Our Core Concentration blog assignment for today was to write what we think the most important idea that Japan borrowed from earlier Asian civilizations China and/or Korea was.
First of all, I'd like to get something clear. Taking inspiration is not "stealing". Cultures do this all the time, and often, it's the basis for new discoveries and legendary cultural artifacts. That said, I also want to put out that all of the ideas that early Japan borrowed from China or Korea were important to its development as a civilization.
Personally, I believe that the most important and essential development that any civilization needs is a system of writing, so this is what I think the most important thing other Asian states contributed to Japan. Without a system of writing, history can only be preserved orally, which often ends with history being distorted and misconstrued. Until they began to venture out and explore other civilizations, Japan had no central system of writing. After they invited Chinese scholars over and sent officials out to the Asian mainland, Japan eventually adapted Chinese as its writing system. This was hard at first because the Chinese and Japanese languages are very different, but they eventually preserved their history through writing.
Nowadays the Chinese and Japanese alphabets aren't similar at all and Japanese uses a character system using symbols called kanji for words instead of letters. There are more than 700 characters in the Japanese alphabet. Seems hard to learn. Still, there are visible similarities between the writing systems even today.
First of all, I'd like to get something clear. Taking inspiration is not "stealing". Cultures do this all the time, and often, it's the basis for new discoveries and legendary cultural artifacts. That said, I also want to put out that all of the ideas that early Japan borrowed from China or Korea were important to its development as a civilization.
Personally, I believe that the most important and essential development that any civilization needs is a system of writing, so this is what I think the most important thing other Asian states contributed to Japan. Without a system of writing, history can only be preserved orally, which often ends with history being distorted and misconstrued. Until they began to venture out and explore other civilizations, Japan had no central system of writing. After they invited Chinese scholars over and sent officials out to the Asian mainland, Japan eventually adapted Chinese as its writing system. This was hard at first because the Chinese and Japanese languages are very different, but they eventually preserved their history through writing.
Nowadays the Chinese and Japanese alphabets aren't similar at all and Japanese uses a character system using symbols called kanji for words instead of letters. There are more than 700 characters in the Japanese alphabet. Seems hard to learn. Still, there are visible similarities between the writing systems even today.
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