Religion, Medicine, and Women’s Health in Premodern East Asia

In premodern East Asia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China rarely experienced anything like the type of religious violence that existed for centuries in historical Europe, despite having vibrant religious traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and numerous folk religions. How do we explain a region in which religion was generally not a part of the explanation for war and rebellion? A unique data set of over 950 entries of Chinese and Korean violence over a 473-year span allows granular measurement of religious violence. I argue that the inclusivist religions of historical East Asia did not easily lend themselves to appropriation by political leaders as a means of differentiating groups or justifying violence. Addressing the paucity of religious war in historical East Asia is theoretically important because it challenges a large body of scholarly literature that finds a universal causal relationship between religion and war that is empirically derived mainly from the experience of only Christianity and Islam. In contrast, it may be that certain types of religious traditions are less amenable to mass mobilization for violence. Moving beyond Christianity and Islam to include East Asian religious traditions promises both to address a potentially serious issue of selection bias and also to be a rich field for theorizing about the relationship between religion and war.

Scholars have researched the impact of Buddhism on pre-modern and modern East Asia from different aspects, both within and between politics (states since the late 19th century): art, ideology, cultural practice, and food. Among existing academic literature on Buddhisms impact on the interaction between polities within East Asia, the expansion of certain material cultural elements and cultural concepts and foodways are among the major focuses. This paper employs the anthropological understanding of non-material and material components of culture. The working anthropological definition of religion is combined, to summarize and categorize the existing research on Buddhisms impact on pre-modern East Asian culture. Understanding culture in its material and non-material components, and its relationship with religion through time and space leads to this article to structure the relationship between Buddhism and pre-modern East Asian cultures into its expansion, its development, and its impact on different subcategories of a culture. The overview suggests an increase in future research on the multidirectional interaction of Buddhist pre-modern East Asian cultures and Buddhisms influence on greater foodway within different pre-modern East Asian societies.

List of Charts - Acknowledgements - Abbreviations used in the Footnotes and Explanatory Note - Introduction - Muromachi Foreign Policy with Korea: Diplomatic Rapprochement in Premodern East Asia - The Kyorin Diplomacy of Early Choson - Hideyoshi's Diplomacy and the Diplomatic Rupture with Korea - Political Culture in Early Modern Japan and Korea - The Tokugawa Taikun Diplomacy and Korea - Korea's Sadae-Kyorin Diplomacy with the Rise of Ch'ing China - The Failure of Reforms in the Eighteenth Century - Conclusion - Notes - Appendices - Bibliography - Index

