The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.-A.D. 907

ONE

Few people today seem to know very precisely where East Asia is, what exactly makes it “East Asian,” or why any such broad regional identi fication should matter anyway as more than only some empty geographic abstraction. Surely it is the nation-state instead (if not the multinational corporation) that is everywhere the essential unit of international affairs. In East Asia, this means specifically China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. If, as of 1942, a majority of Americans notoriously “could not locate either China or India on an outline map of the world,” most Americans today surely have a sharper mental image of China and India, as presumed nation-states, than they do of either East or South Asia as regions.1 One leading authority on Asian-American history insists, correctly , that “there are no Asians in Asia, only people with national identities, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, and Filipino.” Asia, a label that conventionally includes both an enormous continent and far-flung island chains such as Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, is much too large and heterogeneous an area for the label “Asian” to signify much more than “not European.” “There is no cultural or historical entity that can rationally be subsumed under this single term,” concludes one modern geographer.2 From a purely geographic perspective, physically contiguous Europe would seem to be a more logical component of Asia (part of the same continent ) than the widely scattered island archipelagoes. As a final absurdity , East Asia—the subregion that includes quintessentially “Asian” China and Japan—actually falls outside of the scope of what was originally designated Asia altogether. O N E Introduction According to the so-called father of history, Herodotus (ca. 484– 428 b.c.), Asia began at the Nile and extended only as far as India. “East of India it is empty,” he reported. For Herodotus, Asia was effectively coterminous with the Persian empire. By his own definition, Herodotus himself was born in Asia (modern Turkey), and he observed with more than a touch of irony that even the woman who supposedly gave her name to Europe, Europa, also “came from Asia.” As for the name Asia, Herodotus confessed that he was uncertain about its origin but repeated the opinion of “most Greek authorities . . . that Asia is named after the wife of Prometheus.”3 In modern East Asian languages, this all too obviously foreign term, “Asia,” is merely reproduced phonetically, as in the Chinese “Yaxiya,” Japanese “Ajia,” or Korean “Asia.” There is no native East Asian word for Asia—or, by extension , for an East Asia that is clearly only a subcategory of the whole. Premodern East Asians had never heard of East Asia—by any name. However, if, in Herodotus’ day, Asia was an unknown alien concept in East Asia, “Japan,” “Korea,” and “Vietnam” did not exist at all yet, either as native or as foreign ideas. These names had not yet been coined, there were no independent states or countries in the places now designated by those labels, and the Stone Age populations who inhabited these regions had not yet coalesced into recognizable “nations .” China, it is true, had a lengthy head start and was in some important senses already in familiarly identifiable existence in Herodotus ’ lifetime (Confucius died in China at about the same time that Herodotus was born into the Hellenic world), but only as a cluster of contending principalities rather than a single nation-state called “China.” China was first unified into one empire (and even then it was a classic multiethnic conquest empire rather than an ethnically homogeneous nation-state, as modern imagination would have it) by the series of conquests completed by the kingdom of Qin in 221 b.c. These Qin conquests, in turn, set off political, military, and economic repercussions that impacted what we think of today as Vietnam and Korea directly and indirectly reverberated as far as the Japanese islands. The various peoples inhabiting what we now think of as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were each subsequently transformed over the course of the next roughly 1,000 years from obscure prehistoric societies into members of a broadly (though far from completely) uniform East Asian civilization under the looming shadow of this enormous Chinese empire. 2 the genesis of east asia By the tenth century, when the fall of the Tang dynasty in China in a.d. 907 and the rise...