Inquiring the Empireness of the National History: Comparison of the Recent East Asian Regional Histories

Abstract

As an effort to obtain the “historial perception that is transferable across the East Asian regional community”. This article focused on how to confront the empireness of the national history. In this context, the definition of empireness refers to the tendency to form and expand an empire. There are two perspectives to broadly explain the empireness of the national history: one is “self reflection-based historical perspective”, and the other is “pride-based historical perspective”.BR One of qualities that regional histories require to have is its transferability. Regional history should be differentiated from national history as that of individual country’s, for former is transferable across the national borderline. In course, East Asian history as regional history should confront their empireness of national history after rooting their thought on “self reflectionbased historical perspective”. Having this point in mind, I attempted to thoroughly observe and compare how regional history publications reflect several focal questions that has been taken for granted in national history.BR In order to achieve this aim, I compared academic articles about East Asian history that was published in Korea(Yu Yongtae et al., 2010), China(Yang Jun et al., 2006), and Japan(Mitani Hiroshi et al., 2009). Through comparing these publications, this study attempted to look back pride-based historical perspective, that glorifies the empireness that appears through attacking neighboring country and expand the borderline, in terms of self reflectionbased historical perspective.