전근대 동아시아의 국제질서 - 일본의 연구성과를 중심으로

Reviewed by: Tools of Culture: Japan's Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s–1500s Nam-lin Hur (bio) Tools of Culture: Japan's Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s–1500s. Edited by Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenneth R. Robinson, and Haruko Wakabayashi. Association for Asian Studies, Ann Arbor, Mich., 2009. xix, 315 pages. $28.00, paper. The editors suggest that Tools of Culture is distinctive in two ways. First, it aims to "depart from the overall thrust of much English-language scholarship, which has tended to look at overseas contacts and relations as extensions of the state and thus principally as diplomatic history," and, instead, [End Page 394] to "look foremost at factors and interactions that occurred beyond the state" (p. 1). Second, it aims to move beyond "a land-focused approach to Japanese history [that] has tended to marginalize those aspects of Japanese history that involved interaction between Japan and overseas regions" and to "embrace activities not readily incorporated in 'nation-based' history" (p. 2). The strategies the editors adopt in order to highlight these distinctive features are nothing new: they disapprove of existing works on the same, or related, subjects and then basically claim to offer unprecedented, innovative, and pioneering achievements. The task should then be to clarify what other scholars have so badly missed in Japanese history and to indicate how well Tools of Culture succeeds in overcoming this. As far as the editors of this volume are concerned, the shortcomings of existing English-language scholarship on Japanese history are fundamental because its research is based on "assumptions that have [too narrowly] defined the understanding of what constitutes Japanese history" (p. 2). In contrast, as the editors imply, Tools of Culture promises to "decenter some of the assumptions" that have produced "a 'sedentary mapping' of history that elides the fluid dynamics of movement, both physical and cultural, in the premodern era" (p. 2). What is so wrong with past scholarship? In attempting to shed light on the "wider horizons for Japanese history" (p. 2), Tools of Culture presents nine chapters, which are grouped into three parts. Part 1 is entitled "Inscriptions and Interactions," and chapter 1, written by Robert Borgen, examines the diary of a Heian monk named Jōjin (1011–81) who traveled to Song China for 16 months in 1072–73 and attentively observed Chinese canals, architecture, medical practices, and the like. According to Borgen, Jōjin seemed quite impressed by Chinese technology and scientific knowledge. In chapter 2, Murai Shōsuke pays attention to Chinese poetry, which served as a vehicle of diplomatic communication and intellectual exchange in premodern East Asia. Kenneth R. Robinson, in chapter 3, focuses on a 1539 trade mission to Chosŏn Korea led by a monk named Sonkai. Based on the monk's account of his journey, Robinson describes how the Korean government managed Japanese visits in terms of reception, transportation, accommodation, and ceremonies. Part 2 is entitled "Arts and Aesthetics," and in chapter 4 Haruko Wakabayashi offers a detailed examination of a fourteenth-century painting from Shikanoshima. This painting is known as Shikaumi Jinja engi, and it depicts the legendary conquest of the three Korean kingdoms of Silla, Paekche, and Koguryŏ by Empress Jingū in the third century. Based on her finding that the Korean enemies depicted in the Shikaumi Jinja engi are similar to the Mongol enemies who invaded Japan in the late thirteenth century, Wakabayashi suggests that the Japanese came to create timeless images of alien enemies against a backdrop featuring the power of the military [End Page 395] god Hachiman (who was, as the myth tells, in Empress Jingū's womb at the time of the Korean conquest). In chapter 5, as a case of intellectual and cultural exchange between Japan and China, Martin Collcutt discusses the Chinese monk Lanxi Daolong (1213–78), who introduced Chinese-style Zen meditation and culture to Japan and established Kenchōji in Kamakura under the patronage of the Hōjō and other warrior elites. In chapter 6, Saeki Kōji discusses Chinese ceramics (karamono). In Muromachi Japan, karamono shone brightly amid the growing popularity of tea, which constituted the core of medieval...

Fifteenth-century East Asia underwent a remarkable metamorphosis instigated by strong leaders such as Emperor Yung-lo (r. 1403–1424) of Ming China, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) of Muromachi Japan, King Sejong (r. 1418–1450) of Chosŏn Korea and King Shō Shin (r. 1477–1526) of the Ryukyu Kingdom. The most significant consequence of this century was the emergence of diplomacy and ideology in East Asia. This chapter deals with the nature of diplomacy and ideology in the Muromachi period and it is therefore useful to begin with some background information. The establishment of the Ashikaga headquarters in Kyoto in 1378 by Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and the unification of the Northern and Southern Courts in 1392 witnessed the efflorescence of Japan’s premodern Muromachi period. The Muromachi period is generally considered as beginning with the foundation of the bakufu and the promulgation of its legal decree Kemmu shikimoku in 1336 by Ashikaga Takauji and ending when the last shogun Ashikaga Yoshiaki was ousted by a prevailing warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1573. However, Kenneth A. Grossberg argues that the Muromachi age was limited to the years from 1336 to 1490 “when the Ashikaga shoguns actually ruled and their Bakufu was a viable central government.”1

Cutting deeply into a patient’s body posed a problem for medical deontology in premodern East Asia, defined by the Confucian virtue of “humaneness” and a preference for noninvasive cures. How did Japanese physicians reconcile “humaneness” with their interest in invasive European surgical techniques? This essay offers answers through the tale of Kan (1743–1804) and her physician, Hanaoka Seishū (1760–1835). Inspired by the writings of the German physician Lorenz Heister (1683–1758), Hanaoka attempted to remove a cancerous tumor from Kan’s breast in 1803—the first reliably documented operation of its kind in East Asia. In the process, Hanaoka outlined a new reasoning by which the testing of untested foreign techniques could be construed as “humane.” While scholarship on the translation of European medicine in East Asia has focused on epistemic shifts, I argue that translation was also about the renegotiation of ethical relations, reconfiguring patient-practitioner roles and boundaries of the morally permissible.

