Culture of Asia - Nationalities and Ethnic Groups - East Asia

East Asia

East Asia is usually thought to consist of China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Taiwan. The dominant influence historically has been China, though in modern times, cultural exchange has flowed more bi-directionally. Major characteristics of this region include shared Chinese-derived language characteristics, as well as shared religion, especially Buddhism and Taoism. There is also a shared social and moral philosophy derived from Confucianism.

The Chinese script is the oldest continuously used writing system in the world, and has long been a unifying principle of East Asia, as the medium for conveying Chinese culture. It was historically used throughout the region, and is still used in by ethnic Chinese throughout the world, as well as in Japan and to a lesser extent South Korea. Within China, the meanings of the characters remain generally unchanged from region to region, though their pronunciations differ. This is because Classical Chinese was long the written language of all China, and was replaced by Mandarin as the national written language in the twentieth century.

Chinese writing was passed on to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. In Japan, the set of Chinese characters used are called Kanji and form a major component of the Japanese writing system. In the 9th century, Japanese developed their own writing systems called Kana (Hiragana and Katakana) which support Kanji script to suit Japanese language. Today, both ideograph Kanji and syllabary Kana is used in mixture in Japanese. In Vietnam, Chinese script (Han Tu) was used during the millennium under the influence of China, with the vernacular Chu Nom script are also used since 13th century. However, this has now (since the early 20th century) been replaced completely by the Latin Alphabet-based Quoc Ngu. In the 15th century, Koreans also developed their own writing system called Han-gul which is more adapted script to write Korean.

In these cultures, especially in China and Japan the educational level of person is traditionally measured by the quality of his or her calligraphy, rather than diction, as is sometimes the case in the west.

Though Korea, Japan and Vietnam are not Chinese speaking regions, their languages have been influenced by Chinese to some extent. Even though their writing systems have changed over time, Chinese is still found in the historical roots of many borrowed words. Though in modern times, Chinese is also influenced by other Asian languages, especially modern technical and political terms created in Japan to represent western concepts. For example, 文化(culture), 文明(civilization), 人民(people), 経済(economy), 共和(republic) and 哲学(philosophy) are borrowed words from Japanese to Chinese. (ja:和製漢語, zh:和製漢語)

Apart from the unifying influence of Confucianism, Buddhism, Chinese characters, and other Chinese Cultural Influences, there is nevertheless much diversity between the countries of the region such as different religions, national costumes, languages, writing systems, cuisines, traditional music and so on.