ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews historiographical trends regarding Japan's contact with the continent during its classical age—dated from the late sixth or early seventh centuries to the twelfth-century commencement of the medieval era. Japan's classical period corresponded to an age of political change and turmoil in East Asia. The selective borrowing of continental culture—critical to the development of the early Japanese state and society during the classical age—has been central to the study of continental relations. Scholars working in the late nineteenth century—when Japan faced the threat of Western imperialism—found a historical precedent to the adoption of Western science, technology, and government institutions in the cultural borrowing of the archaic and classical periods. Work on classical Japan's foreign relations includes a great wealth of scholarship regarding trade relations. Historians of classical-period foreign relations have a number of standard primary sources at their disposal.
