At several points in our survey of late imperial China,
we have come up
against the adoption of Chinese culture among non-Chinese peoples
beyond the frontiers. Chinese influence, of course, was widespread in
East Asia, but instances of the lasting reception of an integral
Chinese culture by the non-Chinese elites of independent states were
relatively rare. The north, despite some interesting developments, was
not congenial territory for such a process, and in the west and south,
as we saw in the preceding chapter, those who had the alternative of
choosing Indian culture usually took it—perhaps because the shape of
Chinese culture required the entire elite to become learned, whereas
the shape of Indian culture meant that it was enough for them to import
and patronize the learning of monks or Brahmins. So it is not
surprising that two of the three cases that concern us were located in
the settled, agricultural lands of the far northeast, one being the
Korean Peninsula, and the other its island neighbor Japan. Here
geography ensured that neither country was exposed to Indian culture
except through China, and it was by this route that they adopted
Buddhism. In both these cases the key period for the large-scale
adoption of Chinese culture was around the middle of the first
millennium A.D.; in the Japanese case Koreans played a major role as
intermediaries (though this was sometimes conveniently overlooked, as
was already pointed out by the ninth- century Shinto priest Imbe no
Hironari). The third case was Vietnam, the corner of Southeast Asia
farthest from India and closest to China. (The southward expansion of
Vietnam took place only in recent centuries, and in the course of it
the Vietnamese overran regions that had previously adopted Indian
culture.) In Vietnam the key period was perhaps half a millennium later
than in the northeast. Of the three countries it was Korea that took
the adoption of Chinese culture furthest. Here the fifteenth century
saw a radical attempt by the state to Confucianize Korean kinship
structures, and by the early seventeenth century a Manchu ruler could
comment that the Chinese and Koreans differed only in language.'
Yet it was in Japan that the interaction of Chinese
culture with the
native society had the most idiosyncratic and historically significant
results. There is no denying that Chinese influence went very deep—so
deep that the basic Japanese number system today is made up of Chinese
loanwords. In the seventh to the ninth century the Japanese imperial
institution was in many ways a provincial replica of that of the T'ang
dynasty; Japanese legal texts of this period have been used by
historians to reconstruct T'ang legislation that has gone lost in
China. But two things made the Japanese evolution very different from
that of Korea in relation to China.
One was political. Instead of a succession of Chinese-style
dynasties,
the Japanese developed a curious dualism: while the original imperial
dynasty went on forever, it lost all but the trappings of power, and
the reality of power passed into the hands of military rulers who came
to be called shoguns. The insularity of Japan does something to explain
this: being somewhat sheltered from invasion, islands are less subject
to the harsh continental disciplines that drive the formation of
unitary states and sweep away obsolete institutions. Before the
nineteenth century there was only one, short period when an emperor
sought to recover his ancient powers, the abortive Kemmu Restoration of
1333-36. Its most emotive figure, at least in Japanese historical
retrospect, was the ill-fated restorationist leader Kusunoki Masashige.
In fact, the retrospect was to prove more important than the events
themselves.
The other divergence between the paths of Japan and Korea was cultural. As the language
of
literature, Chinese retained an undisputed hegemony in Korea until modern times. It was likewise a
prestigious literary language in Japan; but to a much greater extent than the Koreans, the
Japanese took to "reading" it through a process of mechanical translation into their native
language. Doubtless following Korean precedent, the Japanese adapted the Chinese script to write
Japanese at an early date; but the corpus of literature they composed in their own language was far
larger than the analogous literature of Korea. Its most famous product was the Tale of Genji, a
romance written in the early eleventh century by one of several female authors of the period. In
sum, despite massive Chinese influence, Japan was significantly more Japanese than Korea was
Korean. It was also an intellectually more plural society: it was in Korea, not Japan, that a leading
seventeenth-century scholar held that "a man who does not believe in Chu Hsi is a barbarian."