In Western societies, speaking is construed as an interactive social activity while writing is widely perceived as a solo or private endeavor. Such a functional dichotomy did not apply to the “Sinographic Cosmopolis” in premodern East Asia, however. Based on selected documented examples of writing-mediated cross-border communication spanning over a thousand years from the Sui dynasty to the late Ming dynasty, this paper demonstrates that Hanzi 漢字, a morphographic, non-phonographic script, was commonly used by literati of classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic to engage in “silent conversation” as a substitute for speech. Except for a “drifting” record co-constructed by Korean maritime officials and Chinese “boat people,” all the other examples featured Chinese–Japanese interaction. While synchronous cross-border communication in written Chinese has been reported in scholarly works in East Asian studies (published more commonly in East Asian languages than in English or other Western languages), to our knowledge no attempt has been made to examine such writing-mediated interaction from a linguistic or discourse-pragmatic point of view. Writing-mediated interaction enacted through Sinitic brushtalk (漢文筆談) is compatible with transactional and interactional language functions as in speech. In premodern and early modern East Asia, it was most commonly conducted using brush, ink, and paper, but it could also take place using a pointed object and a flat surface covered with a fluid substance like sand, finger-drawing using water or tea on a table, and so forth. Such an interactional pattern appears to be unparalleled in other regional lingua francas written with a phonographic script such as Latin and Arabic. To facilitate research into the extent to which this interactional pattern is script-specific to morphographic sinograms, a “morphographic hypothesis” is proposed. The theoretical significance of writing-mediated interaction as a third or even fourth known modality of synchronous communication—after speech and (tactile) sign language—will be briefly discussed.

Recent Japanese Scholarship on the Multi-State Order in East Eurasia from the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries Endō Satoshi 遠藤総史, Iiyama Tomoyasu 飯山知保, Itō Kazuma 伊藤一馬, and Mori Eisuke 毛利英介 A conspicuous divergence exists in the pre-1990s and post-1990s Japanophone scholarship on Song China. While earlier generations of scholars perceived historical China as a culturally homogeneous polity that constituted the sole center of a multi-state order in pre-modern East Asia, recent research has attempted to contextualize Song China within a much broader East Eurasian history in terms of both its relations with neighboring states as well as its status as a culturally and socially diverse empire. By the 1990s, to a large extent, Nishijima Sadao's 西嶋定生 (1919–1998) interpretation of the "East Asian tributary system" (higashi Ajia sakuhō taisei 東アジア冊封体制), in which the Chinese emperor stood at the pinnacle of an East Asian multi-state order comprised of multiple tributary relationships with monarchs of the (mostly nominally) vassalized neighboring states, was the prevalent model within Japanese academia. Yet, as Nishijima plainly admitted, with the powerful Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin militarily overmatching the Song dynasty, his explanation of a "tributary system" is not applicable to the era between the tenth and thirteenth centuries.1 Failing to offer an alternative [End Page 193] perspective, pre-1990s Japanophone scholarship of Song history remained dormant in exploring the East Asian multi-state order. Benefiting from and stimulated by the publication of new sources, both printed and epigraphic, as well as the emergence of Mongol Yuan studies since the mid-1990s, the new generation of Japanese scholars of Song, Liao, and Jin history has challenged and greatly changed the course of Chinese historiography in Japan. This essay aims to trace the trajectory of the major Japanese-language discussions, from the 1990s through April 2018, of the multistate order in East Eurasia from the tenth century to the thirteenth century. Changing Geographical Settings:From East Asia to East Eurasia To circumvent unwieldy explanations, it is convenient to begin with a definition of a new geographical setting for inter-state diplomacy, East Eurasia (tōbu Yūrashia 東部ユーラシア or Yūrashia tōbu/tōhō ユーラシア東部/ 東方), and the scholarly background of its emergence. It was not a mere coincidence that the term East Eurasia emerged in Japanophone scholarship almost simultaneously with Anglophone and other scholarship that was relativizing Eurocentric viewpoints in an effort to construct a genuinely global history. In the field of Japanese scholarship on Asian history (tōyōshi 東洋 史), where a clear and nearly insurmountable demarcation had customarily been drawn between East Asian history (higashi Ajia shi 東アジア史, that is, mostly Chinese history) and Inner Asian history (nairiku Ajia shi 内陸アジ ア史), these vocabulary choices also reflected an unmistakable intention to rectify a Sinocentric perspective. It was also during the 1990s that scholars of Mongol Eurasian history in Japan began vigorously advocating the argument that Chinese history should be perceived as an integral part of Eurasian history and that historical China should be treated as simply one of a number of coexisting East Eurasian states. The works of one of the preeminent figures in this academic movement, Sugiyama Masa'aki 杉山正明, have played a decisive role in promoting a "Central Eurasian" perspective on Chinese history. Stimulated by this movement, since the beginning of this century, a group of scholars have sought to divest Song China of its status as primus inter [End Page 194] pares within conventional Japanophone historical narratives of Asian history.2 The rise of Sogdian studies also had a remarkable impact on Japanophone Song scholarship after the 1990s. Shedding light on the migrations of Sogdian traders, soldiers, and diplomats across the Eurasian continent from the sixth to the tenth century, scholars inevitably questioned the discursive boundaries that had been drawn between Tang China and other states in the accepted historical narrative.3 The new geographic setting of East Eurasia also enables scholars to bridge the gaps amongsr Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song histories with a practical awareness of the spatial changes that "China" underwent. By blurring the boundaries of "Chinese" history, the majority of the books and articles included in this essay, to various degrees, take a stance against postulating a "Tang-Song transition," a...

