Stupid me. Once upon a time I thought I was smart enough to tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Koreans (CJK). I thought each group had a particular look. Then I realized that Japanese actually had a diverse looking group of people--some pretty hairy, some not so, some with double eye lids, some with single, some tall, some short like me. All this was proof that the Japanese are a mixed group of people descended from the Chinese mainland, Siberia in the north (maybe Ainu), and southeast asian including Ryukyuans, Taiwanese and others. But of course, stupid me still thought the Chinese and Koreans had specific identifying features. Well, I'm finally over that now. We are all Asians with cultures sprouting form different histories. But many of our customs--like many of our physical features--are divers and yet seemingly closely intertiwined. Many of the similarities are derived from the common religion and philosophy we all shared at one point of our histories--Buddhism, Confucianism. Some of our shared inerests in current pop culture might be traced to ancient shared arts--the picture scroll (emaki) and hanging scroll combines text and graphics together and is found in all our premodern cultures. Can this be likened to manga? Really, seriously. The mix of text and pictures is both intellectually and sensually (visually, emotionally) arousing.
But, of course, there are those who would vehemently disagree. Certainly East Asia does not hold a monopoly on such a concept as stories through images. For example, in the West, there was... uh hieroglyphics, and there was... um, images of the Catholic Stations of the Cross. Uh, I'm sure someone will be nice enough to suggest more. Anyway, before I get into trouble, I main point I wanted to make was that the idea that one of us can tell the difference between CJK based soly on physical/facial features is overrated. To test this out go to:
Its an interesting test. Have fun.
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