Abstract
The widespread Confucian revival in East Asia, along with the rapid socioeconomic development of certain nations in that region, coincided with thorough examinations of nationhood, ethnicity , and cultural identity in theory, research, and policies on a global level. Following an era of imperialism, a presumed shared set of ideas and values—a sort of common worldview—allowed for the perceptions of East Asia as a relatively homogeneous whole, regardless of the many conflicts that had previously occurred between its peoples. This chapter examines contemporary academic research to determine who is perceived as East Asian when sampling populations today. Scholars blend nations into this collective label indicating ethnic and cultural belonging, and special focus is placed on discerning which nations are included and in what way. Case studies of methodological approaches in referential literature analyze whether research designs have begun to take into account the vast cultural diversity of East Asia, current trends of multiculturalism and globalization, and massive migrations, as well as how Japan is positioned within these methodologies. As today’s science is likely the basis of tomorrow’s policies, this study offers a relational approach to ethnic and cultural identities, while stressing the importance of responsible research.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I refer to Erwin Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, Schrodinger’s cat, illustrating his perception of quantum superposition. The cat is imagined enclosed in a box with a radioactive source and a flask filled with poison that will be released whenever the source happens to emit radiation. According to quantum mechanics, the cat is considered to be simultaneously both dead and alive, until the box is opened and it is seen as either dead or alive.
- 2.
Here I refer to Thomas Kuhn’s notable contributions to the philosophy of science, specifically the concept of necessary periodical paradigm shifts and the view that a scientific truth is not an objective fact, but rather a matter of consensus of a community of scientists, a product of necessarily subjective perspectives of the researcher and participants, in the case of empirical research.
- 3.
The UN Statistics Division terms the region in question Eastern Asia, not East Asia (dividing Asia into: Central, Eastern, Southern, South-Eastern, and Western). In the rare examples of the usage of the term Eastern Asia in scholarly work, it has been used to include what is conventionally known as East Asia (mainly, China, Japan, and Korea) and South-East Asia (e.g. Mackerras 1992). Eastern (same as western, southern, and northern) tends to be used more for geographical, indefinite areas, while east (same as west, south, and north), as an adjective, tends to be used more for specific, often political or administrative divisions, but this is just a linguistic tendency. Still, it is interesting to note that, in addition to East versus Eastern, in the literature examined for this chapter there are also frequent differences in the choice of adjectives when terming counterparts in the East-West dichotomy, e.g. East Asia is in relation to Western Europe, not West Europe (e.g. Holcombe 2011). The differences in terms can, of course, be purely arbitrary or a matter of custom, but it could be interesting to survey the motivation of scholars using different versions of the adjectives for different regions of the world.
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Gledić, J. (2016). Blending Ethnicities: Perceptions of East Asian Identities Today. In: Sugita, Y. (eds) Social Commentary on State and Society in Modern Japan. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2395-8_10
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