Reviewed by: The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb Jeff E. Long The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb. By Peter A. Lorge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 200 pp. $80.00 (cloth); $24.99 (paper). The Asian Military Revolution is designed as an introductory text for undergraduate students considering the impact of gunpowder weapons upon Asian civilizations, and with it Peter Lorge largely succeeds in his goals to underscore the significance of gunpowder weapons in Asia and in his attempt to counter Western expectations that technological development fueled "modern" Asian historical development. To accomplish these objectives Lorge sets up his chapters examining the Asian military revolution with a superb introduction that presents the [End Page 323] "Military Revolution debate" among Western scholars. As he highlights the military, economic, and technological reasons given by these scholars to explain the "slow" Asian response to gunpowder weapons, Lorge proceeds to undercut these arguments by asserting that Asia had already undergone its gunpowder revolution years before the technology made its way to the West and transformed European societies. As a result, Lorge defines the "Asian Military Revolution" as a pragmatic matter of how different Asian governments following contact with Europeans or their technology chose to make use of the new and improved gunpowder weapons to expand their political control. While most Asian governments were more than willing to accept and incorporate those elements of Western military technology appropriate to their needs, Lorge argues, the political leaders of those governments did not view acceptance of the new gunpowder weapons as an acknowledgment of Western cultural superiority. As his evidence, Lorge then undertakes over the course of several chapters a study of gunpowder weapons in premodern East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian history leading to a final chapter on "modern" Asian history to support this thesis. Here is where Lorge's survey of the Asian military revolution at times suffers from its overdependence on secondary sources. In depicting the emergence of gunpowder weaponry in early Asian history, Lorge's narrative works best when he draws upon his own research of premodern China and when there is enough secondary source information on Asian military history for him to use. Chapter 1 emphasizes the historical role that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century struggles between the Song dynasty armies, the Jurchen Jin armies, and the Mongols played in spurring innovation of gunpowder weapons like fire arrows and fire spears and ultimately the development of the bomb. Building on this historical context, Lorge layers an effective military analysis of the differences between Chinese and Western defense fortifications that led to different siege warfare strategies by the Song, the Jin, and the Mongols, which in turn increased the use of gunpowder weaponry, including bombs to overcome walled cities. Chapter 2 focuses on early Japanese history and traces the rise of the warrior during medieval Japan before shifting to the sixteenth-century Portuguese introduction of the arquebus to the Japanese and Oda Nobunaga's emphasis on infantry that contributed to the unification process finished by the Tokugawa in 1600. Lorge makes good use of recent works by Karl F. Friday, Thomas Conlan, Joeren P. Lamers, and Peter Shapinsky to describe the emergence of the Japanese warrior and to stress the predominant use of the gun, not the cannon, in Japanese warfare. Lorge completes his study of the East Asian military revolution in [End Page 324] chapter 3, in which he employs the late sixteenth-century Hideyoshi invasions of Chosŏn Korea to scrutinize the varying uses of gunpowder weaponry on all sides in this large-scale East Asian conflict. Beginning with the Chinese military revolution Lorge emphasizes the role of naval warfare along China's rivers, in particular the Yangzi River, which contributed historically to the formation of the Ming dynasty and militarily to the creation of cast iron cannons and solid metal roundshot for use in siege warfare often conducted from ships firing upon fortified positions near rivers. Lorge argues that in the battles between Ming Chinese and Japanese troops on the Korean peninsula the deployment of these cannon was devastating for Japanese armies depending mainly on infantry firing volleys of arquebus fire. From...

