ABSTRACT
East Asia, the easternmost region of the Orient, has been described from a Western perspective as “imaginative geography” (Said 1978). Arguably, each country in East Asia maintained its own traditional culture and developed in its own original ways on an equal footing with the Occident, until it accepted modern Western civilization. However, although the cultures that are the focus of this essay-China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong,) Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, including the ethnic groups within each-experienced a significant negative effect as a result of their encounter with modern Western civilization, their traditions have been revived, with a sense of pan-Asian identity, through exchanges among them.
