More Sinic Japan

samcster94

Banned
From what I understand about Japan, I remember their original development was closer to how Korea evolved. How would their culture likely would evolved if they never go the "Shogun and Samurai direction"???
 
From what I understand about Japan, I remember their original development was closer to how Korea evolved. How would their culture likely would evolved if they never go the "Shogun and Samurai direction"???
You would need a way to make the earlier Heian reforms stick and keep revenue collection at the very least a near-exclusive right of Heian-kyo. Which probably means an entirely different mentality to the aristocrats of the capital, who were willing to farm out military and administrative responsibility to the OTL bushi, so they could make exquisite poetry instead.
 

samcster94

Banned
You would need a way to make the earlier Heian reforms stick and keep revenue collection at the very least a near-exclusive right of Heian-kyo. Which probably means an entirely different mentality to the aristocrats of the capital, who were willing to farm out military and administrative responsibility to the OTL bushi, so they could make exquisite poetry instead.
Exactly. I am no expert, but what made Korea develop the way it did instead of being like Japan?
 
Exactly. I am no expert, but what made Korea develop the way it did instead of being like Japan?
Small size facilitated centralization, while pressure from Khitans in the 10th century made it clear to the Korean nobility that they needed a strong center to protect themselves. Both are factors impossible in Japan, an enormous island archipelago.
 

Maoistic

Banned
Why didn't the Han empire conquer Japan? Was Han naval technology so bad that it couldn't even build ships to invade Japan? Or was the Korean Peninsula already ruled by a powerful state by then?
 
Was Han naval technology so bad that it couldn't even build ships to invade Japan?
I don’t see why you’re always so aggressive about historical East Asia, but the Han did not conquer Japan for the same reason Rome did not conquer the Ukraine; Japan was extremely underdeveloped at the time and there literally was no point.
 

Maoistic

Banned
I don’t see why you’re always so aggressive about historical East Asia
Because it's annoying how people project contemporary China and Japan into past China and Japan. Since both, with Korea and Taiwan, are now the second biggest economic block in the world after the West and overindustrialised to hell, then everything historical in East Asia must have been bigger and badder - the exaggerated descriptions of the Treasure Fleets are now true, Marco Polo's accounts are almost completely factual, East Asia was the most advanced "civilisation" in the Middle Ages and it ruled the world back then, crocks of hogwash that shouldn't be taken seriously but are by Great Divergence theorists and historical economists like Maddison Angus, to the point the Prime Minister of Australia himself gave a presentation peddling how China's "rise" is just a "return" to how "things were back then".

The same has happened with ancient Greece and Rome for a longer time, to be sure, getting so many dumb things like the Greeks "inventing" philosophy, deductive reasoning and the scientific method, developing the first computer in the world with the antikythera mechanism, the first world maps, being the first in abandoning mythology and religion as an explanation for the world and the only one in antiquity to do so (when that's not true in any way). The Roman Empire is also portrayed as the most powerful military organisation of the entire ancient world, when it couldn't conquer even all of Britain and northern Europe and got constantly pushed back by the Parthians. These same Romans also spread little of their culture outside their borders, while absorbing the culture of these supposedly inferior Parthians (the cult of Mithras, the religion of Mani, the Zoroastrian-influenced Christianity). Not to mention the ridiculous assertion, peddled in the internet and in real life even by academics like Stephen Greenblatt (who won a freaking Pulitzer for saying a variation of this thesis), that the Roman Empire was on the verge of industrialisation had dumb, evil Christianity and its anti-science not come.

Edit: It's even more annoying when this leads to the downplay of India. India's ships were regularly docking not just in the Persian Gulf but also in Egypt and Nubia by the Roman period at the very least, but when Zheng He does the same over a millennium later, he is treated like the freaking Columbus of Asia. It's ridiculous.
 
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samcster94

Banned
Small size facilitated centralization, while pressure from Khitans in the 10th century made it clear to the Korean nobility that they needed a strong center to protect themselves. Both are factors impossible in Japan, an enormous island archipelago.
Indeed, Korea is not an island unlike Japan, so it makes sense they went with a centralized state. Proto Korea also got conquered by China early on iirc.
 
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