본 논문은 불교 우화 <기로국>이 고대에서 현대까지 일본과 한국에서 전승되는 과정을 비교·분석하여 전근대 한국의 노인차별주의의 양상을 밝히고자 한다. 조선시대에 유교는 지배적 이데올로기였기 때문에 효는 신성불가침의 가치였다. 효의 보편적인 영향 때문에 부모를 해치는 행위는 상상조차 불가능했다. 다만 폭력까지 일으킬 수 있는 세대 간의 갈등은 인간사회의 보편적 현상으로서 고려나 조선시대에도 존재했지만 (《고려사》나 《실록》에서 수많은 부모 살해 사건이 기록되어 있다), 이와 관련된 구체적인 감정이 기록으로 남은 사례는 없었다. 한국의 경우와 반대로, 일본에서는 이런 감정을 조금 더 자유롭게 표현할 수 있었다. 노화된 신체가 부정(不淨)이라고 생각했기 때문에 노인은 사회에서 배제되었다. 이들은 특히 의례공간에 진입할 수 없었고, 심지어 노년출가를 통하여 가족과 분리되었다. 다만 중세 일본에 노년에 대한 태도는 부정적인 것만은 아니었다. 오히려 숭배와 혐오 사이의 “애매한 영역”을 차지하였다. 일본의 기로국 우화에서는 아들이 어머니를 버린 다음에 후회를 하고 다시 찾거나 아니면 천벌을 받는다. 제2차 세계대전 이후 “나라야마 부시코”란 소설과 영화에서 기로국 이야기가 되살아 나면서 이런 종교적 성격의 응징은 사라진다. 소설가나 감독이 상상한 고대 사회는 야만적이고 무자비하다. 그래서 이들은 70세 되면 무조건 산에서 버려야 된다고 줄거리를 새로만 들었다. 어떤 이유 때문에 이렇게 잔인하게 묘사되는지 그 이유는 불분명하지만, 이런 혁신 덕분에 기로국 이야기의 폭력적인 기원이 다시 부각되며 노인 독자의 입장에서 이 이야기를 새롭게 볼 수 있도록 한다. 그리고 일본 사회의 연령주의를 분석한 결과를 한국 사회에 적용하면 노인차별의 양상을 새롭게 바라보는 관점을 얻을 수 있다. 우선 중세 일본과 마찬가지로 고려시대에도 병든 사람이나 노인을 격리하는 관습이 확인되며, 이것은 노인차별의 결과로 재해석할 수 있다. 둘째로, 일본의 오바스테 서술에서 특히 노년여성은 혐오와 배제의 대상이라는 점을 고려한다면, 조선시대 여성―특히 미망인의 경우―의 사회적 배제 또는 자살 권유도 노년차별 통해 해명할 수 있다. 마지막으로 20세기에 전승된 고려장 민담을 분석하여 노년 서술자가 버려지는 두려움을 “생매”(生埋)로 표현하는 것을 여기서 처음 확인하였다. 20세기 초반에 “고려장”을 “생매”라고 생각했던 것은 조선 시대부터 시작된 고려시대 장례식에 대한 잘못된 이해에서 비롯됐을 수 있다.

