This is from The Decay of the Angel, the last book of Yukio Mishima's tetraology The Sea of Fertility, which I've been slogging through since the first month in Japan:

"Foreign table manners may seem a trifle stupid," said Honda, "but when they come in an easy, natural way they give a person a sense of security. Evidence of good breeding gives a person status, and by good breeding in Japan we mean a familiarity with the Western way of doing things. We find the pure Japanese only in the slums and in the underworld, and may expect them to be more and more narrowly circumscribed as time goes by. The poison known as the pure Japanese is thinning, changing to a potion acceptable to everyone."