A year ago on Round and Square (22 July 2012)—Fieldnotes From History: Provincial Elections (r)
Two years ago on Round and Square (22 July 2011)—Longevity Mountain: Table of Contents
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| [a] Rolling RF |
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V
East Asia (a)
The work of survival
dominates in the history of East Asian ethnic groups, as well. The intensity of
concern tends to flow along a northwest—southeast trajectory, and one historian
of climatic history has noted that rainfall can be configured from very small
amounts—barely tolerant of agricultural life—in the far northwest to abundant
and plentiful amounts of water in the far southeast. These general patterns prevail throughout the rest of East Asia. As one moves
southeast, the harsh environment of central and northeastern Asia is replaced
by an environment far more conducive to agriculture.
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| [b] Harsh RF |
It should never be
forgotten, however, that the very same acclimation to farming and subsistence
on plots of land—the very backbone of Chinese, Japanese, and much of Korean
civilization—held one of the key weak points for agriculturalists in East Asia.
The same harsh northern climates that forged a horse riding, sheep-herding
society helped facilitate punitive moves against the seemingly indolent and isolated
farmers to the south.
China as Center (of a
sort)
China dominates
discussions of ethnicity in East Asia on profound levels that are sometimes
difficult to sort-out after many centuries, and even millennia, of movement and
change. For Westerners, a good way to think about Chinese culture (the analogy
is partial, but fruitful) is akin to Greek and Hellenistic culture. When Jean
Jacques Rousseau read Plato in the eighteenth century, he was surely reading a
Greek author. Just as much, though, he was reading part of his own heritage. It
was no longer only Greek. It was “Western
civilization,” too. In a very similar fashion, a young scholar in Tokugawa
Japan in the eighteenth century might read Confucius, the historian Sima Qian,
or the philosopher Wang Yangming.
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| [c] Internal RF |
He, too, was reading “foreign” authors—but
only in one sense, and by no means the most important one. In a far more
significant way, he was reading his own civilization’s great works, for they
were as much a part of Japanese life (perhaps even more so in neighboring
Korea) as they were in China. It was bigger than China as nation or empire. It
was East Asian civilization, which
was merely born in China. China seems “dominant” only if we cannot see the ways
in which internal dynamics in Japan and Korea—and in many of the areas to the
north and west—worked.
This analogy leads us
directly to the largest countries in East Asia—China, Japan, and Korea. In each
of them, a kind of cultural dominance (an overwhelming ethnicity) had the
potential to destroy diversity and imprint itself as a kind of monoculture.
Yet, just as Japan and Korea developed distinctive identities within a larger
East Asian culture (while reading the classics from China), so, too, did China’s,
Japan’s, and Korea’s ethnic groups both adapt to and gain distinction from the
overwhelming numbers of the majority.
Their sheer size should
not be forgotten, though. The largest ethnic groups of China, Japan, and Korea
so dominate their countries’ histories that they need to be understood “up front,”
and not as mere appendages to an “equal” treatment of several hundred ethnic
groups. It is not—let this be absolutely clear—because they are “more important.”
It is simply that the way each nation-state has developed, and the way in which
people have studied ethnicity, is profoundly shaped by three groups, each of
which constitute ninety or more percent of their countries’ ethnic definition.
These are Han in China, Yamato in Japan, and the Korean ethnic group in Korea.
Each has been associated with the very history of each civilization, and it is
only in the study of ethnicity that we can begin to piece together how these
groups themselves have dominated, assimilated, modified, and changed.
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| [d] Modified RF |
Notes
[1] Ray Huang, China: A Macro History (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe Publishing Company),
25.
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