While on the subject of copying, this was an interesting read.
The Spread Of Chinese Civilization To Japan
Author: Stearns, Peter N.
Date: 2000
The Spread Of Chinese Civilization To Japan
Although its full impact on global history has not been felt until the last century or so, the transmission of key elements in Chinese culture to the offshore islands that came to make up Japan clearly provides one of the most important examples of the spread of civilization from a central core area to neighboring or overseas peoples. In the 1st centuries A.D., the peoples of Japan imported a wide range of ideas, techniques of production, institutional models, and material objects from the Chinese mainland. After adapting these imports to make them compatible with the quite sophisticated culture they had previously developed, the Japanese used what they had borrowed from China to build a civilization of their own. New patterns of rice growing and handicraft production enhanced the economic base of the Yamato clan chieftains who, beginning in the 3d century A.D., extended their control over the most populous regions of the main Japanese island of Honshu.
The Chinese writing system was laboriously adapted to the spoken language of the Japanese and provided key vehicles for intellectual creativity and building a more centralized political system. Often transmitted from China through Korea, Buddhist religious beliefs and art forms enriched Japanese culture at both the elite and popular levels. At the Japanese court and in the peasant villages, these new influences were blended with well-established indigenous traditions of nature worship, which came to be known collectively as Shintoism. Thus, the Japanese developed a unique civilization from a blend of their own culture and a selective importation and conscious refashioning of Chinese influences.
The capacity of the Japanese to adopt Chinese culture distinguishes them from many of the other peoples who were also strongly affected by the expansion of Chinese civilization from its core regions along the Yellow River. For the most part, this expansion was overland and more or less connected to the regions that formed the original Chinese core. It moved southward to the series of river valleys and coastal plains that stretched from the Yangtze basin to northern Vietnam; eastward to the tributary kingdoms of the Korean peninsula; and west and north to the nomadic peoples, who exchanged goods and borrowed cultural elements from the Chinese but fought to resist their overlordship. Very often Chinese civilization, as in the areas south of the Yangtze River and in Vietnam, was spread by war and conquest and imposed as a unified whole on conquered peoples rather than being selectively adopted by them.
Few of these more typical patterns of Chinese expansion were found in the interaction between China and Japan. The extension of Chinese influences to the Japanese islands was necessarily by sea rather than overland. Instead of conquering armies, merchants and traveling monks - and eventually Japanese students who studied in China - were the most important agents by which elements of Chinese culture were transmitted. Especially in the early centuries of borrowing, from the 1st to the 5th centuries A.D., interchange between China and Japan was largely indirect. It was mediated by the peoples and kingdoms of Korea, who had grafted key aspects of Chinese civilization to their own cultures somewhat earlier than the Japanese.
In contrast to the Vietnamese and the peoples of South China, the Japanese initiated and controlled the process of cultural borrowing from China. Despite a willingness to acknowledge the cultural superiority of the Chinese Middle Kingdom, the Japanese retained their political independence throughout the centuries of intense borrowing. Consequently, the Japanese could be more selective in their adoption of Chinese ideas and institutions than most of the other peoples who came under the influences emanating from China.
The Chinese Model And The Remaking Of Japan
Though trade and the continued influx of migrants from the mainland had brought the Japanese peoples into contact with Chinese civilization from the last centuries B.C., the introduction of the Chinese script in the 4th century A.D. marks a major turning point in Japanese cultural development. Writing with the Chinese characters, which were adapted only with great difficulty to the Japanese language, made it possible for the Yamato to begin to build a real bureaucracy and thus more firmly establish their control over vassal clan heads and the peasantry. The use of the Chinese written language also meant that the Japanese could learn from Chinese texts on all manner of subjects, from science and philosophy to art and religion. These works, as well as Chinese scribes to make additional copies and interpret them, were imported from the 5th century onward. Later, Japanese students and scholars who were fluent in Chinese were sent to China to acquire new learning firsthand.
Political And Social Change
Beginning in the early 7th century, the Yamato rulers proclaimed themselves absolute monarchs in imitation of the emperors of China. They styled themselves the "emperors of the rising sun" in official letters to (one imagines) the somewhat dismayed Chinese "emperors of the setting sun." Inspired by Chinese examples, they established councils and government departments and sought to introduce genuine bureaucratic control at the local level. At Nara and later Heian, the Japanese emperors laid out courts and capital cities patterned after the ancient imperial centers of China. The Yamato rulers strove to build a peasant conscript army and impose legal codes and a landholding system similar to those found in China.
In the centuries after the introduction of Buddhism, Chinese influences were felt in virtually all spheres of Japanese society. Alongside the traditional warrior elite, a class of monks and scholars developed that for several centuries exercised considerable power at the imperial court. Trade with China and Korea and improved communications within Japan enriched existing merchant groups and led to their emergence as a distinct class.
New tools and techniques imported from the mainland increased the output of Japanese cultivators and made possible a great expansion of the islands' previously marginal mining industry. All social classes benefited greatly from the introduction of China's advanced medicines and methods of treating diseases and bodily injuries resulting from accidents or warfare.
Chinese Influence And Japanese Resistance
Contacts with China and innovations based on the Chinese model were pushed, from the 4th century A.D. onward, by those at the top of Japanese society. Japanese rulers and their chief advisors were motivated mainly by the desire to increase the power of the state to control the warrior nobles and to extract resources from the peasantry. Buddhist ethics and Confucian legal codes enhanced the rulers' legitimacy; Chinese rituals gave a new dignity and luster to court routines; and the growth of a Chinese-style bureaucracy provided the means for the creation of the first genuine state in Japanese history. Because the Japanese remained politically independent from China, their rulers could convincingly argue that the adoption of Chinese ways was voluntary and carefully controlled. Only imports that would strengthen the Japanese state or contribute to the well-being of the Japanese populace need be accepted. Chinese ideas and institutions could be reworked to suit conditions in Japan and fit the needs of the Japanese people. Selective borrowing from their ancient and advanced Chinese neighbors, the innovators argued, allowed the Japanese to become fully civilized without destroying their own culture and identity.
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The Spread Of Chinese Civilization To Japan
*Peter N. Stearns was Chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and also served as the Dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, he founded and edited the Journal of Social History. While at Carnegie Mellon he developed a pioneering approach to teaching World History.