This article attempts to establish a comprehensive understanding of the many international wars that beset East Asia from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. These wars can be summarized as attempts by newly unified polities in Manchuria and Japan to subjugate the “Chinese cultural sphere” represented by Chosŏn Korea and Ming China—attempts that were ultimately successful. Although the aggressors in the Imjin War on the one hand and the Chŏngmyo-Pyŏngja Wars on the other were different and did not mutually influence each other, they showed similar logic in trying to legitimize their invasions of Chosŏn. By comparing documents produced before and during the conflicts by the Japanese and the Manchu, this article will ascertain how both sides justified their invasions and how they tried to impose this historical memory on the invaded country, Chosŏn. By retracing the discourse of a “just war” that was developed in pre-modern East Asia, this study shows how both Manchu and Japanese documents regarding the foreign invasions refer to ancient Chinese concepts of “punitive expedition” ( zhengfa ) and Heaven ( Tian ), which are either used in different ways (in the case of the former), or in broadly similar ways (in the case of the latter) by both sides. The relevant documents, which were composed either during the war or shortly after, show how both sides employed similar strategies to try and argue that their invasions were cases of righteous wars. Rather than taking Chosŏn’s experience of being invaded as unique and absolute, this article tries to reevaluate this experience from a world history perspective, and makes a case for seeing these conflicts as part of a series of interconnected events that took place at a turning point in East Asian history.

Reviewed by: Confucianism for the Modern World Christian Jochim (bio) Daniel L. Bell and Hahm Chaibong, editors. Confucianism for the Modern World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiii, 383 pp. Hardcover $80.00, ISBN 0-521-82100-2. Paperback $33.00, ISBN 0-521-52788-0. Confucianism for the Modern World grew out of the “Confucian democracy” project and contains, in part, papers from a conference at Andong, Korea (pp. xi–xii). Unfortunately, the editors tell us little about either of these items, not even the conference dates. The volume presents a wide range of courageous efforts to defend the need for Confucianism in the world today. At the start, the editors claim that contributors to the book “argue for feasible and desirable Confucian policies and institutions” (p. i). Their contributions must, therefore, be judged primarily as Confucian prescriptions for the modern world. Readers will find little description of Confucianism as it actually exists today, although there is much good description of Confucian ideas and institutions from premodern East Asia, which contributors often present as the basis for their prescriptions for today’s world. For most readers, the main issue will be the extent to which each contributor argues successfully for Confucian policies and institutions that are both feasible and desirable in today’s world. In reviewing the contributions, I will keep this issue in mind. I will begin by commenting on the epilogue by William Theodore de Bary, which seeks to answer the question: Why Confucius now? De Bary has little sympathy for those who would despair at the nature of historical Confucianism and, instead, turn to the “original Confucius” for inspiration. He argues that we must focus on the ways in which East Asian peoples have tried to implement Confucian ideas and ideals in actual historical practices and institutions. As he indicates, whether we look at cases of successful implementation or at failures, this is the only way we can hope to predict what will happen with similar efforts to implement Confucian ideas and ideals today. But why bother? Are there not better sets of ideas and ideals for us to adopt today? De Bary thinks not, pointing out that his goal in The Liberal Tradition of China “was to show how Confucian ideas and ideals had survived, on their own merits, from age to age, not just from ideological inertia but because major thinkers in the past brought them to bear on pivotal issues of both perennial and contemporary relevance” (pp. 363–364). Why should these ideas and ideals continue to survive? And how can we assure that they will? De Bary’s answer is that we should insist that educational curricula everywhere incorporate, first, the study of classical texts and, second, efforts to stress the relevance of their content for personal reflection and self-cultivation. As for why the Analects, in particular, should be part of this effort, even outside East Asia, he points to “the appeal of Confucius as a person who achieved a measure of self-fulfillment in difficult circumstances” (p. 371). [End Page 59] As much as I would instinctively agree with de Bary, I do not see how his argument would persuade other people around the world to include the Analects in their school curricula. After all, every society on earth has its culture heroes, recent as well as ancient, with strong personalities, “who achieved a measure of self-fulfillment in difficult circumstances.” In a sense, then, de Bary does not solve but instead simply highlights the problem facing all contributors to the volume. They need to convince readers not only that Confucian ideas and institutions are interesting and valuable, but also that they are preferable to other alternatives or, in other words, more “feasible and desirable” than the alternatives, including modern or Western ones. The various contributors are painfully aware of this fact and exert their best efforts to show how Confucian prescriptions for today’s ills are better than others. Moreover, some contributors embrace de Bary’s advice that, in developing Confucian-based prescriptions for today’s ills, we stay focused on ways in which East Asian peoples previously implemented Confucian ideas and ideals in actual historical practices and...

