| East Asian studies | |||||||||||
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| Chinese name | |||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 东亚研究 | ||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 東亞研究 | ||||||||||
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| Korean name | |||||||||||
| Hangul | 동아시아학 | ||||||||||
| Hanja | 東아시아學 | ||||||||||
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| Japanese name | |||||||||||
| Kanji | 東アジア研究 | ||||||||||
| Kana | ひがしあじあけんきゅう | ||||||||||
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East Asian studies is a distinctmultidisciplinary field of scholarly enquiry and education that promotes a broadhumanistic understanding ofEast Asia past and present. The field includes the study of the region's culture,written language, history and political institutions.
East Asian studies is located within the broader field ofAsian studies and is alsointerdisciplinary in character, incorporating elements of thesocial sciences (anthropology,economics,sociology,politics, etc.) andhumanities (literature,history,art,film,music, etc.), among others. The field encourages scholars from diverse disciplines to exchanges ideas on scholarship as it relates to the East Asian experience and the experience of East Asia in the world. In addition, the field encourages scholars to educate others to have a deeper understanding of and appreciation and respect for, all that is East Asia and, therefore, to promote peaceful human integration worldwide.
At universities throughout North America and the Western world, the study of East Asian humanities is traditionally housed in EALC (EastAsianLanguages andCivilizations[1][2] orEastAsianLanguages andCultures[3][4]), EALL (EastAsianLanguages andLiteratures[5][6]), EAS (EastAsianStudies[7][8][9]), as well as Asian Studies[10] departments, which run majors in Chinese and Japanese language and literature and sometimes Korean language and literature.
East Asian studies programs, on the other hand, are typically interdisciplinary centers that bring together literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, etc. from their various departments and schools to promote instructional programs, conferences and lecture series of common interest. East Asian studies centers also often run interdisciplinary undergraduate and master's degree programs in East Asian studies.
In universities across the United States, as part of theopposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, younger faculty and graduate students criticized the field for complicity in what they saw asAmerican imperialism. In particular, theCommittee of Concerned Asian Scholars debated and published alternative approaches not centered in the United States or funded, as many American programs were, by the American government or major foundations. They charged that Japan was held up as a model of non-revolutionary modernization and the field focused onmodernization theory in order to fend off revolution.
In the following decades, many critics were inspired byEdward Said's 1978 bookOrientalism, while others, writing from the point of view of the quantitative or theoretical social sciences, saw area studies in general and East Asian studies in particular, as amorphous and lacking in rigor.[11]
Critiques were also mounted from other points in the political spectrum. Ramon H. Myers and Thomas A. Metzger, two scholars based at the generally conservativeHoover Institution, charged that "the 'revolution' paradigm increasingly overshadowed the 'modernization' paradigm" and "this fallacy has become integral to much of the writing on modern Chinese history", discrediting or ignoring other factors in the history of modern China.[12]
In Europe, notable scholars of East Asian studies have long occupied professorships at prominent universities in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy, while recent publications also suggest that the "Nordic countries offer some unique contributions in the field of East Asian studies."[13]
The sub-field dedicated toChina,Chinese history,Chinese culture,Chinese literature, and theChinese language. In the context of theRepublic of China also specified asTaiwan studies (Academia Sinica).
The sub-field dedicated toJapan,Japanese culture,Japanese history,Japanese literature, and theJapanese language. The foundation of theAsiatic Society of Japan atYokohama in 1872 by men such asErnest Satow andFrederick Victor Dickins was an important event in the development of Japanese studies as an academic discipline.
The sub-field dedicated toKorea,Korean culture,Korean history,Korean literature, and theKorean language. The term Korean studies first began to be used in the 1940s, but did not attain widespread currency untilSouth Korea rose to economic prominence in the 1970s. In 1991, the South Korean government established theKorea Foundation to promote Korean studies.
The sub-field dedicated toMongolia,Mongolian culture,Mongolian literature and theMongolian language. Mongolian studies are also presented as a sub-field of the study ofInner Asia (as opposed to East Asia). TheAmerican Center for Mongolian Studies was founded in 2002.
In addition to the above, studies about the history of theOrient have mainly developed in Japan. Orient means areas inNorth Africa,Eurasia exceptEurope and islands around them because of chaos due to studies about the history ofGreater China andKorea under the Tokugawa shogunate before 1868 and those about the Eastern world from the establishment of European-style high-educational institutions after that year.
The notion about Oriental history that was made between 1868 and 1945 did not spread on other East Asian areas including Korea as the colony of Japan. There have been some Japanese notable historians about Oriental history but they are less famous in other countries.
