiwan’s current level of cleanliness owes more to the past two or three decades of domestic effort. Taiwan’s “trash doesn’t touch the ground” policy is a well-known example: residents bring their garbage out to curbside collection trucks that announce their arrival by playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” Taiwan also built one of the world’s most advanced recycling systems. These policies have become part of modern civic life. Taiwan’s metro systems enforce a strict ban on eating and drinking, a standard that even Japanese visitors find impressive.
A thousand-year relay from the Tang dynasty to modern East Asia
This is a story of cultural inheritance across centuries and borders. The Tang Dynasty exported an elevated way of living and the philosophy that sweeping is spiritual practice. Japan merged it with Shinto purity beliefs and, in the modern era, developed it to its highest expression through public education. Taiwan absorbed the sanitation habits Japan left behind and built its own culture of environmental responsibility and civic self-discipline.