My focus in this article is on historical processes—in particular, the ways that texts, ideas, and cultural practices circulate within, and especially move beyond, local, regional and national boundaries. I have chosen to call this process “transnationalism”—even though it occurred well before the rise of “modern” nation states. In the case of cultural practices, the basic process has usually involved transmission, assimilation (often requiring some sort of theoretical and/or practical justification), transformation and often recirculation. One such practice—divination—has been virtually a human universal across vast expanses of both space and time. And over the past century, two ancient and closely related Chinese ways of foretelling and/or influencing the future have become truly “global” in their reach: one is the use of the classic text known as the Yijing易經(often transliterated I Ching and usually translated Book of Changes); the other is geomancy or “siting,” commonly known by one or another transliteration of the Chinese term fengshui (lit. “wind and water;” aka feng shui, fung shui, etc.). I have discussed the globalization of the Yijing at length elsewhere. This article provides what I hope will be a complementary case study of the way that fengshui theories and practices traveled from China to other parts of the world, and what happened to them in the process. My primary time frame is the period from about 1600 to about 1900 (with some attention to the “modern” era after 1900), and my specific regional focus is East Asia, also known in some circles as the Sinosphere (東亞文化圈) or the “cultural sphere of Chinese writing” (漢字文化圈). It should be noted, however, that in the discussions that follow, I am using terms such as “China” and “Chinese,” “Korea” and “Korean,” “Japan” and “Japanese” and “Vietnam” and “Vietnamese” advisedly. In each case, the names of these countries and culture groups differed significantly over time, depending on one’s perspective. And, of course, borders fluctuated, sometimes dramatically, especially in Southeast Asia. Moreover, even within relatively stable political/cultural environments, significant regional and ethnic differences existed (think of “America” and “Americans” during this period). Nonetheless, in each case, at any given time, there were certain widely shared ideas, values, aesthetic standards, customs, institutions, laws, rituals, symbols, and even modes of communication—especially among the more literate sectors of these societies—that make it both possible and productive to generalize.

This article observes how Newtonian science was interpreted by two intellectuals from Korea and Japan who encountered it for the first time in their respective countries. In their responses, Korea’s Choe Hangi and Japan’s Shizuki Tadao displayed both similarities and differences. First, they are similar because they interpreted Newtonian science using traditional East Asian gi theory. Universalism and materialism of gi functioned as a common intellectual basis for premodern intellectuals of East Asia. Despite their common gi-based foundation, their thoughts on natural philosophy, as expressed through their interpretations of Newtonian science, display differences. Choe Hangi built a gi philosophy of his own using only gi theory. Devising a gi mechanism, Choe ultimately discarded Newtonian physics. In his gihak, the supranatural God was not recognized and all phenomena of nature were explained using only his mechanics of gi. Shizuki Tadao also attempted to interpret Newtonian science by applying the theory of gi. He denied the concept of a vacuum, and sought to explain the source and mechanism of gravity through gi. He did not, however, exhaustively pursue the theory and philosophy of gi as did Choe Hangi. Accepting the perspective of Newtonian science, Shizuki Tadao recognized the origin of gravity as unknowable. Then, Shizuki could not deduce the standard of morals and ethics of the humanity from the principles of nature and had to acknowledge the supranatural God as the creator and ruler of nature. The Newtonian science these two East Asian intellectuals understood was not the Newtonian science of the West. In premodern East Asia, Newtonian science was a context dependent knowledge, meaning its place was dependent upon specific historical and cultural contexts.