Parallel Lives, Congenial Visions

Book excerpt: This book introduces the history of cultural exchanges between East Asia and the West through comparative biographical sketches of sixty personalities from China and Japan. These sketches illustrate how both countries, starting from a shared cultural heritage in script and Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist worldviews, took rather different approaches in their encounters with the European world since the 16th to 17th centuries. In particular in the 19th century under external and internal pressure, both nations strove to modernize their societies by introducing technology and new ideas from the Western world, turning them into political rivals and even enemies. Thus, these biographical sketches also shed some light on the general dynamics of cross-cultural interactions between China, Japan, and the West up to the early 20th century. The Chinese and Japanese men and women presented in this book are outstanding personalities who tried to open up the road to international relationships, pioneers in their respective domains who introduced Western culture to their nations, precursors who strove for modernization, e.g., in the fields of translation, education, medicine, media, and social welfare. They testify to individual agency in these cross-cultural exchanges. Many of those who tried to be “cultural bridge-builders” since the 16th century were Christians, simply because the missionaries, who worked hard to learn the native languages of China and Japan, were the first to introduce new cultural elements to these countries. The universal scope and vision of the Christian faith enabled both missionaries and native believers to overcome narrow nationalism or xenophobia and turned them into cross-cultural mediators.