Dynasty, and re-establish the Han tribe. For better or worse, they have a very nationalistic civilization.
While the Japanese may have imported Chinese characters from China, the way the Japanese use Chinese characters is quite different. The Chinese and Japanese have different pronunciations for the same characters and as a result are unable to communicate with each other. People of Korea and Vietnam are now trying to do away with Chinese characters. Furthermore, when it comes to religion, there are a variety of religions such as Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and other unlimited number of religions in each region of Asia. There is no one religion which can cover all Asians. There are no common laws, nor common myths among Asian. Not only that, the Chinese history of fine art and the Japanese history of fine art took completely different routes. Asian music started to come together for the first time in the 20th century. My friend, Minoru Miki, who is a composer, tried to form an orchestra with Asian musicians. Such a merger became possible because Asian musicians have now learned western-style notation, that is, "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti", which acts as a kind of common musical language.
Each Asian nation, in fact, has its own civilization, which even in the past had contained a modem element. A Chinese historian, Yu Shi-Yin, wrote a book entitled "Religious Thought and Merchant's Ethics" of modern China. According to this book, the idea of diligence or respect for merchants started in China around the 9th Century. The emergence of new Zen Buddhism, and then new Confucianism, gave rise to the idea that it was right to seek commercial profits. Max Weber says this idea came into existence in the West much later. There was a Japanese thinker, Seisan Suzuki. He was a scholar of the early 17th Century and his theory of ethics was based on reliability or trust; in other words, honesty. He insisted that honesty does not mean just to be faithful to others, but to be faithful to oneself. You must not betray yourself. He criticized the loyalty of the samurai class. He said the samurai's loyalty to his lord was based on the expectation of some reward. If you are loyal to your lord. you will be rewarded, so Suzuki insisted that it was one-grade lower. Honesty to oneself on the other hand, is not based on the expectation of any reward.
The concept of honesty in this sense is very important to modernization. This concept of honesty also came into existence in the West in the 17th century, according to an American scholar, Lionel Trilling. All these facts show that all individual spirit, thought and ethics aimed at modernization both in the West and East Asia occurred around the same period of time. Also it is very interesting to note that alchemy had been very popular in China. However, while alchemy in Europe produced metal to make money, alchemy in China focused on longevity, and the research on medical treatment to prolong people's lives. This is the difference between alchemy of the West and of China. At any rate, alchemy had been popular in both regions.
On the other hand, according to the theory of Taoism the whole world is arranged in a mathematical order. In other words, the world structure is expressed in numbers. Normally such a sense of the world is supposed to lead to modern science. There is a Chinese classic literary work, ".Hsi Yu Chi or Monkey", which is a very popular story among the Japanese and I think other Asian people perhaps know the story. Many numbers also appear in the book. Everything ranging from the monkey's hair to the length of a weapon is expressed in numbers. Recently, a Japanese scholar who has been studying this book found that all these numbers are magic numbers of Taoism. This fact shows that in China there was the idea that the world was organized in numerical order. On the other hand, the Japanese never looked at the world in such a way.
Japan, however, did have a more spiritual concept of "love", similar to that in the West as I mentioned before, and a large number of love stories were written in Japan. The history of love stories dates back to the old times. It has been in the center of Japanese literature since around the 10th century.
China, however, has had no tradition of love stories in China.
In Chinese literature, love was regarded as purely a sexual matter without the spiritual element, and was despised as such. Japan also had experimental or practical technical development. Detailed research has always been conducted for technical development in agriculture, textile or other fields. If all those idea shad been united that is, the idea of seeing the world in a mathematical order and the idea of daily innovation of technologies, then Western-like modernization, or modern, scientific technologies would have emerged in Asia much earlier. Unfortunately, since Asia was never united into one world, there was no chance of these two ideas being united. Even though each necessary element existed in Asia, it took much longer for Asian countries to achieve modernization as a whole. In the 20th century each Asian nation began to modernize, stimulated by the West.
